traps, crutches, and death's radio
Apr. 8th, 2005 03:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashThis was a reply on T's journal to some thoughts he had on abstraction. I'm not quite sure I really engaged what he was saying there; I kinda ended up writing a manifesto for my own art... whatever the hell I'm trying to do with it.
"process is a trap" - Jackson Pollock
I have a quote stuck in my mind that I think is much the same, from a different angle: John K. has said that "style is a crutch". An apology for your shortcomings of skill, a ritualized work-around, and ultimately a trap.
I keep feeling trapped in my style sometimes. Sure, I can do this thing and do it well; I've explored around and made this very personal bag of tricks. Some are borrowed, some are my own refinement, some may be uniquely my own take on five things at once; I don't know how easy it is for someone else to ape this particular look. I've never really seen anyone try.
So I make myself experiment. I try to do something different with every piece: "this time", I say, "I can't use gradients." "this time, I will strive for greater realism and modelling than normal." "this time, I will limit my color scheme thus-and-so". "this time, I must complete it in x amount of time."
Some experiments work. Some don't. Some work so well they seem not to work - one of my attempts at "this must look painterly" worked so well that I got the odd comment from people running it down for looking like loose, unfinished brushstrokes, when it was complete calculated artifice. Some experiments get abandoned.
And I keep returning to my familiar idiom, too. Sometimes to relax, sometimes to satisfy other limits more easily, but mostly because it's an easy thing to do by now. Distort like this, blow off that worry of realism, pick these color harmonies, obsessively detail here and there and there to balance the huge areas of flat color, and bang, another Slick Piece of Peggy Art.
Sometimes I feel like this is bad. Like I have to be on the move, like I have to go attack something different now that I've pretty much mastered this particular voice.
Other times I think of that bit about the Big Pyramid in "Understanding Comics", and what Scott said about Sergio Aragonés: he found his visual place long ago, he's staked his claim, and he's very very comfortable there. So comfortable he can crank out a page of crazily-full comic-book every day, no matter what happens in his life.
In terms of The Career, both have complling arguments. Be a chameleon: master any style, work on any project... never get noticed because you change so easily. Be a unique, strong voice: people come to you when they want what you've mastered... and only then.
There are paths between these extremes, of course. I think I have a fairly strong artistic voice nowadays, a way of thinking and working that permeates everything I do, even the crazy departures from what people expect. If I picked up a brush and started wildly slopping oil paint around, what came out would have certain qualities in common with everything else, though I'm not sure anyone else would see them all... but I do try to make myself break my style, to occasionally do things I hate so I can learn from them.
Sorry, I kinda rambled there.
There was no struggle. Ultimately, I should reject it... - T', on a sketch that came far too easily, that he feels he should pretty much just toss because of that.
No, you shouldn't. Yes, you should. No, yes, no, yes.
A lot of the time, I just draw whatever the hell the pencil wants me to. And the rest is obvious.
Further ramblings, added after cutting and pasting the comment from there to here...
What am I trying to do with my art? Where is it going? I'm so reflexively anti-commercial with it, loathe even to draw something to tickle a friend's fancy, let alone try to get regularly paid to do it. I just have to make this stuff, and make it in a sort of vacuum of expectation. It's for me. You don't have to get it, though I always like it when people do. I don't even have to get it. Narrative is oblique in my art, it's a world of middle moments, of in-betweens. Never key poses. A blur, a multiple image, a stretched distortion. So much of it just comes from beneath my mind, from my trained hand moving half on its own: "hey, that looks sorta like..." and it does, in short order. Despite my strongly commercial and graphic veneer, the flat colors and strong ties to cartoon conventions, it's all very personal, very masturbatory. I say cryptic things indirectly; I find it hard to put a drawing's direct point up front and loud.
This is not unlike my other modes of communication. Cryptic, mazy, gigglingly mysterious. Wilfuly obscure in ways that I hope are a little more clever than a fifteen-year-old just discovering the power of an in-joke.
There's this book. "The Infinity Concerto", by Greg Bear. The hero's a poet. A young poet, still struggling to find his voice. He talks about an old movie he saw (Google finally reveals to me that it does exist; I never thought to check until now: Cocteau's Orphee), an updating of Orpheus and Eurydice in which Death is a beautiful woman whose car radio babbles beautiful nonsense. Sometimes, he says, poems just write themselves, and he's only their agent. They're not his poems, they're not ones he would write. He's tuned in to Death's Radio.
