Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Thought of The Day Nov 24, 2009

Believing in yourself blindly is sports cliché BS. Neither determination alone, nor talent alone, nor skill alone nor a combination of all these will make your drawings sing and dance. You'll need all 3 plus the awareness to spot mediocrity in your own work, the conviction to eliminate it through careful observation and relentless practice and the presence of mind to disregard praise.


F.U. blank has a unique perspective as well, he says he hates his own work until people tell him otherwise and you think everything you do is crap and no amount of praise will convince you otherwise.

I, on the other hand, LOVE a lot of what i come up with, because a lot of the stuff I do is inspired by the object of my affection and when I draw it I am in a trance. I love drawing and sculpting women way more than the drawings themselves and whether people like or hate what I do makes absolutely no difference to me.

Most often than not, if the work is full of ideas (regardless of the theme or concept) I end up liking it a lot. It could be a quick sketch full of energy and crazy connections, loops and elements left out on purpose to let the viewer fill in the voids.

The work doesn't have to be extremely detailed or laboriously crafted, by ideas I mean original ways to depict something: how an arm connects with an elbow, the graphic representation or shorthand one uses to illustrate a complex form, an apparently outlandish curve driven to its logical conclusion, strange shapes that explain familiar elements, things not normally associated to certain elements, which at first sight may seem ridiculous but upon further inspection make perfect sense. Drawings that make you feel funny inside, drawings that can be stared at for long periods of time.

I really don't care if I created it or someone else created it, or the reason why it was created or any other information.

Once the drawing or sculpt is done, I sit there contemplating it in awe as if I'm staring at something I've never seen before, from someone I have never met. Because I have no recollection of how it was done.

No amount of praise will make me like something I dislike, I believe the difference lies in that I don't draw for people or with people's expectations in mind. I really appreciate praise when it's given honestly, independently of whether i like or dislike the piece. I believe good things must be celebrated so I don't have a problem with praise, i just don't live and die by it. I am my worst critic and my biggest fan.

People are dumb and people like dumb things that they can identify themselves with and mirror themselves in. We, artists may or may not be qualified to judge other people's work I personally am not interested in judging anybody's work, I just know what I like and what moves me, if the work does not move me because it lacks in ideas or the execution of said ideas is poor, that's the end of that.