The Gap

A few days ago a classmate posted another version of this message from Ira Glass on a group page on Facebook. I love it. If any of you ever feel frustrated about what you're working on, check it out.


Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Art doesn't just come to people "magically." Creative expression comes from ideas… and learning how to make them happen. The only problem is, we aren't just born with perfect experience in every media and we aren't just given the solutions to our ideas. We aren't even told how to decide which ideas to follow through with, and we might not even fully UNDERSTAND our ideas or direction.
I find as well, that the more I learn, the more I understand why and how things work, the more I hear how and why others have done things… the more TASTE and knowledge of materials and how to use them that I develop… the more dissatisfying it is to have mediocre art.
The cure?
Make more art!
Like my figure painting prof always tells us… "What you're doing is proving to me that if you did it more your work would be great." In other words, "you know WHAT you're doing, you just have to go through the messy experience of making it work (and learning what DOESN'T work!)."

Never say "I'm not a painter/illustrator/designer/writer/enteryounameithere" just because you tried being creative at some point and it didn't go well, or you found it hard.
ART IS REALLY HARD.
And it doesn't stop being hard work with experience. You just have more knowledge of what works, what doesn't, and of yourself as an artist. If you stop working hard you get sloppy, you get lazy, you don't notice things you need to work on, you stop pressing on into new territories, your color/measurements/values/concepts start digressing… You get the idea.
I recently read the book "Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting" by Richard Schmid, and he wrote how difficult painting STILL is for him.

Source: http://www.tuttartpitturascultura-
poesiamusica.com/2013/10/Richard-Schmid.html

Source: http://artistsnetworks.com/schmid/index.html

Also, in this book he added a little nugget on "talent." I think it can apply to talent with anything: art, music, writing, mathematics, linguistics, etc. Just because we don't have experience with something, or it seems difficult, doesn't mean we can't do it… it just means we have more work to do. And any kind of talent might develop at much different rates in different people, but judging how much or little you have can be a cop-out of doing something, or trying to improve at something. 

"Don't bother about whether or not you have it [talent]. Just assume that you do, and then forget about it. Talent is a word we use after someone has become accomplished. There is no way to detect it before the fact …"

And the only way to get there is through work. And not just repetition. It takes thinking, studying, researching, getting advice from others, trial and error/experimentation, analyzing, questioning, looking at other people's solutions, observing, reading….

So what does this tell ME? 

I need to get back to work. Gotta get through this gap faster. :)