It looks easy!

As write this post tonight a very attractive skunk keeps coming up to me and sniffing my boot. It is mostly white and gray, not like others I have encountered before. Carries itself very well.

images by Eduard Manet from artrenewal.org
Some one in the comments recently referred to spontaneity and the possibility of losing that. I want to speak a little about the type of paintings above or those from the brush of a John Sargent or other bravura painter. Although the paintings may look dashed off, and they may even be done rather rapidly, that is part of the art, an artifice, a deception.

In the early eighties when I first heard Stevie Ray Vaughn play guitar, I thought, that sounds so easy! But what it was, was facile. Great musicians, acrobats, and magicians all deliberately work at their craft until it looks effortless. They want it to look easy. If. when you saw them perform, they looked like they could barely do it, their effort would be a distraction. The trick is to make it look as if they can just rattle off difficult things by natural talent. I suppose it may be attractive to viewers that the labor is camouflaged, as the viewer can then imagine himself doing the same thing ( as I supposed until I next touched a guitar after hearing SRV ) Part of being REALLY good at something is making it look easy.

Richard Schmid once wrote that "loose is how things look, not how they are made". The passages that seem spontaneous are often those painted most deliberately with icy concentration. Nothing in them is accidental. The ability to make them is at the end of a long progression of failed or lesser sallies at the same result. To paraphrase the amazing Mr. Schmid "spontaneous is how a painting looks, not how it was made".

There is no way to relax yourself into being able to dash off bravura passages in profound alpha state nonchalance, anymore than you can play guitar like SRV that way.