Most of my best drawings seem to arrive from there. My sketchbooks are full of idle scribbles made while I await the next transmission. An image emerges, suddenly, from the scrawls. A thought coheres, a phrase rattles 'round my head from nowhere. It filters through my hand, through my habits, and I make it mine. But I so rarely know what it means.
Obscurity, straight from Death's Radio, sung as sweet as I can. I keep coming back to that. I guess that's the answer to the question I posed of "what am I trying to do with my art?". Keep practicing and await the next transmission. Package it up slickly and slip it into the world. Fool around with new ways to present it, appropriate bits of other's voices, but ultimately it's what Death's Radio demands for a drawing. Not everything comes from Death's Radio; some comes from wanting to draw this or that or the other thing - but a significant portion isn't quite from me, in some important way, it's from the Radio.
Obviously, I'm not trying to get rich here.
"process is a trap" - Jackson Pollock
I have a quote stuck in my mind that I think is much the same, from a different angle: John K. has said that "style is a crutch". An apology for your shortcomings of skill, a ritualized work-around, and ultimately a trap.
I keep feeling trapped in my style sometimes. Sure, I can do this thing and do it well; I've explored around and made this very personal bag of tricks. Some are borrowed, some are my own refinement, some may be uniquely my own take on five things at once; I don't know how easy it is for someone else to ape this particular look. I've never really seen anyone try.
So I make myself experiment. I try to do something different with every piece: "this time", I say, "I can't use gradients." "this time, I will strive for greater realism and modelling than normal." "this time, I will limit my color scheme thus-and-so". "this time, I must complete it in x amount of time."
Some experiments work. Some don't. Some work so well they seem not to work - one of my attempts at "this must look painterly" worked so well that I got the odd comment from people running it down for looking like loose, unfinished brushstrokes, when it was complete calculated artifice. Some experiments get abandoned.
And I keep returning to my familiar idiom, too. Sometimes to relax, sometimes to satisfy other limits more easily, but mostly because it's an easy thing to do by now. Distort like this, blow off that worry of realism, pick these color harmonies, obsessively detail here and there and there to balance the huge areas of flat color, and bang, another Slick Piece of Peggy Art.
Sometimes I feel like this is bad. Like I have to be on the move, like I have to go attack something different now that I've pretty much mastered this particular voice.
Other times I think of that bit about the Big Pyramid in "Understanding Comics", and what Scott said about Sergio Aragonés: he found his visual place long ago, he's staked his claim, and he's very very comfortable there. So comfortable he can crank out a page of crazily-full comic-book every day, no matter what happens in his life.
In terms of The Career, both have complling arguments. Be a chameleon: master any style, work on any project... never get noticed because you change so easily. Be a unique, strong voice: people come to you when they want what you've mastered... and only then.
There are paths between these extremes, of course. I think I have a fairly strong artistic voice nowadays, a way of thinking and working that permeates everything I do, even the crazy departures from what people expect. If I picked up a brush and started wildly slopping oil paint around, what came out would have certain qualities in common with everything else, though I'm not sure anyone else would see them all... but I do try to make myself break my style, to occasionally do things I hate so I can learn from them.
Sorry, I kinda rambled there.
There was no struggle. Ultimately, I should reject it... - T', on a sketch that came far too easily, that he feels he should pretty much just toss because of that.
No, you shouldn't. Yes, you should. No, yes, no, yes.
A lot of the time, I just draw whatever the hell the pencil wants me to. And the rest is obvious.
Further ramblings, added after cutting and pasting the comment from there to here...
What am I trying to do with my art? Where is it going? I'm so reflexively anti-commercial with it, loathe even to draw something to tickle a friend's fancy, let alone try to get regularly paid to do it. I just have to make this stuff, and make it in a sort of vacuum of expectation. It's for me. You don't have to get it, though I always like it when people do. I don't even have to get it. Narrative is oblique in my art, it's a world of middle moments, of in-betweens. Never key poses. A blur, a multiple image, a stretched distortion. So much of it just comes from beneath my mind, from my trained hand moving half on its own: "hey, that looks sorta like..." and it does, in short order. Despite my strongly commercial and graphic veneer, the flat colors and strong ties to cartoon conventions, it's all very personal, very masturbatory. I say cryptic things indirectly; I find it hard to put a drawing's direct point up front and loud.
