What is a Drawing?

All this sketching I've been doing has me thinking a lot about just what we embark upon when we draw something. Making a drawing requires decision after decision in the attempt to turn our view of that 3D object into a reasonably understandable 2D image. And to make that image pleasing, interesting, worth looking at. It always comes down to simplifying, it seems. Not only can you not 'draw every leaf', you can't even draw every branch, or even every main branch. Looking at such a drawing would be as unbearably tedious to the viewer as creating it would have been to the artist. If we take up a pencil or a pen and create a representational drawing – a representation of an object rather than, say, a representation of our angst whenever we see Aunt Lillian - then the starting point is the object itself  and we have no option but to translate in some way, since we are already taking away one dimension. So, how do we go about this translation? The simplest choice is to represent something as faithfully as possible, photographically if you will, trying to make our two dimensional mixture of paper and marks look like the three dimensional object we're looking at. Sometimes this can make a lovely drawing, but not always. If it always worked, then every photograph would be great art and the scale of greatness would be measured in pixels or dots per inch. At the other end of the scale, there's stick figures. I find both extremes less appealing than methods that lie somewhere on the continuum between the two. Here's some images of drawings that give varying translations of reality onto paper.        

The realist route, a drawing by Ingres. Personally, I don't care for this drawing. To me, the 'unfinished' portions of the study are lovely, but the finished face looks like this is where pencil lines go to die.

Moving a bit farther away from realism, this DaVinci drawing manages to keep the finished portion more alive looking. 

This Rubens drawing is even livelier. I love this drawing. I came across it when I seached for drawings by Ingres, and when this one came up I knew it could not possibly be an Ingres.

 Look at those lines! Wiggling around, lively as can be. I've always been in love with Rembrandt drawings. There's just so much going on there. I feel as if I could reach out and touch this fellow.

Step by step translations from realist to stick figures, each of them exquisite.

Forests and Trees

My latest fascination/obsession/time-waster is drawing trees. Trees in the distance, trees on the horizon, trees in the middle ground, trees up close. Drawing trees is vastly different from painting them. In a painting, they are not typically the center of interest and are suggested rather than featured, although Constable did some fine tree 'portraits'. Trees are more easily suggested in color than in line: Block in a vaguely tree-like shape in a mid-value hue (probably green) add darker, usually cooler, shadow areas, lighter and usually warmer light areas and highlights. That's the basic 'tree' algorithm. The goals are similar in a drawing. Again, the tree is not usually the center of interest, so it has to be suggested rather than explicitly delineated. And that's where it gets tricky. Just as you can't paint every leaf, neither can you draw every leaf. Soooo, what, then, do you draw? I find that I have to make more decisions in drawing than in painting. Or at least it seems like there are more to be made, possibly because this is only lightly explored territory for me. I have no memorized map, no starting algorithm, no very accurate compass. Maybe people who draw but don't paint consider that all the color decisions made in a painting are much more complex than drawing. After all, anything that's not routine is complex. Anything new is difficult. But anything new is also fascinating. And I have become fascinated with those trees. How to simplify one of the most visually complex things in nature is an engaging task to undertake, a great game to play and I think I'm becoming addicted. What fun!

The Art of Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice - what does that mean?

It can mean everything to you as an artist. There's a fresh new wind that's wafted into the world of learning and the big phrase out there right now, the new, ground-breaking – or at least myth-breaking -  understanding, is something called “Deliberate Practice”. And what is that? Well, first let's look at what caused it's discovery. Over the past few decades, many researcher have been trying to discover what talent is, just what that elusive beast might be. Paradoxically, they seem to have discovered that the beast is a chimera. It simply does not exist, at least in the form of an inborn gift that makes this or that skill or pursuit easy and effortless for those with the gift.

“Mozart,” I hear you saying. Well, as it happens, Mozart worked really, really hard, never thought music was easy, struggled all the time. And that early success, the childhood prowess? You too might have had that success had you been born to Mozart's father, who was at the time the most accomplished and successful music teacher in Europe. Successful as a teacher, rather than as a performing musician, that is. And he started teaching Wolfgang almost from birth. Oh, and those early symphonies? Well, no one really thinks they're all that great and they seem to have been almost certainly edited by his father, as they bear stylistic components that are very much like his own work. No, not cheating, just teaching.

So if there's no such thing as Talent, than what makes some people great at something and others simply ordinary? What the research has found is that to be great at something, what you have to do is work really hard, for a long time. How long? To be good enough to be considered one of the best in the world, it seems to come out to 10,000 hours for most pursuits. How hard? We'll get to that.

