Why Do Artists Use Such Big Words?

I wrote an article years ago about artist’s lingo ( click here ) and in sleuthing for backup of that point I surfed the internet and artist websites and their “artist statements” in particular, to see if I could decipher and cull the lingo and vernacular of artists and start to understand it. I found a shocking array of unreadable paragraphs that sounded complicated yet sort of meaningful but actually left me cold and empty with regards to meaning and substance. I must freely admit that I am an artist and am also an art teacher for about 20 and 15 years respectively. I could look in my own closet for linguistic skeletons passed out like too much Halloween candy not respecting the auditory cavities I might leave behind. I catch myself sometimes using not necessarily big words, of which I have limited recall, but longer than necessary or repetitive and sometimes confusing statements, not intentionally uttered, but offered almost as a byproduct of trying to explain the peculiarities of artmaking, of which there are many. So, why the heck would I say the same thing three times differently when one short burst would suffice?

Call it insecurity or something like that. We all have insecurity and the artist’s insecurities are no different than “normal” ones except that the process of making art opens little, or even big windows onto that secret place of uncertainty we hide away from many but our most trusted confidants. Making art can be a humbling, vulnerable occupation more of the time than not. Creation comes partly from peering down that deep well of uncertainty and seeing what might be reflected back or what may even lie hidden below the surface. Faith is a powerful tool in our artistic toolbox and faith that we won’t fall into the well even as we stretch to peer deeper and teeter on the edge of whatever precipice we’ve created always underpins the process. When that faith exhausts out of the room like so much oxygen leaving our ego gasping for breath, vulnerable, insecure, it’s going to seek something to sustain it.

Enter the big words.

I’ll diverge here and offer a snippet of a scene. For the setting, imagine a college campus and you are the intrepid art student doing your best to fit into a world in which everyone is doing their best not to fit in…

You feel vulnerable and crappy because your art is coming out crappy (we could write a whole different article on the relative health of feeling so intrinsically good or bad if your art is good or bad.) You are 20 years old and you need to take your art piece to class in all its crappiness and to do your best not to feel punched in the gut when your crappy feelings are hurt by your paunchy, bearded, white, male art teacher. A funny thing happen as you sit and listen to the discussion about your crappy art – it’s described as “working on a tactile level, which creates a visceral reaction that is palpable in a really fundamental way.” You like how that sounds! Another comment is that “the distribution of kinetic marks activates the surface in a way that is emotive.” Boy, this feels good! A last utterance describes “a tension between the nuance of compression and decompression in the artist’s touch.” Ok, that last didn’t make much sense but it sure felt great! Somewhere in between these statements was a comment about using different color and perhaps spending more time on the work… Reasonable… but those other comments where so much more mysterious and they sounded so full of meaning! Great!

What we have just witnessed is a not uncommon exchange in art school, elaborated a bit for effect but not necessarily uncommon.

At its core, art making leaves us vulnerable and we often feel crappy and uncertain of our actual versus desired results. The art we make is also communicating with a language (the language of paint in my case) that is potentially imprecise for what we want to say (all language is somewhat imprecise but some more so than others) We then want to best say something we strongly believe in and with strong belief comes a greater desire for things to work effectively. The result of all these variables compounding is a sense of unease and uncertainty that is often overpowering. It takes guts to admit your uncertainty and instead what often fills the void are those statements and words we have heard, read or even uttered that describe art with large words that sound, on the surface, unquestionably meaningful (see above example) even if we aren’t quite sure what they mean. I think they really often hold their meaning in their ability to confuse and create vulnerability in the listener because the listener doesn’t dare admit they don’t understand what they just heard! We do need to communicate and we need to express complicated things with confidence but we so often overcompensate with words that cover our uncertainty with their own supposed “big” meaning we end up not really communicating at all.

I recently heard a radio show where the host was talking with a Yale professor on a particular subject in the professor’s specialty. Almost every statement offered by this Yale professor was prefaced by “I taught this in my class…” or “in my class, we talked about…” Every time I heard this preface it was as if this professor needed just a little extra meaning offered by her association with Yale University and her class. It was as if the information offered wasn’t quite meaningful enough but with an association with her class it became just meaningful enough. I’ll admit to doing much the same in my own teaching as I’ll relate a certain point to a mentor of mine even though the point has intrinsically become my own. If my mentor (who I respect deeply) said it then of course the point has just a little bit more meaning and power than if just little old me said it. I don’t advocate against this kind of association if reasonably employed but there is an obscuring of the meaning if we as the audience start to hear the uncertainty that is masked behind whatever device is employed. I stopped hearing what this Yale professor said because I could only hear “in my class…” and I doubted what came next. We artists do much the same in describing our work with those big words and statements.

