Seekers and wankers

I am going to give the color wheel a rest for a few days. I like to mix things up a bit here, so tonight I think I will write about two different attitudes toward art and why one of them will lock you out of advancement as a painter. Caution; the material that follows is provocative and may contain irksome content.

There are two types of art students, the first who I shall refer to for convenience as "wankers" believe that all they need to know lies buried within themselves and they have but to find the sincerity to extrude it onto the canvas.

The second group I will call "seekers" look out into the world and seek to find information out there about how to make art. Seekers read books about painting, study with other artists, haunt museums and study historic art. They seek out the company and advice of other artists, particularly those that can help the improve. They BELIEVE they can improve. I recommend you develop a seeker's attitude. Here are some reasons why I think that is a good idea.

Lots of people have been down this road before you, even though they may have been very clever they still have had the benefit of generations of artists handing down ideas and methods. If you wanted to become a chemist, you wouldn't hole up in your basement and try to discover the periodic table of elements yourself, it took generations to discover that, you would simply buy a book and look it up. Why waste the years discovering that which is not only basic, but easily discoverable? With enough years of study you might be able to do something original chemically perhaps even add a new element to that table.

A familiarity with the historic ideas will give you a standpoint for appraising new ideas. Knowing how artists before you have dealt with various problems will give you an inventory of methods for solving those problems when they appear in your own painting. Knowing the work of the great artists will help you to recognize the best art of today rather than be impressed with the merely adequate or worse, the derivative. How are you going to make great art if you don't know what it looks like? If you told me you were studying to be a rock and roll guitarist and I asked you what you thought of Chuck Berry and you said "who?" I would guess you were not real serious.
Wankers are anti-learning. Why learn about the art of other people if everything you need to know is already within you? They have mistaken self examination for communication. What matters is not what the artist intends, but what they convey.

Knowing about art will make you a better painter, not damage your originality. It is better that your originality spring from knowledge rather than being a symptom of that which you have left unlearned. The seekers will add to their knowledge, the wankers will not. That is why you occasionally meet people who have been painting for many years that paint so poorly, rather than become knowledgeable about art, they have chased themselves in ever tightening circles. Wankers!

When I was an art student we were encouraged to be wankers. I think it filled chairs in the art schools. Telling those kids it was all about them, was far more popular than presenting them with a daunting course of study into methods, history, materials and philosophies of art. It also made possible the employment of teachers who might have been unable to convey those rarefied ideas. The art school teachers I had would simply dribble zen-like pop psyche phrases and cryptic aphorism like "explore the random inner tectonics of the flatness continuum!" or "give it more Bossa Nova!

While "Know thyself" is a good advice, "know what you are doing" is probably better advice in the painting game. Become a seeker, not a wanker!