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Tag: learning

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I’m learning a new art form

I’m slowly learning to act naturally in front of the camera. It’s been a difficult process.

The ancient Greeks used ποίημα (poiÄ“ma) to describe workmanship. It comes down to English as poem and poetry. Poesis, which means bringing something into being that did not exist before, is another derivative.

It’s no surprise that ancient Greeks thought of creativity in poetic terms; they were masters of verse. We do the same thing today, letting language romp across various art forms willy-nilly. Composition and dissonance, for example, mean the same thing to a musician as to a painter.

That’s because the structure of art is oddly consistent across genres. My bass player husband can pick up any string instrument and coax decent sound from it, because the principles are universal.

There are exceptions, of course. “What is the equivalent of a sketch in photography?” Ron Andrews mused in response to this post. Ron’s right about static photography not needing sketches, but storyboards are just sketches for moving pictures.

The two classes I have finished so far; number three should join them shortly.

You don’t know what you don’t know

At the beginning of this year, I set out to make a series of online classes about painting. I want to get through the seven steps of a painting by the end of this year. I’m almost done with step three, composition. It’s been a doozy. The lesson is long and complex, but so is the subject of composition.

Just the brain dump would be challenging enough. On top of that, I’m still learning the medium. I have no director, so I’m learning to speak slowly and naturally to a camera in an empty room. I’m learning to do voice-overs and tinkering with ways to demonstrate technique. I’ve learned to edit audio and video on three different platforms.

Then there are the exercises and quizzes. To write them is easy; to make them work interactively online is more difficult. Thank goodness for Laura Boucher. She’s my operations manager, daughter, and software guru.

Then there’s Monday Morning Art School, which is free, of course.

Look to the experts

I don’t watch television or movies and I’m too old for Tik-Tok. To overcome this, Laura has me studying YouTube videos. Sandi Brock is a middle-aged sheep farmer from Ontario with close to a million subscribers. She’s an improbable influencer. I learn a lot from her.

The most liberating lesson is that people really don’t care about my flat Buffalo accent or wrinkles. To some extent, the artifice of perfection is irrelevant in contemporary social media. People find their own tribe and ignore the rest.

Painters today have incredible resources compared to the last century. My father taught me to paint, but for most people, learning opportunities were limited to what the local art gallery had on offer. If, like Bob Ross, you were interested in realism in a town where abstraction was king, tough. You were out of luck.

Today you can go online and study with just about anyone, including me. You’re the captain of your own ship, for good or ill.

I have already made a few hundred ‘resources’ for this online class. I’m getting better at it as I go along.

I’m a convert

When I was young, I took voice lessons. I still love to sing, but my voice is a mess. Right now, I’m looking for a place to take voice lessons online. The beauty of this scheme is that I don’t need to show up at 6 PM on Tuesdays; I can do the lessons whenever I want.

Three years ago, at the start of COVID, I fought the idea of teaching online. Today I’m a convert. The proof is in the pudding, and my Zoom classes have proven more effective than ‘real life’ classes in creating professional artists, and almost as effective as intensive workshops.

And that’s why I’m, at age 64, learning a whole new form of ποίησις. The medium may change, but the impulses of creation are universal.

So tell me in the comments, what new skill are you working on?

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Think with your hands

Think with your hands. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

“I think with my hands, and it really cements my thoughts,” Theresa Vincent emailed me recently. She has a way with words; she’s the same person who told me a painting needs brides and bridesmaids.

I may be the only person in my church who draws, but I’m not alone in fussing while listening. There are occasionally people who knit, and lots of people who take notes. Whether they look back at them or not, writing notes results in better retention. More words are better than fewer, and writing by hand is better than tapping out notes in a phone or laptop.

Most importantly for us, drawing instead of writing results in even better memory retention. It doesn’t matter if what we’re drawing is ‘relevant’ or whether the pictures are objectively good.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

Take that, every teacher who disciplined a student for drawing in class! I sure had those teachers; they made school a misery for me. Fifty years later, I realize I was a deeply-traumatized kid who needed help, but that wasn’t happening back in the 1970s. All I had was my pencil, and school had no room for free thinkers.

Fast forward to the aughts, when my own kids were in school. You’d think it would have been better after thirty years of child psychology, but school then was even more rigid and more disciplined. I knew several kids who were disciplined for drawing in class, including my own.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

How does drawing help us remember?