In the end, artist will use big words. We will hide behind them and also use them with a true understanding of their meaning. Better? Worse? Most important is that we communicate because, at the real end of the day, that is our job.

Why Does Art Cost so Much?

You visit the city and decide to take in a few art galleries before dinner. You walk around the first gallery, admire the work and see a small framed painting that catches your eye. A quick perusal of the price list and…what! $850 for an oil painting 12×12 inches and barely 14×14 with the frame? You walk out shaking your head wondering how you could charge so much for something so small.

That next day, your car decides that the trip to the city and all the requisite potholes were too much. Clunk and you’re stuck on the side of the road and as the tow truck lifts your car you are sure the sound the clinking chains just made eerily resembles the sound change would make if there would be any left in your pocket. “Transmission’s hurt” says your mechanic. “$415 in parts and 5 hours labor @ $87 per hour comes to… $850.”

You pay, because what else can you do?

OK, buying art and getting your car fixed isn’t really the same thing but a few parallels are apt to explore. Car parts certainly cost more than art parts. That 12×12 painting probably breaks down roughly and thusly;

Canvas – $20

Paint  - $10

Frame – $60  (no assembly, just the frame)

Your total cost of materials so far is about $90 without a single brushmark painted or hanging wire attached.

Now we go to the labor costs and if we follow our mechanic analogy and assume an artist’s time is worth at least that of a mechanics (I am in no way disparaging mechanics whose jobs are very difficult but I also believe something as rigorous and specialized as making art deserves at least equal consideration.) The slippery part comes in figuring how much time a painting takes to make (that is the industry standard first question you are asked by fellow artists and public alike – “how long did it take?”) and the answer is…it depends.

What kind of painting is it? Is it a highly precise image (slower) or something more loose (faster.) As a younger artist I often made many more poor choices that needed a lot of rectifying and time and as an older artist my process is a little more efficient and faster. You also rarely work on a single piece from start to finish with a stopwatch in hand so we are faced with a best educated guess. Roughly 8 hours, start to finish seems reasonable for a 12×12 painting.

Back to our analogy and we find our labor costs at $87 per hour x 8 hours = $696

Plus, we need an hour or so for touch up and assembly of the frame and painting (bring an unframed painting to a frame shop and just try to walk out without spending at least $100) so we can add, say $50 of framing labor to our cost.

Our total cost of the painting now sits at $836 which is an odd price to display so we rounded up to $850 for good measure.

Now comes the tricky part. The gallery will take 50% of the price that it sells for (pretty typical industry standard.) so your return just went down to a meager $425. In addition, we are in a bad economy and as a mid career artist, the cache of your name and art isn’t high enough to allow you to raise your price well beyond that $850 mark so you and the gallery figure $850 to be a reasonable price. (In defense of galleries and their commission; they market your work, rent a spot in high trafficked areas and serve as free museums for the public with nearly 12 new shows a year. The job they do is just as tough with much more overhead than your typical artist so they generally earn the commssion.)

If and when your piece sells you will be cut a check for $425 minus an immediate $90 for those fixed supply costs and you are left with $335. For good measure let’s round to $300 in thinking of studio rent, utilities, marketing, etc and because things always cost more than you want.

So, for 9 or so hours of work (a good long day) you made $300. Not quite the $87 an hour your mechanic makes as it actually breaks down to only $33 per hour. Still, $300 a day would come out to about $70,000 a year! Fantastic! If…you make a painting a day… that can sell for $850 each… and you sell every single piece you make… then and only then will you make such a nice living.

At the end of the day, making art becomes a labor of love plain and simple. Those 8 hours you’ve “allotted” for your piece might easily turn to 16 or 20 or more as the dictates of a creative process demand. You rarely think financially when you are making the work and you do your best when it is finished to find a reasonable price that covers both time and materials with some equity. What is interesting is when you compare the relative cost of art to other professions and think of the benefit versus cost… Let’s just say, the art will last a lifetime and the rebuilt transmission… until the next pothole.

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

The word creative is often associated with fields that lend themselves to its use. Creative artist, creative, cook, creative writer and so on. Often, the word is attached in other fields when someone excels of a proportion outside what is normal. An accountant is creative when they save a lot of money by flexing numbers appropriately (or not so appropriately…) but what is that creativity? How does something earn the title “creative…?”

