I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I’ve thought of adding a category Saturday Skills so that I might discuss what skills I want to work on in my creative life. For example, I’ve been wanting to improve my drawing skills and compositional skills, and have thought of starting with value studies, in which you reduce a particular subject/composition to a small number of shapes in dark, mid, and light values (typically black, neutral mid gray, and white).
On the other hand, do I need to work on skills directly, or can they just come to me through writing and painting with intent? Writing coach Marion Roach Smith says that the single greatest piece of writing advice she offers is: write with intent.
Here’s what Smith means:
Writing with intent means study the form you are writing, master that form and publish in that form. It means never again using prompts or writing exercises, time-wasting morning pages or any other such stuff that does not get to the heart of mastering the medium in which you want to publish.
I’m not totally sure what I want to publish for my Things Men Gave Me project: a set of personal essays? Or a standard memoir?
I do wonder about the advice to “study the form you are writing.” Is this actually necessary or is it actually a diversion from intent?
What about simply writing the thing you want to write, without studying and mastering the form you are intending to work within?
In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami describes how he wrote his first novel. He spent his twenties running a jazz café with his wife. In April of 1978, he atttended a baseball game. At one point, when a batter hit the ball with a crack, he had an epiphany: I think I can write a novel.
He picked up a sheaf of writing paper and a fancy pen, and started to write. Every night after work he wrote at his kitchen table at dawn (he worked late into the night at his café).
He did not study the modern Japanese novel before writing it:
[Although] I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff—my favorites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks—I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in the Japanese language.
He operated intuitively and on guesswork, but when he read through what he produced, he wasn’t impressed. He found what he wrote boring.
Keeping his epiphany in mind, he thought:
Maybe it had been a mistake to try to write something “novelistic” in the first place. “Give up trying to create something sophisticated,” I told myself. “Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”
He came up with a creative and a unique way to do this. He put away his manuscript paper and his fancy fountain pen. He pulled out an old typewriter, and decided to write the opening of his novel in English! “What the hell, I figured. If I was going to do something unorthodox, why not go all the way?”
His decision to write in English meant he had to simplify his language, express ideas in an easy-to-understand way, and strip out any “extraneous fat” from his descriptions. The result? “A rough, uncultivated kind of prose.” He found that “a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.”
This is similar to what I do when I paint something representational. Not having extensive classical training in drawing, composition, and value, I have to work within my skillset to produce something I think is both meaningful and fun to look at. I use a painterly, loose, messy style because it doesn’t require precision of proportion or details.
While I regularly have the thought, “I need to improve my skills” or “I should go get formal art education,” I don’t think that will serve me. Many creators learn as though go, creating exactly what they want to create, without spending a lot of time studying what other people are doing, fitting their creative output into specific categories, or refining their skillset other than by doing it while actually creating what they want to create.
When I was learning to be an artist, I bought many books on painting with acrylics then worked through the tutorials and I followed online tutorials too. What I discovered was that this taught me some basic skills and how to handle materials and which materials I liked. But it also introduced me to what worked for that other artist specifically. It didn’t do anything to help me develop my own personal point of view as an artist. There’s not just one way of doing abstract paintings or semi-abstracts or representational still lifes of flowers. There are as many ways of doing those things as there are artists doing it.
I’ve lately been getting good responses on my art from other people, mostly my friends and family, but that’s enough. It’s more than I used to get. I used to get lukewarm commentary from other people (and I still do from people in the art group that I’ve decided isn’t a good fit for me).
My mom liked a poppies painting I did so much, she asked if she could have it, or something similar, to hang up in her apartment. She never asked before.
My older daughter commented multiple times on how much she likes the painting I have hanging up on the wall behind my stairway going up to the loft; it was something I did rather quickly, and it was not in my usual style, but I really liked it too! So to have someone call that one out in particular made me realize, I can make art that people like. And also, different people like different pieces.
My niece, who studied visual art in high school and is an accomplished artist, told my younger daughter how much she likes my style. And she commented on my Casa Bonita paintings that I have hanging in the guest room where she stayed: “I love how you did those!”
And my younger daughter commented multiple times about how much she likes the painting I have in progress, texting me, “I love your style, the vibrant colors are so beautiful!!” She even showed a photo of the painting to a professor she was meeting with, a woman who I happened to go to high school with. I’m sure she wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t think the painting had something special about it.
Meanwhile, multiple friends have commented that, while they enjoy my essays, what is really striking to them is the artwork I’m creating to go with them.
I’m not totally sure what happens next, but I have some ideas. I’m thinking of applying to art festivals for next summer to get my art in front of potential buyers; I think that will be a better way to move forward than more juried art shows. Very few artworks are ever sold at those shows. They seem mainly to be for vanity and to connect with other artists. Exhibiting my work in such shows has given me more confidence and more understanding of framing and wiring art for hanging, but it isn’t really working with intent around getting my art into the world the way I want.
For the writing, I’m going to continue working on essay-painting pairings but now that I’m getting my rhythm and voice going I think I will also start developing an entire manuscript that I will likely self publish in spring of next year, so that I can have it ready for sale when I go to art festivals.
Why self publish? Because my work is unusual enough I think that’s a better way to go than looking for a traditional publisher. I know that even when a book is published by a traditional publisher, the author still needs to work her butt off to promote it. Why not just publish and promote it myself?
I do know what’s not happening next. I’m not going to sign up for drawing and painting classes. I’m not going to add deliberate practice of value studies or drawing or scene writing into my regular routine.
I want to note, right here, right now, that I feel like I am on the right track with all that I am doing, that art monsterhood is my true calling and direction.