“Wow, you’re so lucky,” people say to me when they see my work. “I wish I could draw.”
There is this pervasive mythology that artistic people are born with the ability to draw, paint, or sculpt because this otherworldly aptitude was somehow zapped into them at birth, and that out of that bolt of divinity, they became endowed with a skill set apart from the common man. For the most part, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While certainly some people are born with extraordinary gifts, the cultivation of any skill set required to bring any creative enterprise to bear takes work. An enormous amount of work.
The real issue is that our society appreciates art but doesn’t actually respect it. Our education system teaches generalized creativity instead of the skill set required to master the principles of visual design. As a result, fewer people develop whatever artistic faculty they possess or discover if they even have talent at all. I once had a teacher say to me when I wanted to learn some of the principles and techniques of realism, “Why would you want to do that? Just throw your emotions onto the canvas.” Even improvisation, however, requires structure. Monet didn’t just dabble paint, he created pieces that still possessed an understanding of perspective, light, color, and form even as he tried to transcend the ordinary.
I’ve had teachers plop crayons, colored pencils, paints, scissors, paper, and all manner of art supplies in front of me and tell me to just “create something”. While there is a place and a time for noodling around and experimentation, this only serves to reinforce the impression that art isn’t serious and that it’s only fun. An attitude, I would argue, that makes our view of artists and our education system all the worse. Can you imagine if we taught anything else that way? What if you sent your children to kindergarten and the teacher said, “We’re not going to teach the alphabet. Or grammar. Or spelling. We’re just going to let them feel their way to language through mimicry and interpretive grunting?” Would you accept that? Probably not. But somehow, instead of equating the point, the line, the plane, the circle, the square, the triangle, the cube, the sphere, the cone, the cylinder, values, hues, gradation, composition, perspective and gesture with the alphabet, words, grammar, sentences, paragraphs, a thesis, and a conclusion, we short shrift teaching the actual language of visual arts for some woeful facsimile.
Art, like writing, like math, like knowing how to design and carry out a scientific experiment, like computer programming, is a skill set. It’s not magic. To those who think the arts are frivolous, there are ample examples in ever facet of our economy to refute that. Art is all around us. All those cereal boxes with a cartoon of Tony the Tiger on them? An artist did that. The iconic Nike swoosh? The brainchild of graphic designer Carolyn Davidson. The logo for the New York Yankees? Created by famed decorative artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. All the prints and patterns that blanket fabrics, paper products, textiles, ceramics, and gift products originated in the studio of an artist. The entertainment and gaming industries provide one of America’s largest exports, art is involved in packaging, branding, advertising and marketing every single one of our consumer products, and, in a 2015 New Yorker exposé, journalist Ian Parker wrote that—far more than if the CEO, hardware engineers, or programmers—if Jony Ive, Apple’s top designer retired, it would have the most deleterious effect on Apple’s stock price, where “a ten-percent drop in Apple’s valuation represents seventy-one billion dollars.”
From an economic standpoint, I’d say that's pretty serious.
And yet, because our culture devalues art education, the consequence is the devaluation of the process of creating art itself. The danger of this myth of inborn ability is damaging for artists’ livelihood because people assume that the work is fun and easy. Yes, some artists achieve celebrity status, and then they can sell a pill cabinet for five million dollars, but for most creative professionals, we regularly confront people who dismiss, or don’t see, the investment of time, tuition, supplies, more time, Adobe creative programs, classes and even more time it takes to maintain and develop visual language skills. The biggest consequence of this is the atrocious Exposure Myth which every artist has experienced. “I can’t afford to pay you, but this will give you exposure that could lead to more work.” Spoiler alert: it never does. And truly, the people who can actually give you exposure can also afford to pay you.
Thankfully, over the last few decades, artists have begun to articulate their frustration with this work-for-free paradigm and fight back. Dan Cassaro’s sarcastic response to Showtime’s invitation for him to provide free work went viral; Mike Monteiro’s “F*ck You Pay Me” speech in 2011 felt like a beaconing call; Taylor Swift, in her letter to Apple, who wanted to offer songs on their new service without paying musicians, wrote, “we don’t ask for your iPhones for free.”
Sometimes one image can take fifty to a hundred hours to create. And sometimes, yes, it’s fun. Even exhilarating. But sometimes I can’t figure out how to make something work, and I have to teach myself a new method or how to use a new material or I have to go down the rabbit hole of experimentation. And sometimes it’s a slog. And sometimes my body hurts from being cramped into one position to render the image. And sometimes, I’m almost to the end, and I realize, no, I have to start over again, or undo part of what I’ve done. And sometimes it just feels like work.
