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Chapter 5

Finding Your Work

  • Art is exquisitely responsive.
  • In art, it is more nourishing to be a maker than a viewer.
  • Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker.
    • You can't learn much about making that particular piece by being moved by it, as the creation is bound to the moment and location of where it happened.
  • If for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, that is what you should be doing in that moment.
  • This is especially true now that art has been divorced from being a community effort and more close to the artist themselves.

Canon

  • It is extremely common to encounter work not unfolding.

  • You may think that:

    • you've run out of new ideas, or
    • you've been following a wrong path that leads to a dead end.

  • But if it was working before and it isn't now, neither could be the case.

  • New ideas come into play far less frequently than practical ideas.

  • What you did got you here, and if you apply the method again, you will get to the same place.

    • If something was working and now it's not, your method has changed somewhere.

  • Certain tools make certain results possible.

    • The dilemma:
      • When to stick with familiar tools and materials
      • When to reach out and embrace new things.

  • We don't think about how or why we do things the way we do it. We just do.

    • Especially when things are going well.

  • Working within the self-imposed discipline of a particular form eases the prospect of having to reinvent yourself with each new piece.

  • Once you discover a useful form of work, it should not be abandoned.

  • Making good art depends on making lots of art, and anything that lets you do put the first brushstroke onto the canvas has a very real, tangible and practical value.

    • Only the maker has a chance of knowing how important these minutiae and rituals are to them to stay at work.
    • These can be uninteresting to the viewers.

  • The hard part is finding these patterns.

  • Over time, a productive artist will have amassed these small patterns that makes them keep churning out work.

    • As time goes by, these patterns go beyond simple procedure and gives the artist's work their own color.
      • It becomes inseparable from the artist.
      • At this point, the particularity of individual work becomes less of an issue.
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