prodigy, 2

[egypturnash]

Lots of interesting thoughts on yesterday's entry about the seeming lack of visual arts prodigies.

Here's a thought I had regarding the lack, after going through more replies than I thought there were (LJ's being slow on the notification mails): To be a good artist, first you must learn to see like an adult; then you must learn to see like a child again.

And these things have to happen in sequence; by their nature, they can't overlap. And they take time.

Comments

let's go to print

[kaputotter.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!




I like it.

Re: let's go to print

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There was more, but I decided to go with the brief, snappy summation, you know? Better for quotability. n.n

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

From what I've been able to tell, there's a lot to do with fear and confidence as well, but you stated the issue really clearly.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. You have to be willing to defend your artistic choices, and do your work without fear of fucking up or being sneered at... but there's these two important things you have to learn, and you can't do them at once. Seeing like a child from innocence is very different from consciously seeing like that.

Oh, and I couldn't think of anyone I consider an "artistic genius", in late reply to your comment on the other entry. I've worked with people who've been called "geniuses" and it's really just a matter of having a period in your life where drawing is what you do, all the damn time. This is not necessarily a good period when you're having it, either; it might be a way of escaping from some horrible shit!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I was even thinking of the fear of a blank canvas, fear of making things perfect, which in a way, feeds back into your "think like a child" point. Really, I believe one wants to get to a point in one's artistic career where one doesn't really "think" at all.

For geniuses, I'd point to Picasso at least and perhaps Hockney, though not so much for his own work as much as his dissertations on art and the viewing of it.

Though he'd disagree with me, I think there's genius in Goodwin's work, but it's something that's really most appreciable when you see him do a piece from start to finish. He just -gets- it, and that's before any sort of real training.

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

i work with kids every friday who consistently amaze me with the sensitivity of their creations.

they draw intuitive, readily and brilliantly until TV, fashion, fast food, video games, and gender cues via popular musicians take over and drown out the creative urge.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

You could have a very good point here. I can't help but wonder if all that media cap isn't just another test, another way to weed out those that aren't as serioues about their inner vision, art and the creative spirit. Funny, I was SUCH a tv kid when I was little and now I can barely stand it except for how-to shows, and old sit-com reruns I know by heart.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I think about my old art from when I was a kid and it had a lot lacking. I've never been impressed by kid's art; I've never warmed to 'outsider' art either. I'll agree that Popular Culture sucks that desire to create, and swallows the creativity of a lot of people who do try to make stuff anyway - go trolling around open-access art sites, and you'll see a lot of stuff that's entirely working off of [popular kid show of the month].

I am, I admit, biased towards Good Composition and Knowlege of Anatomy and Construction and all that - and yes, I can sometimes be a hypocrite who barely uses these things and essentially defends herself with "but it's my style!".

[zeeth_kyrah]

I think your parents need some art-history classes...

[amoux.livejournal.com]

I can't tell whether that was an attempt to be insightful, cutting, or what.

[zeeth_kyrah]

I was trying to be helpful and agreeable.

[waywind.livejournal.com]

Picasso said something very, very similar. I'm going from memory here, since I can't find it. "I once painted like an old master, but only after many years of study could I paint like a child." That's not quite how the quote went, but it was something like that.

Attempts to find that quote brings up this other Picasso quote: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

That is a true observation, and any artist who experiments with both realism and abstraction will run into it at some point. Adult-sight shows all these "realistic" details that are how things are really shaped, but you've got to learn how to see things like that. A lot of those are counterintuitive to learn, too, and it amounts to spending a lot of study to try and resemble a camera. Child-sight is how people *really* see, since only some portions of reality make their way into a person's brain, and those are often iconic. The parts that seem new or important seem larger than the rest. Child-sight is all about how things look in your brain rather than how they look in a camera. The irony is that you have to have worked hard on conveying adult-sight before you can really begin to convey child-sight as it really is.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was halfway thinking of those half-remembered Picasso lines when I put this together. It's a helix, not a circle: you come back where you started, but a level higher. I wonder where another loop round will take my art? I wonder if that's possible, if I'll live long enough... if there is another layer to find.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I bet the foundation that takes care of your art after you're gone will have a wing devoted to your senile second childhood. They won't realize, it was really your third!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I think Bruce Lee's comment on martial arts may have been applicable to art as well when he said that there were three stages in progression: the first during which a kick is just a kick, the second during which a kick becomes more than a kick, and the third during which a kick becomes just a kick again.