Leaning on the Shoulders of Giants

I has a plan! Hurrah!

Well, sort of. It’s the begin­nings of a plan. A plan of study­ing and learned-ness. (I’m feel­ing a lit­tle bit silly this morn­ing, can you tell?)

I have recently insti­tuted office and stu­dio hours. This is new for me. I’ve never really had “hours” before. But from now on, I’m devot­ing morn­ings to my art and after­noons to all things I’m required to do to make money so I can con­tinue to live in my apart­ment by the sea.

It’s actu­ally help­ful because they’re two very dif­fer­ent parts of my brain, so instead of switch­ing between the two, I can use one or the other and not con­fuse the crap out of myself. It also means there’s a limit on com­puter time and that’s prob­a­bly def­i­nitely a good thing.

My goal is to try to spend 30 hours in the stu­dio a week and there will be a semi strict sched­ule to fol­low. Ish. At least, it’ll be as strict as I get, which if you’re of mil­i­tary incli­na­tions, you’ll cringe, but for hippy dippy me, this is a lot of struc­ture. Good struc­ture I think.

I’ve real­ized that if I want to go to the lovely school in France and also if I want to improve my art regard­less, I’ve got to get some kind of a study pro­gram together. I don’t want to spend all of my time study­ing, because I’ve got com­mis­sions to pro­duce and a body of work to develop, but I want my study­ing to inform my art.

So this is my ten­ta­tive plan, for now at least:

Old Mas­ter Studying

That whole shoul­ders of giants thing? Def­i­nitely going to take advan­tage of that. These dudes and dudettes knew what they were doing. I would be a com­plete idiot to ignore their knowl­edge. I’m an art his­tory book addict, but I’ve never sat down and stud­ied it before. So every morn­ing, I’m going to ana­lyze an Old Mas­ter paint­ing of my choice based on things like design, value, com­po­si­tion, color etc. and try to under­stand the choices they were mak­ing and why. I fig­ure if I’m doing this for other people’s art, I’ll begin to do it on my own.

Then I’ll make a black and white sketch of the piece, so that it’s not just an aca­d­e­mic under­stand­ing of what they did. If I copy it, I’ll start to inte­grate it into my own under­stand­ing (I’m a visual kines­thetic learner, so this is the best way to get my brain to play along.)

Besides being good for me, this is actu­ally a lot of fun. I love ana­lyz­ing paint­ings. It may not be as much fun on day 150, but that under­ly­ing enjoy­ment should keep me going. And if I do this for 6 months, doing one paint­ing a day, 5 days a week – that’s 120ish paint­ings by Decem­ber 1st. That’s an awful lot of knowledge.

Work­ing From Life

This is the other big­gie. I’ve com­mit­ted to doing 5 draw­ings from life per week – so essen­tially one per day, Mon­day to Fri­day. Maybe I’ll do more, because again, this is pretty enjoy­able, albeit frus­trat­ing some days as well.

I also want to do one paint­ing from life per week. Right now, I’m not com­mit­ting to any­thing huge – a 4×6, or 5×7 study of some fruit is fine. If I’m feel­ing espe­cially adven­tur­ous, maybe I’ll go do some plein air paint­ing (still try­ing to find the right equip­ment for me for that).

Some days it’ll be paint­ing Jesse or a friend from life. Some days it’ll be myself. But either way, each week there’s got to be at least one small life paint­ing com­pleted. In time, this may increase, but it’s about get­ting myself to start that’s impor­tant. I’ll prob­a­bly get bored with the small paint­ings and move on nat­u­rally. I don’t want to force any­thing, because then I’ll just stall myself and I’ll never get started again.

The Final 6

To apply for the school in France, I need 6 pieces. I think I’ll be send­ing at least one life draw­ing, and some paint­ings. So over the next 6 months, I want to develop these 6 pieces. What I’ll prob­a­bly do is cre­ate 10–12 and then pick the top 6.

I’d like to mail the appli­ca­tion on Decem­ber 1st, to be absolutely sure it arrives by Jan­u­ary 1st. That’s essen­tially 6 months. And even if I don’t get into the school, it’s a nice dead­line to force me to study and improve. Because at the end of the day, the point is not to attend this school. The point is to study and learn and improve my art. If I get into this school, then that is freak­ing awe­some. I will learn so much there. But if I don’t, there will be other oppor­tu­ni­ties and other schools and other ways of learn­ing. If this turns out to be the wrong place for me, then the right place will show up.

The impor­tant thing for me is to keep the mind of a stu­dent and just keep on learning.

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