My relationship with arting (someone really needs to come up with some kind of actual verb for those of us who mess around with mixed media) is much more violent than my relationship with writing.
The most aggressive thing I do when I write is roll around on the floor whining; maybe snarl a bit in a kind of self-mocking way. When my art isn’t cooperating, though, cue the screaming and the looking for something to stab.
(I COULD REALLY USE SOMETHING TO STAB RIGHT NOW. JFC, HOW can it be THIS HARD to block in a stupid fucking pose?!)
I’m curious why this is. Maybe it’s because words are more tame for me? Sometimes they struggle a bit, but I never have any real sense that they have the upper hand. It’s only a matter of time before I manage to herd them into position. Art, for me, is more wild. Things do not happen the way I want them to happen just because I know that’s how they should happen. This pose, for example, has climbed into a tree out of my reach, and is sitting there laughing at me from the higher branches while I flail uselessly at it.
Or maybe it’s the degrees of removal. A portion of my approach to writing is that I think of it as illustrating images through words. But this will always be an inexact science, and I understand that. Even if I could lay down every word perfectly, it still wouldn’t quite pick up the idea in my head and drop it fully-formed into yours, because the language map in my mind isn’t quite the same as the language map in yours.
(For this reason, there comes a point when you might as well give up laboring over the ‘perfect sentence.’ The cold fact is, you’re wasting your time because nobody but you will think it’s perfect.)
When it comes to art, however, I have an image in my head, and an image on paper, and in a perfect world, the image on the paper (or the computer screen) would match the one in my head when I was finished.
IT SOUNDS SO EASY, DOESN’T IT. HAHAHAHAHA. Here’s the reality: ”Arrrrrrrrrrgh I JUST WANT HIS GODDAMN SHOULDER TO TWIST THIS WAY, it’s a freaking LINE, HOW can it feel like moving granite just to make it go where I want it to?!”
This has been a glimpse into my arting process. Because I know you wanted to know.
Really interesting thought PA, amazingly well expressed. I was a fine arts / English double major and I completely agree that each medium — visual art vs. words — has its own set of frustrations.
I think when it comes down to it, the process of learning how to do any art, whether it’s writing or visual art (or anything else), is the process of translating the vision in your head into words or onto paper (or onto a movie screen, or into clay, etc). And it seems, for me, that the process of learning to do that translation is the craft, and the drive to do it and the inspiration and the vision is the art.
I think anyone who has that drive is an artist, and that the real struggle lies in the craft process. I know I have had endless struggles with writing because I don’t have a lot of experience with consistently applying myself at it over time, and learning it as a craft. I like instant gratification: I just want what’s in my head to show up on the page. It’s been years since I’ve done any visual art, but I can remember feeling the same way when I used to paint.
…The process of learning to do that translation is the craft, and the drive to do it and the inspiration and the vision is the art. That’s exactly it!
I was an English major, and I used to get into conversations/arguments with the arts students and faculty about what counted as art, about comparing processes and craft. Neat stuff. We all agreed that the internal aspects of the ‘from head onto paper’ process feel very similar, but of course the techniques you use make it happen—the craft—are different.
For that matter, the same goes for different artistic media. The skills and techniques for pencil and charcoal, acrylic paints, watercolor paints, sculpting in stone vs. clay…all very different. (Along with knitting, carving, embroidery, various musical instruments, etc.) Just because you can do one doesn’t mean you have any facility at all with another—though you can always learn!
And that’s the bottom line, I guess. A craft is learnable. It’s just a skill set. And it’s a separate skill set from the process of inspiration and cultivation of ideas. And I think that latter one is what we REALLY mean when we talk about art. That’s the part all the other ones have in common.
^_^ And thanks for humoring me. It has helped.
*tries this art thing again now that the impulse to murder someone via spork has faded*