This is not unlike my other modes of communication. Cryptic, mazy, gigglingly mysterious. Wilfuly obscure in ways that I hope are a little more clever than a fifteen-year-old just discovering the power of an in-joke.
There's this book. "The Infinity Concerto", by Greg Bear. The hero's a poet. A young poet, still struggling to find his voice. He talks about an old movie he saw (Google finally reveals to me that it does exist; I never thought to check until now: Cocteau's Orphee), an updating of Orpheus and Eurydice in which Death is a beautiful woman whose car radio babbles beautiful nonsense. Sometimes, he says, poems just write themselves, and he's only their agent. They're not his poems, they're not ones he would write. He's tuned in to Death's Radio.
Most of my best drawings seem to arrive from there. My sketchbooks are full of idle scribbles made while I await the next transmission. An image emerges, suddenly, from the scrawls. A thought coheres, a phrase rattles 'round my head from nowhere. It filters through my hand, through my habits, and I make it mine. But I so rarely know what it means.
Obscurity, straight from Death's Radio, sung as sweet as I can. I keep coming back to that. I guess that's the answer to the question I posed of "what am I trying to do with my art?". Keep practicing and await the next transmission. Package it up slickly and slip it into the world. Fool around with new ways to present it, appropriate bits of other's voices, but ultimately it's what Death's Radio demands for a drawing. Not everything comes from Death's Radio; some comes from wanting to draw this or that or the other thing - but a significant portion isn't quite from me, in some important way, it's from the Radio.
Obviously, I'm not trying to get rich here.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 04:16 am (UTC)And what do I find? Purple-blue palettes. With a few orange-yellows for deliberate attempts at variety. Why am I so fixated on purple-blue harmonies? I've gotten away from them, to the point where a straight use of one almost looks weird now, but I still just want to do that.
I guess it creates a Spooky Mood of Spooky Frostbitten Mystery, or something, and I tend to like that. Even if I know I overuse that scheme and deliberately shy away from it now.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 10:08 am (UTC)...in the Winter Forests of Haunted Grim Infinity?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 06:31 am (UTC)I look up and could've sworn I saw a blue figure for an instant. I look outside my window and I see a dog walking slowly away. I lean out and its spots were just leaves above the ground. Someone was laying on my bed. I shake them and tell them to wake up.. Just clothes..
I'm at work and I wanna draw something inspired by that weirdness with Rezeya..
I come home and all I want to do is feel my mind slip away and lose time.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 10:07 am (UTC)I come home and all I want to do is feel my mind slip away and lose time.
Boy, does all that sound familiar, and I don't even have a conventional art to get frustrated about. :) I've been spending the last few days tripping balls, to distract myself from my earache and because I knew I was going back into this mundane environment... and the mere act of sitting up to jot notes about some pretty thing I saw seemed to banish the pretty thing. I lie in bed stoned or daydreaming, and as soon as I get up it's all gone. I can't get the ideas out of my head when I'm at work -- but give me three weeks alone, sick, and bored in my bedroom, with nothing to do but write and think, and I can't get my visionary coils to spark at all...
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 10:26 am (UTC)I've sort of been training myself to write down or audio-record these ideas and find a way to get excited about them again when I get home. They're never as fresh and a lot of the time, they feel tedious but I do manage to get some of them done.
I'm also very affected by people in my home environment. My partner seems to have a knack for knowing just went to interrupt and, if I feel self conscious or insecure, I have a harder time working. Particularly when I record audio and know that a roommate might snicker at the overemoting I'm putting into something that I might be somewhat sensative about.
I recognize that my ego is frail though so when I catch myself falling into this, I try to do whatever it was anyhow just to spite myself.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 11:48 am (UTC)I try to carry a notebook everywhere I go, and sometimes I salvage enough from the notes to put together an essay later, but more often than not it's like I'm trying to deciper alien hieroglyphs, since all the original emotion I tried to codify is just gone, along with any of the implicit details. (I wrote a story about it once, called "Automata"; it was up on my web site, which I really should think about relaunching...)
I'm very fussy in a similar way about home environments. I have trouble writing or roleplaying if there's any chance of distractions, though I have to admit Rik's been really great about that. We've developed a small vocabulary around when it's all right to interrupt the other -- we can be "bubbled" for instance, and off-limits to the other, though I really need a lot more work than he does on respecting those limits. It's not self-consciousness for me so much as anxious hypervigilance -- if so much as a doorbell or phone ringer goes off, it can take me 15-20 minutes to stop bracing myself for another one and focus on what I was doing...
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 03:09 pm (UTC)My laughter is rarely derisive. Usually it's joyful. I laugh with delight and wonder and to celebrat, not to belittle.
So if I laugh at somthing you do, it's probably a good thing.
My laughter used to be a bitter nasty thing, because that's what I was. It's much less that, now.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 01:05 pm (UTC)Some of the stuff in there looks as good as some of the stuff I had done recently and often better than in some cases. Some of the stuff I've done at home. A lot of it is far worse than my 'schooldoodles' are. Oh wells!
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 10:02 am (UTC)As for forcing yourself out of a style, I think I have to root for your "yes, keep the easy sketch" voice. I adore T's artwork, but that comment almost makes it sound as if the technique itself were the only reason for it to exist, and that idea sits uneasily with me! It's just a means to an end. Yes, by all means, polish and grind a wide variety of lenses -- but what's really important to me is the object, the symbol, the message. To hell with Marshall McLuhan. The medium isn't everything. I'd rather see a trite rendition of a beautiful thing, than see a nothing that stands in for a perfect rendition of a beautiful thing.
Also, the original thing I was going to comment before I thought of the above bullshit: tuning into the radio broadcasts of various divinities and abstractions would be an absolutely awesome "school of magic" mechanic for a postmodern RPG. I think I must now steal that for Fluorocrash.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 03:32 pm (UTC)I couldn't write with the clarity and speed you do to save my life. I think that qualifies. It just gets lost when you hang around such an intensely visual fandom as furry.
I think both medium and message are important. Even if I used the exact same composition, "me drawing X" would be different from "T' drawing X" from "Goodwin drawing X" from "Ursula drawing X" from "Pseudo drawing X"... and, of course, none of us would really want to use the same composition. Each tells a story in xer own way.
Fel free to steal that idea! I just inspired it, after all. I think it counts as yours.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 01:14 pm (UTC)Process traps you because it seems correct, it seems right, it is the only way you know how because it works. You believe other methods as 'not quite as true' because you've programmed yourself. It's only a Trap if you are unaware that it is a Trap.
Style a crutch. I believe this is true very much, even if you realise Style is a crutch. I think it's not a crutch... as you are drawing, but as you complete the image and repeat the style, it becomes a crutch. The goal of building your own Style is silly and you shouldn't really worry about that. Most things are built from the ground up, so you've already been using other styles if you are not visually blind.
It's almost impossible to avoid. So, if you're so afraid of using Style.. Draw with your eyes closed? *grin*
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 03:18 pm (UTC)I agree with what you say about "building your own style being silly" - I've talked about this sort of thing before, and my firm conviction is that a "style" is something that accretes. Steal a bit from this artist, a bit from that artist, a lot from this other one, practice the fundamentals so you understand what these abstractions you borrow are shorthands for, develop your own personal shorthands, keep swiping from an ever-broader set of artists... five or ten years later, you "have a style" to call your own. If you still care about it.
And when it becomes too easy to draw a particular way, it can begin to become a problem. It's boring when there's no challenge left, when the Process is completely reflex. Right now, a lot of the Process has become reflex for me; I talk about "my hand knowing how to do things" which frees me to consider broader issues about a drawing - but what happens when I've done my schtick so much that I can be thinking about, I dunno, my taxes while the whole process happens beneath my conscious mind? I haven't arrived at that point yet; T' is a bit older than I am and may be closing in on it.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 04:34 pm (UTC)I tend to defend myself by saying I don't have a style and explain that I'm still looking for something I can call my own..
Back to zoning-out.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-08 06:34 pm (UTC)Heh, not likely. I talk a good game (maybe?) but I'm still new at a lot of this art thing. Talking, writing, speaking to others about it really helps me see what I'm doing, what should stay, what should go. If anything, I'd place you ahead of me in the game, Peggy. :"D
no subject
Date: 2005-04-09 06:13 am (UTC)Well, most of it. Sometimes from talking to other people, some of it even by trying, a little, to teach other people.
It's funny how much verbiage we can generate about something so non-verbal, isn't it? But we're all full of language. Maybe it's to make up for the time we spend with that turned off when we're actually making the imagery.