It’s very important for each person to have one thing in life that doesn’t have to be done well to be enjoyable. For someone like me who has trouble enjoying things at which I do not excel, it is doubly so. A few years back, I picked up oil painting because it was the most interesting looking evening class being offered by the community college. It was hard not to get hooked on it right away. Make no mistake, I have no talent for it but the relaxing effect of playing with the color and the seemingly endless possibilities offered by the medium forced me to drop any pretense of ability and enjoy it.
Since my move to the expanse that is The Republic, I haven’t done much with it. It’s hard enough to squeeze in time for my musical work and having a little boy who is into everything all the time galavanting from room to room at mach 4 isn’t conducive to quiet reflection or, quite frankly, open tubes of paint. But I had an idea while I was playing with a piece of software called Scribbles. The idea seemed pretty good and I thought it might be nice to use some colors that would work in the living room. I pitched the idea to my wife and she was totally into it (she loves purely decorative paintings). Off I went to ye olde art shoppe.
The project came to a close last night. It was so much fun. I turned on some music and just pushed the paint around the canvas. The scratching of the brush is a wonderful sound. The finished work (which I am loathe to call it) isn’t half bad. In fact, if I had any amount invested in the craft of painting, I would say that it’s some sort of minimal primitivism (or um…something like that…). But to feel good about that, I would have to be able to paint a still life that actually looked like its subject. These were the thoughts going through my head last night as I cleaned up my supplies. How much craft should one have to have mastered before being able to critique and classify one’s own work?
It’s my opinion that art and craft are two different things that are not entirely interrelated. I think one can have craft without art though it is difficult to go the other way around. During my schooling I was (and still am) always highly suspicious of composers who wrote aleatoric music or took on free jazz without being able to write a four voice chorale in the style of Bach or explain the basics of harmony and counterpoint. Something in my gut told me that it wasn’t acceptable to simply break the rules when there wasn’t a solid understanding of them. One can’t effectively go against the grain without knowing the grain intimately. After all, how can one create an effective reaction without having a precipitating action?
This all reeks of academic silliness best discussed with espresso and berets, but I think there’s something to this. Having a blog doesn’t make one a writer any more than my trip to the Artarama (not a joke! Great store!) makes me a painter. What does it take to cross that line? I believe that it’s craft. Knowing the medium. Appreciating it. Loving it. And time. So much time. A great deal in music that comes down to woodshedding. Those hours spent learning patterns and scales. The days of working on tone and intonation. There’s a reason it’s called a discipline.
Looking back on my painting classes and the time I spent with the canvas after them, it’s small wonder that I painted the same salt shaker time and time again. Something in me must have realized that the real work of learning a craft is in the etudes, not the masterpieces. The more time one spends with the etudes, the shorter the gap to the masterpiece. That is what separates the Professional, to borrow a term from The War of Art (yes, I’m still fully in love with this book) from everyone else. A Professional knows that there must be an investment in craft to achieve art. We can’t have art without it. Or at least we can’t sustain art without it. There are always outliers but they have that name for a reason. Who really wants to be a one hit wonder?
But I didn’t pick up the brush to make art. I did it to have fun and make something that would match the living room. The process of creating it was purely recreational and allowed me a space that did not have the demands that I place upon myself in my musical work. It is successful, but I don’t think it is art.
1 Comments.