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

[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!