Art School 003
So to begin with you need to start going on something right off the bat.
I want you to do some lousey drawings. The main thing is just to draw. Don't worry about refinement at least for now. Don't worry if it looks like what you're drawing. Just draw.
First, get yourself a sketch pad. If you don't have one get some paper. If you're broke that's a little bit of a problem but not much. We live in a paper world.
Go to any office district and you'll find tons of paper being thrown away every day with all the writing on one side. Grab that stuff. The other side is yours. If you're out in the boondocks you can even make some paper by making a pulp (we'll get into that later, but for now you can find out by asking around) and dipping a screen in it. Pull it out and let it dry, then peel off the paper and there you are. That stuff is worth more anyway because you made it from scratch.
Take it in bunches and glue them on one edge with rubber cement. Or just put them one at a time on you sketch board. This can be a piece of cardboard or a piece of press board.
If you've got some money or can go out and panhandle some, get a drawing board from an art supply store or some plywood from the lumber store and sand it smooth.
Albright now, if you've got some supplies, grab something to draw with. A ball point pen will do, but it's better for now if you can get
a hold of some kind of a pencil. If you're too poor, light a fire and set in it a number of twigs. When the fire gets going pretty well, cover it with a sand mound and poke a hole in the top of the mound making sure it makes it all the way down to the twigs.
Let that fire smolder itself out for a day, letting the smoke escape through the small hole at the top of the sand pile. Then next day dig it up and collect the twigs. By then they should have become charcoal and you can draw with that. Use one and save the rest. Charcoal drawings can be valuable and you might be able to sell some of your stuff later.
Now take a piece of paper and crumple it up. That's right. Not too tight, now. Just a loose ball. Throw it on the table. That's your
model for a couple of weeks. Start drawing it. Work as long on each drawing as you see fit.
As you draw, a learning process is taking place in your mind. It's a natural thing that takes place without you or a teacher imparting some special lesson or skill. That's why I reiterated that everyone's an artist. How much of an artist you will become depends on how much you allow the natural process to take place.
Be careful though. You might harm the process by letting boredom get the best of you. You might switch on the radio or start listening to the news. You might begin a conversation with someone while you work. This is what destroys the process. I insist it is like a beautiful crystal growing in a solution. It only grows if the solution is not disturbed.
When you try to entertain yourself, you don't realize it, but you are doing what is called "multitasking" and the art process growing within you won't form properly. You may pick up on art in a vague,
wispy way, but it will have become shallow and lifeless; lacking in power and
determination. As you get further down the line, if you fool around you won't have the
control you need to make a positive statement and that, after all, is great art.
Above all, stay away from the pop music, especially rock'n'roll. These have cheap driving backbeats and shallow, flippant cord repetition that have a destructive effect on the mind. How can that be? You ask. Music can't hurt anyone, you think.
That's just it. The repetition of the music causes the mind to remove vast parts that aren't being stimulated. To be stimulated in more parts of your mind, you need natural, random sounds and sights. What these do is touch more parts of your mind and as the saying goes, "use it or loose it", if it's stimulated, the mechanisms of survival in the
brain won't assimilate it and take it away. They'll find something else for dinner than your
brain!
Just so, you might as well face it, there's a trade-off with true artists, mostly. They become more and more intellectually capable and then less and less able to get along with the average people that have
unwittingly participated in the pop culture of their day and have gone through the lobotomizing processes.
You'll be thinking differently more and more as you develop and your powers of reason will begin to increase. You'll become something foreign and
abhorrent to most of them and they will gossip about your ways of thinking which will be more and more different than theirs.
You will have begun to enter the creative process. It will begin to wake you up and you'll begin to enjoy thinking. More and more, you'll come up with original ideas. This is the natural process in the human being that is so great and wonderful and could be present in everyone, but most are afraid and conform to a destructive world that just breaks them down into an unreasoning mass of economic shallowness.
But I want you to survive. I know full well the human being to be capable of so much more than the
disappointing meaningless existence we are stuck in these days where nothing more than the profit motive is
paramount.
Listen, there is only one thing of value in society and that's art. Even though the artist is downtrodden and made to be
insignificant, just look at how they need us. Offers of half a billion for one Rembrandt and it's turned down. And they still put artwork on their currency in every country.
Keep drawing that crumpled up piece of paper for a while. One drawing after another. If you try, you can even feel the ideas and the mental abilities growing in your mind. Get quiet and let that mind
crystallize. At last you're giving it a chance to move higher. Even if it is a piece of crumpled up paper on the table, you are unlocking your ability to say something about it.
Because of the simplicity of your present subject you aren't side-tracked by things you might mentally yourself consider important. The crumpled paper, it's angles, it's shades, it's planes and much more, give you a new power of
development. It's a blank statement, it gives you the ability to discover necessary things about drawing itself and is helping you to
develop into a more competent draftsman.
So just draw the paper. Doggonnit, kid. Trust me on this one. Just do it. Let your mind
develop. Begin the process of unlocking that artist within you. It could get transposed later into the ability to paint a landscape, or design high
fashion, or design a car or aircraft. It might lead you to architecture. But one thing is that if you start simple and build on a solid foundation, your creativity will
develop.
proceed, if you will, to art school 004
Click on any of the following to go there:
The Art School table of contents
Why is it that art is ignored by the masses? Those who control them for starters.
http://www.paulhallart.com is created and authored by Paul A. L. Hall (I had to do the whole thing myself).
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
Art is art. It's a part of the physical universe, unlike modern industry and commerce.
email Paul and all at paulandall@paulhallart.com (it's the dot com before the storm).
art school 003