Which is why professional artists should not work for free.
Because to become a professional artist, you have to develop skill. Art is a skillset, not a superpower–something people would understand if we had been taught to draw with the same rigor that we have been taught to read.
What does it take to be a professional artist?
It takes a long time and a lot of work. There is no way around this.
Nick Saban, the coach of the Alabama Crimson tide, has won more NCAA National Championships in college football than anyone else in the current era. He is famous for his meticulous focus on process instead of results. He has said in interviews that most people say they want to be champions but don’t actually want to do what it takes to be a champion. We like to think that we have a lot of choices, but if you want to be great, you don’t actually have the luxury of choice. It takes what it takes.
In this, he is correct.
Mastery takes many forms, but it always occurs in the following stages. Most people start out unconsciously incompetent. Meaning, we don’t know what we don’t know. As we develop a sense of what we need to learn, we become conscious of our own incompetence. This is followed by a long period of establishing a skillset until we become consciously competent. And then an equally long period of day in and day out pencil mileage in order to become so good that we are unconsciously competent.
No one gets around this. Yes, some people create something and become overnight sensations, but this is usually a fluke, and without a base level of competence, rarely leads to longevity. Ira Glass, the creator of the podcast This American Life said it best in his now famous meditation on the process of creativity:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
For art, there are three stages as you fight your way through this process. The first stage is, can you draw a person? Can you even make a drawing beyond a stick figure that even achieves an accurate representation of what a human being looks like? This stage involves learning basic shapes, structural representation, proportion, and developing your line quality. This requires an enormous amount of practice. The second stage is: can you draw that specific person? From here, you develop a sense of value, color, gesture, expression. As you become more and more comfortable in your process, your own sense of an artistic style begins to emerge. And then you achieve the last stage, which is, can you draw your version of that person? When you think of the great artists—Vermeer, Picasso, Dali, Chuck Close, Rembrandt, Daumier, DaVinci—not only could they draw specific people, but it’s clear from looking at their work which one of them painted which piece because their canon of work has a singularity of vision.
Every artist needs to adhere to a practice, to develop a process, and to create projects on which they can hone their skillset and find their voice. The best way to get good at anything is to do it every day. Drawing one day a week on the weekend for eight hours is actually less productive than drawing every day for twenty minutes. Daily practice builds neurological connections which cement themselves every night during sleep. Also, often starting is the hardest part (because it involves overcoming what Steven Pressfield has coined Resistance in his classic The War of Art), and once we are involved in a task, it’s easier to extend the time and energy and over time, because it has become a habit, it also becomes easier to start.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has said that he has an appointment with himself to write jokes every day, without a day off. He has a Don’t-Break-the-Chain calendar of 365 days a year posted over his desk and draws an X after each session so that as he goes along, he doesn’t break the chain of X’s. Author and 4-hour entrepreneur, Tim Ferris, who was struggling to write his tome, The Four Hour Body, received advice about writing from an author who had written over 60 books. His advice, paraphrased here was:
“Make it small and temporary: the immense practicality of baby steps. Take the pressure off. Set a meager daily goal whether that be twenty minutes of drawing or two pages of writing or X amount of whatever practice you wish to cultivate per day. This way you avoid making a mental monster of your project. Setting the bar low will allow you to do what matters most: get started each morning. Take the pressure off and put in your five to seven easy sessions. The rest will take care of itself.”
Cultivating a daily practice will also eliminate creative block. Because you’re no longer sitting down with the pressure of trying to create a masterpiece, but simply chipping away at exercises to make yourself better or explorations to make your project come together as a whole. Cultivating a practice where you do the work for you, because it’s important, because it’s part of the fiber of your daily life, will help you find your voice and your style, and ultimately your audience because you’re human. And human beings have more in common that we have differences. So at some point, someone will look at your work and see themselves, even if you’re doing the work for yourself and from your own point of view.
To this end, to anyone who wants to become an artist, the best way is to go through the same kind of sequential, building block-style of training you did in school for reading, writing and arithmetic—whether it’s an atelier program, or a concept design academy, or a specifically designed program of online and in-person classes that cover the basics from draftsmanship to perspective to line, volume, value, and composition. It’s a matter of trying different media, experimenting with different techniques, integrating different styles, learning different forms, and, as Bruce Lee would say, “adapt[ing] what is useful, reject[ing] what is useless, and add[ing] what is specifically your own.” Becoming an artist is no different from becoming a lawyer or a doctor or an investor or a mathematician.
It’s not luck. It’s a lifetime of hard work.