By my standards, I think of creativity not as something intrinsic to a process or a vocation but rather the thing that happens when you overcome a particular obstacle in a way that is refreshing, surprising and outside the box. For example, in painting you often hear about creative use of color. As artists, we work with approaches and processes that we have grown accustomed to, much like the accountant. Our process lets us solve the problem of using paint to make an image while the accountant solves the problem of making numbers add up. What happens is that, like any system of human use, it can grow repetitive and, well, boring; not a good thing for art. You often use the same colors in much the same proportion because they are familiar in the repetition you have grown accustomed to. When you are growing too familiar with your process you might place obstacles in your path to force a change. To jar your color sense into a new direction you might arbitrarily add a vibrant, unfamiliar color into some duller part of the painting and force yourself to rework and change the colors around it. You have purposely put an obstacle in your way; that strange new color, and you have a created a problem that needs solving. Creativity happens as you step forth into new color territory in working to make old color and new color work in harmony. You have found that creative use of color.  Most likely, you’ve engaged in the process with all your concentration in order to make bold, different and unfamiliar choices to solve this problem. A solution that works can be called creative because you have brought something new to your process that may (or may not) stay with you but the struggle has refocused your efforts. Your normal process, if unchallenged, will never demand such effort, and thus, creativity.

A creative person finds ways to inherently make or find obstacles that forces them onto that narrow ledge of uncertainty only navigable with great effort and concentration. The calculated risk of that narrow ledge becomes an inherent part of a process of doing work and they intuitively call on creativity each and every day they sit down to make something. Some professions demand such a process; the arts being a prime example. All professions will benefit from such a process but the rigor and monotony of some tasks exhaust and dull the intensity needed to step onto that ledge. There are many times that the art process stagnates and you’ll resist those precarious places with all your might. I think the infamous “writers block” might stem from an inability to take that leap of faith into the territory of risk.

In the end, I think creativity can truly be intrinsic to any task; you just have to be open to it. It takes risk and it takes hard work but the reward of overcoming some obstacle with some new approach brings awareness and fosters curiosity.

Even a little curiosity is a very big thing.

Restarting and Reworking an old project

Reworking Old2Reworking New2

Reworking Old1Reworking New1

Old on left • Rework(ing) on right

Don’t we all have these projects lying about, whispering sweet guilt at their unfinished nature? It might be some involved yard work or a shelf that isn’t quite up on the wall yet. For myself and many artists there are various older ideas that had begun to take form in our chosen medium but for whatever reason never quite came to a place of completion that satisfied the parties involved. In my own art, oil painting has always been a difficult beast to master because it brings a larger set of possibilities than other mediums which means more paths to follow and more places to get lost and frustrated. My studio racks are littered with half realized oil paintings, of which many fall under the category of “project needing completion.”

In particular, I had made a series of paintings entitled “Malls” which, if logic follows, were depictions of shopping malls in oil paint. At the time (2001-2003) I was a semi fledgling studio painter just finding my footing in terms of direction and execution. I knew what I was doing for the most part but there was a lot of learning on the job (still is.) This led to some paintings that I feel where stronger in concept than in actual construction – especially a number of much larger pieces whose polish eluded me as time and energy ran out. Physically smaller pieces are easier to make in that, for obvious reasons, they happen more quickly and the ½ inch brush dances across the canvas with an organic flair as a simple flick of the wrist will create some exciting effect of color and paint. At the larger scale, that same quality of surface requires a 2 inch brush and a swirl and twist of the whole arm. A smaller work is akin to walking on a plank that sits on the ground while a larger work is like walking on that same plank now suspended 4 feet above the ground. Same plank, different variables and a more challenging process to walk with height under your feet.

So I sit with a number of large, older oil paintings that have needed a rework for years and I am just now feeling up to the challenge. Plus, I am running out of storage space and if I still have these large pieces after all these years then that means they haven’t and maybe won’t sell in their current format. I still think these are good pieces overall, I just think they can be little better.

How do you approach reworking these old projects? Do you employ a scorched earth policy or a simple tickling of the sleeping giant? Probably somewhere in between is best and as I’ve worked these past weeks I’ve felt the process unfold almost like rekindling an old friendship that has lain dormant for many years.
That old friend that you’ve come back in contact with after all these years (thanks, facebook…) has touched a nerve of history that rushes forth a jumble of old feelings and patterns that have to then be reconciled with new feelings and patterns.

Like that first conversation after ten years of silence there is hesitation and curiosity all at once as you step back into older patterns and wonder, almost aloud, if you didn’t leave this relationship for a good reason. It’s neither altogether comfortable nor uncomfortable but it is fascinating. With effort, as all meaningful relationships require, you start to see that some of that old stuff was founded with good intentions and strong bonds. Those aspects of your relationship are hard to break and will remain strong if you choose to move forward. At the same time, there is some reason that you left behind that project and reconciling what wasn’t working then is a big part of finding what will work today.