Nobody knows precisely how this works, but it probably means that our moving hands help create new neural pathways to encode long-term memory. The brain-even the elderly one-continues to grow and mend itself. Even after great damage, like stroke or head injury, our brains make new neural pathways and alter existing ones. That’s how we adapt to new experiences and learn new information.

C. is a student in my Zoom brushwork class. She is 83 years old. The foolish might read that and think she’s an old lady taking art classes down at the senior center. They’d be all wrong. C. is a very serious painter, an excellent draftsman, and completely open to new ideas. Last week, I had my class do a small-brush exercise in the style of Les Nabis. It is difficult to give up the brushes you know and love, but C. embraced the challenge. And she crushed it.

Drawing in church. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

Obviously, it’s not drawing alone that keeps C. youthful. She sails, she travels, and she has good genes. But art has a big place in her life.

Our brains are not the only way we think. We have a complicated autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system activates our fight-or-flight response; the parasympathetic nervous system restores us to calm. Our enteric nervous system, which controls our gut (and thus our ‘gut responses’) can operate independently of our brains. And the cool thing is, we’re just beginning to understand how these systems all work together.

I’d almost bet I drew this at Christmas. 5X8, graphite on pencil in my sketchbook.

But they do, so it’s not unreasonable for Theresa to say she thinks with her hands. It might be quite literally true.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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It helps to pay attention to the rules

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed includes shipping in continental US.

This is a cautionary tale for autodidacts (people who teach themselves). As a group we are highly self-disciplined, curious, stubborn and creative, but we can also waste a lot of time and effort on rabbit trails.

The advent of social media was a great time for people like us to start marketing online, because nobody really ‘knew’ how to do it. But there were traditional ideas of marketing that would have been helpful. One of these was the so-called funnel. This is the path that a customer takes from first hearing your name to making a purchase. It includes the following steps:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Intent
  • Purchase
The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

Now you know more about the funnel than I ever did. I knew that marketers made big efforts to get people to sign up for their blogs and websites. Why bother, I asked myself. This blog has a high readership through its exposure on social media. (There’s that autodidact thing manifesting itself; we’re good at coming up with new ways of doing old things.)

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are not disinterested forums that can be used by little parasites like me. Emailing my blog directly, instead of relying on social media, would have been a Very Good Idea after all. *

Breaking Storm, oil on linen
Breaking Storm, 48X30, oil on linen, framed, $5579 includes shipping in continental US.

What does this have to do with painting?

I learned to paint from my father. He was born in 1924, and learned to paint before World War 2. His teaching model was less lecture and more letting me tag along with him while he drew and painted.

Later, I took classes at the Art Students League. I was shocked at what Cornelia Foss told me after she saw my first effort in her class.

“If this was 1950, I’d say ‘brava’, but it’s not.” She then proceeded to tear apart my technique and replace it with something more up-to-date.

It wasn’t just obsolete; it was in many ways bad. From Kristin Zimmermann, I learned about pigments. Somewhere along the line, I dropped the soup of turpentine that I’d been stewing my paintings in, turning them all a milky grey. And I learned how to draw the human figure with academic accuracy.

That’s not to say that everything I ever taught myself was bad; in fact, because I’m a voracious reader much of it was good. But I wasted many years on bad technique because I was too proud to ask for help.

Moonlight, c. 1885-95, Ralph Albert Blakelock, courtesy Phillips Collection. Yes, it’s mysterious and enigmatic, but it’s also falling apart.

Ralph Albert Blakelock was a celebrated painter of his day, achieving the highest price for a living American painter in 1916 with a version of Moonlight, above. His is a tragic story of celebrity, mental illness, abuse and swindle. Blakelock was largely self-taught. Being that kind of creative thinker, he would tinker with the processes of painting. He often mixed bitumen and varnish for rich depth of color in his thick, uneven paint. That has proved to be a conservation disaster, so when we look at his paintings today, we aren’t seeing what he laid down. In fact, in most of them tonalism has been replaced by something grubby and dark.

Autodidacts, it doesn’t hurt to ask for help occasionally.

*You can sign up for my newsletter, by the way, in the little box on the right. And it might be wise to ‘whitelist’ me; I lost Bruce McMillan’s wonderful newsletter for a while because gmail sent it to my spam folder.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: