Fake it till you make it

Art is hard. Save for the lucky few who seem to have popped out with spatial sense and precise hand-eye co-ordination, you really have to work at it.

Long-time radio host Ira Glass has posed a theory on his show The American Life about a gap between an artist’s work and his/her potential.

There is that exasperating time when what you draw (or play, or act, or what have you) doesn’t match the aspiration you have in your head. For a painter, for example, you can imagine painting the landscape with brilliant hues and flecks of colour, it looks beautiful in your mind.

But somewhere on the road between your mind and your hand, the message gets lots and you end up with something a little more… abstract.

Glass went on to say that “it’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap.” Practice really does make perfect, and although we artists like to think that we’re exempt of such simple ideas, this isn’t one that we evade.

To become a technically gifted artist, you don’t have to sit down for five hours a day and draw rows upon rows of eyes, or apples, or horses (although if you’re a sucker for punishment, I suggest the latter). You just have to draw. Draw anything you see, anything you can imagine.

Even if you’re not trying to teach yourself to draw anything specific, the fact that you’re drawing regularly will cause you to improve. Your brain picks up on cues… because, science (Jim Rohn had a point when he said that “there are some things you don’t have to know how it works – only that it works”).

Another example: when you first start to get dressed yourself as a two- or three-yearold, you emerge from your room a clumsy hodgepodge of pattern, colour and backwards clothing.

But as you get older and you hone your skills, you begin to pay attention to putting the shirt on the right way, picking colours that compliment one another. It isn’t really an intentional thing, this evolution.

It just happens because every day you have to put on clothes, every day something happens that you decide you either like or dislike, and every day you fine-tune your style a bit more according to that.

It’s interesting though, that even when a three-year-old is done getting dressed in the morning, she emerges from her room with her clothes all twisted and unruly, smiling like it’s the best thing she’s ever done.

We artists are very hard on ourselves. We tend to focus on the endgame a lot. We see hyper realist paintings in big museums and yearn for the day when we’ll be able to do that. It’s not often that we step back from the easel, take a look at the canvas, and smile because we’re proud. But it’s all progress.

Every painting you paint, or song you write, or play you act, you’re learning something. The trick is to be gentle enough with ourselves to understand that we’re still maturing.

“As long as you keep at it and continue enjoying what you do,” said artist Ray Sampang. “You’ll get to where you want to be.”

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