Recently I've been reading a book by Will Gompertz, perhaps better known as BBC TVs news correspondent for art and culture. The book, called "think like an artist" has some excellent advice, not only for aspiring artists but anybody who wants to be more creative and more productive.
I particularly like one of the early paragraphs in the book which discusses the fact that artists never actually fail. What he means by this is that the each time an artist tries new idea or concept or even somebody who just makes a very small adjustment to that concept, and yet feels that for whatever reason it doesn't "work", this should not be regarded as a failure, but as a success in just one more step or iteration towards making something that is good. What I mean by that is that every piece is successful no matter whether it's considered good or bad because it is simply a step along the journey.
This just keeps coming back to my own feeling that art is about a never-ending journey. I've said it before, but just by moving through life, by living we are displacing something around us, like leaving footprints in the sand, sitting on the settee and squashing a caution which leaves an impression of our existence, or just going online on the Internet in search of some trivial fact, will leave a record of us having been there. On those huge Internet servers hidden away in what are called "lights out data centres" (which truly does mean that they don't turn the lights on, but the computers silently run insidiously all the time), there will be a tiny trace, in the form of registered bits and bytes, ones and zeros, literally on and off, which is a record of us having traveled through that virtual space on our journey of existence.
So everything we do, everything we touch, displaces something or leaves a 'transfer'.
This is drawing,
.........therefore being is drawing.
No comments:
Post a Comment