a pea under her pillow

I had a sleepless night last night. It doesn't happen often, but it has been happening a lot more frequently since Nechama, my cat came into my life. She isn't really a cat. She's a kitten. There's such a difference. In fact, I have trouble using the feminine case when talking to her, because she's such a baby. In Hebrew there is gender all the time, in all speech. It is so different from English. It is also a conceptual language, and that is what I planned to write about today, but just now, I started thinking about what I'd been doing all night, which was browsing through different young artists sites. Often the art works are accompanied by journals, and often, the journals turn out to be more interesting than the art. That is what I was thinking about. I think it's because of ubexperience. There are a lot of young people who still haven't learned the tools of the trade. But even so, they're often thinking some very heavy thoughts.


sitting in the mall

Sometimes when young people get to an art school, they have the impression that anything you do is art. This is part of the 'post modern' ethic, but really it isn't true. If a bear shits in the woods, and someone goes out and gets it, and takes it to the museum, and puts it in a glass box, and writes a learned little paragraph about it that is printed and put at the base of the box… well, then it may be art. But it would be hard to get away with that a second or third time. And till that guy comes, while the shit is just in the woods, it still isn't art. So what does it mean when you've done a drawing of someone reclining before you, and someone comes along and says "that isn't anatomically correct" and you say, "yeah, but I wanted it that way."?

The point is that in art there are two separate and important issues. One is taste, and that is dependent on the individual, even though there are certain definitions of taste in every society. The second is: tools of the trade. Regardless of your taste, and whether you want to draw in a fierce provocation of nature, you have to know how to draw before you can accomplish the provocation. Picasso was one of the most original provocative artists in the last century, and he broke a lot of the rules. But check him out and you'll realize that before he did anything revolutionary, he proved his ability to draw and paint by conventional standards. The reason this is important has nothing to do with what others will think, or whether some art teacher or critic will feel you have the right to express yourself in an unorthodox manner. No. It's more like a boxer jumping rope to get into shape. If you knew nothing about boxing, you might say, what a sissy thing to do. Why he should just go down the street smacking people till someone kick's his ass, and then little by little he'll get the hang of boxing. But it doesn't work that way. You have to develop the tools. You have to strengthen your body and spirit in order to become a good boxer or a good artist. Day by day, you do the same exercises over and over again, usually with someone looking at you from the side who can criticize your progress, and point out where you're out of key. You know how much practice a good athlete has to put in before the game? Same way with chess masters. They have to get their body in shape so that they can think straight. They swim for hours, and do exercises in order to be able to play chess. Same thing with artists.

An artist has to learn how to make his arm, his hand, an extension of the vision in his mind. He has to learn how to control the image on the paper, how to give depth, surface, and texture by way of distributing tones on the paper or the canvas. An artist has to learn how to think straight, at the same time listening to his guts and his heart, and listening to his immediate environment, and to the universe around him. Like the princess who knew there was a pea under her pillow? That was about nobility. The artist has nobility.