How do you make something unfinished?
Because that's what a stroke is.
If you lay a stroke down and don't lose it into the surrounding color field it's unfinished.
How do you make something unfinished finished?
That's a tough problem.
So if you're gonna be painterly or stylistic in any way how are you gonna make it feel
like it's a complete idea?
That's a tricky deal.
Yeah.
You know? And so where's the consistency in that if you're gonna use broken line?
You know, broken, soft edges.
You know, limited color, simplified form.
Why does it not look unfinished?
How can a sketch be worthy of being framed?
In other words, worthy of going in a gallery.
Okay.
And the trick to that is if it feels like it's saying what it needs to say.
In other words every stroke for the most part that you put down or every mark in that artwork
if it's speaking the truth about what you're trying to say, "This is a cheek bone that
turns, that flows down into this structure that comes forward and then steps back..."
If those truths ring out despite the technique it'll feel finished.
But if it's a placeholder, if you do a figure drawing and you just do a ball for the head,
well, it could be anybody's head in almost any position. You know?
You got some sense of where that position is probably but you haven't nailed it down
in space, in position.
It doesn't have the right character and it doesn't have a unique character to the models there.
But ideally if you've got, and Charles Hawthorne said this, "With every mark you make," it's
a little bit of hyperbole but it makes for a good teaching moment.
"With every mark you make I know how you're feeling."
If you were really wanting to get out of that classroom and go have lunch that's gonna come through
in some level of that mark.
It's gonna be a lazy, impatient mark that's not speaking, not doing the work it needs to do.
But if that tracks like an ant up over... If you can actually feel when you put that stroke
on that cheek bone the mounds of the cheekbone...
N.C. Wyeth said, and this I think is true, he said, "If I was doing a painting of a guy reaping
the fields with his scythe," he'd make those up for the most part later in his career,
he said, "By the end of the day, man, my neck and back were sore because I was feeling that
same tension." It's like method acting.
Yeah.
You know? He was actually... The method actor actually feels those emotions and sometimes suffers
for it after the film's over.
And he suffered for it because he dialed into that tension. You know?
So if I'm gonna make this hand as opposed to that hand, those strokes, those moments,
those color shifts, those gradations and so the contours in some manner or form those
have to be quite different because they're serving a different master.
So, you know... So finding that is incredibly complex and the artist generally, not always
but generally, most of the great art movements have done this, is gonna distill down.
It's gonna take a piece of the truth, it might just be by framing it.
I'm not gonna put all this, the rest of the room, we're just framed here
but there's a whole wide world around us that we don't get to see in this frame.
But, also, what am I gonna do about that particular petal?
Am I gonna do every possible thing?
Am I gonna get out the magnifying glass and do a miniature rendering of it or am I gonna
just make it one stroke?
Or leave that one out completely. You know?
And so we're always editing down.
Right.
So the trick, one of the tricks is when we edit, let's do it out of a strength, out of
a choice. Let's say, "Shoot.
If I had more time I'd put more petals in there."
If I had more time each petal would be a more rendered petal.
But let's do something that speaks to some poetic truth.
Some deeper truth about it.
Maybe it's just a zigzag of yellow or a splatter with a brush or something like that.
Or it's taken out completely or it's made bigger or it's moved over, it's set back three feet.
You know? What are we gonna do to change it or edit it in such a way that it supports our system
of belief?
Our agenda?
You know, we're not journalists, we're editorialists.
And what are we really trying to say about that?
And the clearer you can be on that in terms of the craft and by painting a front plane
now, well, that front plane should have something to do with this front plane and that front
plane there, all those front planes in flesh, you're gonna have some relationship
of color and value and such.
And because they're all on an organic figure they're gonna have some relationship in terms
of shape, too because they're all gonna be somewhat organic, figurative shapes.
And that'll be very different than something that's clean lines and architectural.
So are you saying those decisions should be based on what your message is instead of just
the level of detail?
Ideally.
Now that might be very carefully thought out.
That tends to be the kind of guy I am.
But most artists in history don't think it out.
But they feel it.
You know, every time you work your instincts are telling you that there's something wrong,
it doesn't sit back or doesn't do... Or it's the wrong scale or whatever it is.
You're making those critical choices oftentimes and for most artists, even advanced artists
most of the time without the critical thinking.
But what I argue when I teach is that if you don't spend at least some time in the beginning
critically thinking that all you're doing is you're a slave to the system.
You happen to get a teacher that you kind of liked and you're a secondhand version of them.
And oftentimes they can't quite tell you why it works, they just know that the guy that
they got it from or the girl they got it from showed them that it did work and it looked
good and it felt good.
But why does it work?
We can't figure those things out so I'm always a "why" guy.
I wanna know why something works and then I can play games with it and then say, "Well,
maybe I'll break that up.
I'll flatten that space." You know?
Tangents are bad, maybe I'll use tangents for a specific reason.
You know, for a counter reason or something.
You can play with those ideas.
So you're saying the people that feel it instead of thinking about it, they're just instinctively
copying somebody else or...
Oftentimes.
Okay.
Yeah. And there's good copying, and I'll explain in a second, and there's bad copying.
Because we all copy and we all have to copy.
If you go to most good museums you'll see great artists have done copies of other great artists.
That's how you learn.
But if you're just a slave to that, if you've got a, you know, an Atelier
a school or whatever, they have the house style.
Right.
Now how many students going through that are gonna be able to transcend that style and
make their own style?
They're gonna be influenced and probably heavily influenced by that style and they'll probably
never get past it because they don't know what's in that style and oftentimes they're
not...The teacher isn't able to tell them what is in that style that really makes it work.
They just have a few...They have a process that they're teaching rather than a philosophy.
And, for me, art is...We're visual philosophers and we can get into deep meaning of life and
man's inhumanity of man kind of philosophy or just the philosophy of how
form reacts to our mind.
You know? How does your audience see things?