The first few steps of reworking the old project feel oddly like the small talk of catching up after so long. You tease and prod old memories and test them against your new sensibilities. Some of the old isn’t so different from the new and a color choice in an old painting might still resonate after all this time. Some aspects aren’t so wonderful and you question how in the world you hung out with this painting once upon a time. The flaws are so obvious now…

Soon, if you want to bring that project into the light of present day, hard choices need to be made. How much do you keep and how much do you discard and rework? The lurking difficulty is that our human nature will gravitate towards the familiar, even when it isn’t desirable. I have literally caught myself short a few times in the reworking as I realize I am making the same poor choices I made years ago with a slight variation. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.

Goals are the key to deciphering this process. Usually, paintings go awry when we lose sight of ultimate goals and swirl the paint around, directionless. I see parts of these mall paintings that lack that direction and my memory recounts the pressure of a deadline (a show) caused some of that aimlessness.

For the “Malls,” I found the overall structure of the paintings to be reasonably strong and what I found lacking was a deliberate sense of focus between sky, mall and parking lot. I also feel that the surface of the paint wasn’t as seductive and meaningful as it could have been. My lack of time and knowledge frustrated this process many years ago and I can call on more experience and knowledge in the present to tackle these new goals. Simply – clarify the sky, mall and parking lot relationship and make the painted surfaces richer. I believe goals are easier to achieve when they are kept essential and clear and it is on this footing I have preceded in my reworking.

Now, if I could only get that shelf on the wall…

Fear in Art

Blank canvases sit waiting. Potential commission checks drift happily into the daydream of my future and then uncomfortably out again. Today, like many others in the life of self employment in the arts, is free, unencumbered with any other obligations but the chance to make art. The studio is clean, the paints sit ready. Everything in my life at this moment is primed and proper for making good art.

Yet here I sit, unable to start. Afraid of…what? This circumstance is not new to me, nor is it news to any artist that fear is a great motivator of inaction. What is it about the blank and oh so white emptiness of paper, canvas, etc. that cripples even the most steely resolve? In my world of the 2 dimensional arts my ally is the colored mud of paint, usually in watercolor form put down in microscopically thin layers… Is that something to be afraid of? A finished watercolor painting has an accumulation of a nearly immeasurable weight of paint on its’ surface. If you could accumulate all the paint of a typical watercolor painting in a small pile it wouldn’t accumulate enough to butter a piece of toast. Is it enough to ruin a day, or maybe even a week? You betcha! The poor writer, of who I am becoming acquainted through this blogging effort, who relies on the bits and bytes of their word processing software to encode their musings onto a computer hard drive actually accumulates nothing but a few electrons as they type through their day. Those minute electrons are no less capable of driving said writer as insane as the forebear’s quill and inkwell or more recent forebear’s typewriter.

What are we so afraid of?

I’ve heard life described as a spiral among other things, and as the spiral draws out from the center and grows ever larger, the same issues keep intersecting at the same points along the spiral like spokes on an ever increasing wheel. The drawback is that you intersect with an issue over and over again as your life spirals on and you are never truly free of that issue. The benefit happens that, as the spiral grows larger; those issues are intersected less and less frequently as the times between intersections lengthen as years pass. Making art is one of those life processes within which each of us will find our inherent issues of triumph and struggle. The triumphs are surprisingly forgettable as the solitary nature of art limits the joy we might feel without someone to share it with. The struggles? Oh, how isolation magnifies the feelings of insecurity, frustration, uncertainty, fear, anger and on and on. That intersection of difficult on our life-spiral is an intersection we’d much rather skip over if only life would let us! The struggles do fade from memory but they also seem to represent many more spokes on our life spiral and may, in fact represent an unfair amount of spokes!

My intersection and struggle with the blank page stems from an issue that recurs time and again. I struggle to plan things out and to take the painstaking steps of research in the form of sketching or gathering reference material that might alleviate organizing the canvas. I pine to dive into color and paint well before the canvas is even primed. Yet, you skip those first crucial steps and you lengthen your process immeasurably as you will more than likely need to backtrack and reorder things that could have been ordered more appropriately from the start. My desire might be akin to speaking before thinking. How many repairing conversations have I had with my significant other after speaking without thinking? Much more effort need be spent in that dialogue… Painting without planning can be much the same for me.

What creates that aforementioned fear is that planning and organizing things before you start means you need to dig deep into yourself from the very beginning of your art making process and, well, that’s hard! You are much more aware of the limitations of your idea when it much planned and understood from the start and what if that idea then proves unworthy?! The real fear stems from our identifying ourselves with our art and if our art should prove unworthy, then so are we! That fear might be irrational but any task you spend hours and days attending can take on a life of its own that seems in a strange way might just be our own life…

Really, art is just something we do and the best we can do today, tomorrow or next year is just that, the best we can do. It’s not something to be afraid of but something to be celebrated. Who we are is much more than our art and what we should really be afraid of is forgetting this and thinking that artist is who we are.