I’m certainly not a chef, but whenever I’m asked what the “key ingredient” is to making good photographs, good ART, the answer I give is a simple one: make a lot of it.
We often talk about how vision is everything, but vision doesn’t come from the womb full grown and mature. It’s cultivated. And that cultivation takes time and effort. Certainty and control might be your friends while performing surgery, but they are not your friends here.
While some people might mistake my suggestion of repetition and productivity with ‘thoughtless’ production, it couldn’t be further from what I mean. In reality, it’s usually through producing art that ideas get brought to fruition. You’re working your way through fear, through vagueness, through the numbers, the details, the soul of it. It’s through this process that we find what we’re looking for.
Tolstoy re-wrote War & Peace 8 times (by hand) before he got it right.
Michael Jordan has missed 26 game winning shots.
I could go on, but you get the point.
[Btw, if you haven’t read the book Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
“Making art is like beginning a sentence before you know it’s ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all – or having gotten there, you may not have said anything. This is probably not a good idea in public speaking, but it’s an excellent idea in making art.” – from the book Art & Fear
, you’re missing out. The book was first gifted to me by a photographer I met on the road named Bryce Boyer. Thx B.]
Hey Chase
Agreed. And add my recommendation for that book. It’s an excellent read.
Nice post,
Cheers
Carl
A quote from the artist Chuck Close:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
Sounds like a great read.
I think that it is easy to spend a lot of time thinking about making art, but not actually creating it.
Perhaps it is best that we do our ‘thinking’ while we are doing.
That title? Art & fear. It sums up everything that holds me back. Fear… the perpetual demon that must be recognized, contained and squashed! I plan to check out that book. Thanks Chase for the recommendation.
nice! i got Art & Fear from the library last week and it’s sitting on my bedside table. of course reading it is the next step! : ) Thanks for the extra push!