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I wonder why it seems too easy to be consumed by the responsibilities of life. Why is it that the things I don’t necessarily enjoy can so conveniently push what I really want to be doing aside? This often leads to frustration. (And these feelings also contribute to drawings like such below.) But why why why? Have you heard “procrastination is the killer of dreams?” Well, where does the desire to procrastinate come from? It has to derive from a foremost feeling. Could it be fear? Doubt? Both? Yes. Where do those feelings come from? Perhaps the thousands of successful artists who have dominated and set the bar for the art industry? Definitely. How could I ever break into that? I’d have to be good, motivated, different. How does that happen? Hard work? That’s everybody’s answer to anything. Work at it. You’ll get good eventually. Put in 10,000 hours? Be yourself? Huh? And how many times have I heard that the great artists or photographers don’t have a special solution. Well, duh. If there were a special recipe to become a popular, successful, collected artist then that process would be patented by now and selling like crazy.  Of course.

After spending a whole day studying the human facial muscles, I wanted to venture further on my own and make a face showing emotion. This was how I felt at the time, life throwing curveballs at me, and thus he is a screaming man. What else can I say. I'll talk more about this drawing and the facial muscles in my next post.

_____Ok, so there’s hard work. What else? That can’t just be it. Working away in your little apartment creating masterpieces and no one else knows about them. Networking. But you can’t just network with anybody. It has to be the right people. If you knew a whole bunch of weight lifters and you’re trying to break into the baby photography industry, that doesn’t seem like the greatest combo. Alright, moving on.
_____What about competitions? What about art communities? Hmmm…. innumerable websites to post your work. Do people really find you? How do you stand out from the thousands of other artists who post their work? Does it come back to being the best? Does it come back to the persistent effort into the quality of your art? What about an idea? Isn’t that the most powerful of all seeds? Can’t even the dumbest ideas transform into something that appears entirely pure genius?
_____And then there is orginality. How does someone come up with something entirely new? The world seems so satruated with ideas and new this and new that already. Someone always has a new book, a new technique, a new style of photographs. NO WAY. Someone out there has thought of the same thing already. This is a painful reminder as I write my book.

The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

_____Yet people still surprise and invent something new and technology advances. How does art advance? Modern art has turned into something that is almost disposable. Rotting vegetables nailed to a board. Feces on a podium. Why does that remind me of a trash dump? Shock art? Work that is described as grotesque, violent, and sexual. I suppose that genre of art can appeal and inspire other people and artists. Everyone has their tastes. Just like some artists are engrossed in creating classical art and mimicking the Old Masters. That genre has always been more appealing and popular. Not surprising that artists who pursue that style end up having very similar looking work.
_____So many questions. Does asking questions help one discover the answer? Possibly. But the answer to what? What are you looking for, Grace? I have come up with several factors:

• Hard work
• Networking
• Originality
• Style/Theme/Genre/Niche

_____Factors of what? Successful artists? What defines a successful artists when artists themselves can’t even put a solid definition on what art is itself?

I think I’m leading myself in a circle. Wait. Is that it? Perhaps it’s not one long road and whoever reaches the end wins. What if it’s a race track. A never ending direction and whoever can last the longest, with each exhausting stride, for countless circles around the track, wins. But what is winning? No. There is no winning. The race never ends. The only thing that matters is if you’re the one to give up, not run as fast as the others, or sprinting faster than everyone else. Perseverance. What if that is the key? Meeting failure, doubt, fear, procrastination, yet being the one to never give up.  But what if giving up is sometimes the answer? That should be possible. Maybe you’re on the wrong race track? In the end, I’d rather be running on the artistry race track than looking and waiting around in life for the perfect track to run on. Maybe it’s better to be somewhere than nowhere at all.

Why does it sound like I’m obsessing over this? Because I don’t want to be at my part-time job the rest of my life. But the reason I also have a part time job is because I didn’t want my art to revolve around money. It was exhausting and depressing. I traded. We’ll see if it was for the best, but right now, I know that art and illustration is what I want to do. Only, before I was afraid of doing it, and am still working on conquering that fear.

Ok, no more thinking for you Grace. And goodness, this was supposed to be a post about facial muscles. I guess my mind was somewhere else.

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Lately, I’ve been doing some reading about Michelangelo.  Apart from being one or the world’s greatest genius artist -as a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, poet- and  other than his immense sense of detail, form, figures, proportion, anatomy, composition, lighting, structure, and deep meaning behind each work, what else can we learn from Michelangelo?

I’d like to draw your attention to his innate sense of materials.  He was such a perfectionist, and that started with his materials.  He would spend 6 to 8 months in the quarries picking out the perfect pieces of marble before he started any of sculpting.   Could you imagine spending almost a year before you even start the art application process!  You’re just trying to get the materials.  The right materials.

He especially learned how important  the right materials are when he was working on a sculpture and a black vein came through across the face of  the Rebellious Slave.   From that he realized that the marble slab he picked wasn’t large enough to work with and far from perfect.  Usually he would carve and carve to mold the form, but with the slave, he ran out of room. What he learned from this he also applied to all of the huge projects he undertook later on, like the Tomb of Pope Julius II.

Also, with his  first version of Christ Carrying the Cross, he discovered a black vein  in the marble and quickly left it to start working on a new.  He was nearly completed with the first Christ, but found the impurity and left it with no hesitancy.  He did an entirely  new marble statue because the first one had a large blemish!

So how does this apply to contemporary day artists?  How often is it easy to just pick up a canvas and start painting?  Do we even learn about what kind of linen, canvas, or paper that we’re using?  Would we spend 8 months trying to make our materials perfect and lasting? Yes, it costs money.  Yes, it takes time.   I’m even wonder how much it even means to clients.  Do installations and contemporary art have to be a good quality?  Not really.   Rotten vegetables, feces, old mattresses… come on… why do you have to really put energy and effort into your materials?

Um, maybe because it lasts… No one is going to remember your name unless you actually have work with your name on it.  Seriously, why not use good quality materials and go through lengthy process to make sure that your artwork doesn’t dissolve into a million pieces or lose color or warp or crack.  How important is it?  Hmmm….

We live in this instant age.  We want to create now. We want art now.  Does it even matter how much time we put into our work?

You could say that it comes down to the branding of your art, not necessarily the quality.  But for some people, like Michelangelo, his branding was his style and quality of art.  He was known and will forever be known as the best.  From the materials to the finished work, he gave every bit of his attention to the creation process.  Instant art didn’t exist then, does it now? Should it?

Shout out your feelings and let me know your thoughts

Peace of cake.

Grace