The single most important fact to take away from all this is this:  talent comes from work rather than from some trick of genetics. There are some obvious exceptions of course – you'll have a very hard time becoming an Olympic weightlifter if you are of delicate and feeble physique, or a world class basketball player if you are 5 feet tall. But most pursuits don't depend on particular physical traits or strength. They depend on learning, practicing, working at it tirelessly.

The other discovery is about how to practice, and where the idea of Deliberate Practice was born. It is obvious that there are people who, even if they spend the noted 10,000 hours in a pursuit, do not become world-class experts. Think of people who work at the same sort of job for years and years. A typical work year, at least to a worker in the US, means 2000 hours of work. This work can be considered as practice in their craft, whatever it might be. So, five years comes out to 10,000 hours and makes them experts? Well, no. It turns out that just doing something, although it will take you to a certain level of competence, is not enough. And this is where the idea of Deliberate Practice comes in.

Deliberate Practice is the sort of practice that is NOT easy, it's not the type of practice where you play that guitar solo you've mastered and enjoy how in the groove you feel playing it, or where you play tennis a couple times a week with a friend of sort of equal ability, and you both have a very good time and then go to lunch afterwards.

For most things that we do, we stick to what we do easily, and tend to avoid the parts we're not good at unless they become necessary to something we must accomplish. Yes, you can learn that new programming method if your company decides to rewrite its whole system using that paradigm; you can learn that new guitar riff if you decide it's just the thing for the new song you love. And most of us spend most of our practice time somewhere in that territory. We learn new things, but we don't really seek them out. We prefer to do what we know because we find it enjoyable. But those world-class people? They seek out the hard bits all the time. They are more fascinated by what they can't yet do than by what they can do comfortably. And herein lies the whole difference. What they are doing, seeking out the new, the difficult, the unsettling, is what deliberate practice is.

THE SORT OF BAD NEWS

OK, so 10,000 hours is a long time. But, there's lots of space between where you are now and where you might be if you were The Best Artist In the World.  How that could even be decided? Many of the richest artists are not thought of as particularly good, so sales are only a hazy measure of skill or competence. Fashion has more to do with sales than anything else. And think of this – even when the people who are great had spent only half that time working hard on their skill, they were probably already really good. Maybe 'really good' is how you want to be able to think of your skill or maybe all you want to be is better than you are right now – where better can itself keep betting better. It's up to you where you want to end up. But, no matter your goal, the Sort Of Bad News is that you have to really work. How do you decide how to work? Go to classes? With practicing art teachers or with online instruction? Take workshops? Follow instruction books? Well, all of those can work. But the problem is that you have to work. And work outside your comfort zone. That's key.

THE REALLY GOOD NEWS

The Really Good News is that the Talent monster is a fake! You know that monster. The monster who tells you you're not very good. The one who tells you that you are rubbish at drawing; that a real artist would have been able to draw that street of complex buildings without blinking an eye. The monster who tells you how uncreative you are, that a real artist would have had no trouble designing the perfect color scheme for that painting, the perfect arrangement of shapes and textures and values. Yeah, you know that monster. It's the monster you meet whenever you try something that you find difficult. You try drawing that tangle of leaves and you reach a point where you are clueless what to do next to make it look believable. The monster tells you, for the zillionth time, that you are obviously not a real artist, that all of your successes have all been flukes, fakes, lucky accidents. You then remember that you have a great need to give those kitchen counters a good scrub, or that you have to start on dinner, or a huge desire to finish reading that book you've been enjoying so much. The Talent Monster takes it as his job to make you give up. And the You're Not Real card is his favorite play.

But all that depends on believing in that mysterious beast, Talent, doesn't it? All those nasty things the Talent Monster tells you only work if you believe in him. Let's see how it might play out if you don't believe in the Talent Monster: You come to an impasse in a painting. You just can't get the colors right, You want a gentle glow and you end up either with dull mud, or garishness. You can't seem to draw that towel hanging on the hook convincingly; it looks like it's standing stiffly in mid-air. Or you just can't make the arrangement of shapes work in that new abstract you're started. Well, so what? If you throw out the Talent bugaboo, then these become just problems to be played around with, figured out. They say nothing at all about who you are, about what you are. They tell you what you do hot yet know how to do easily. And that's the GOOD part. They tell you exactly what you have to practice to get better. Having trouble drawing ellipses? Well, work on that. Having trouble understanding color? Well, work on that.

Therein lies the magic of Deliberate Practice. Deliberate Practice does not depend on talent, does not believe in talent. You get better by working at it. Take some time to digest that. It's the most important understanding there is in becoming a better artist.