Yesterday, I came across a quote by a former gallery owner: “Everything under the sun has already been done”.
To me, this quote expresses everything that is wrong with the art world today. A non-artist, someone who has never wielded a paint-brush, makes a sweeping statement about what art is and should be about. The worst part is that people listen to such statements and accept them without question.
I drew and painted as a child and young adult; making art was as natural to me as drinking water, and I didn’t think much of it. Then, I took a twenty-one-year break to pursue physics. After I returned to art ten years ago, I noticed a gradual change in my ways of seeing and thinking. I was once again looking at things the way I used to in my youth, two-dimensionally, observing line, colour, and composition in the back of my mind even in the midst of a conversation. I also found that to make good art, I had to embrace rather than suppress my sensitivity, and I began to experience certain recurring feelings, thoughts, fears, and desires. Occasionally, I would read a quote by an artist, or an essay or diary entry by a writer (I find writers’ experiences to be very similar to my own), revealing that they, too, had those thoughts and feelings. I realized that my experiences were not unique. As painful as it sometimes was, I had the privilege of living the life of an artist and sharing some of the same feelings that moved the people who created the work I admire in museums.
As an artist—as someone who doesn’t just study art but actually makes art—I can say the following with confidence: art is not about doing something new. An artist—one who is hoping to produce great, lasting art—does not get up in the morning and set out to make something no one has seen before. That would be much too easy. Making art is subtler, more complicated, more precious than that.
Throughout history, there have been examples of artists creating things that shocked people. But if you look closely, the artist in question never set out to shock anyone. The artist, in all the cases that I’m familiar with, was aiming to capture something beautiful, or to express a truth. The shock was incidental. If someone is shocked by a work of art, that says something about the person who is shocked. What it says may be good or bad. The fact that the work of art shocked someone, or that it shocked a lot of people, doesn’t prove that the work of art is good. It is not by aiming to shock, horrify, disturb, or outrage people that an artist can make great, meaningful, lasting art.
Being an artist means being sensitive. It means living one’s life with sensitivity and experiencing the world through that sensitivity. When an artist creates a work of art, that work incorporates the artist’s sensitivity. When another person later views the work, they feel the same sensitivity the artist felt, the same feelings the artist experienced while drawing or painting.
Here is the way it works for me in practice. Sometimes, during the course of a day, especially if I’m in new or unfamiliar surroundings, I see something that subtly captures my interest. I feel a pull towards it. It is a very mild pull, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to ignore it and walk on, but if I stop and observe, or if I am in a position to draw or paint on the spot or soon afterwards, often a good drawing or painting results. Other times, as I look through the sketches I’ve done from imagination in one of my sketchbooks, a particular sketch draws me in. If I pursue that sketch, often a good painting results. My aim when drawing or painting is to be honest and tell the truth; it is to reproduce a mental image as faithfully as possible. When I am able to focus on that goal and resist the urge to try to impress the viewer, I succeed in creating something meaningful. I don’t want to shock anyone or make them feel stupid or inferior; I want them to see what I see, to feel what I feel.
In my experience, conscious thought does not produce a good drawing or painting. To produce something good, an artist must be experienced enough that they don’t have to think consciously about technique. But even beyond that, if one tries to put an idea into a work of art, the work often suffers. A great work of art is much more than an idea; it incorporates all of an artist’s experiences and feelings. In other words, ideas don’t make paintings; they are too straightforward, too unsubtle, and utterly incapable of capturing the complexity of what it means to be a person in the world.
The problem with the artistic state of the world today is that too many people, artists and non-artists, have allowed a group of people who have never made art, who have never felt the fear, joy, despair, and pleasure of creating, and who lack even the slightest artistic sensibility, to claim to be authorities on art. Non-artists don’t trust their artistic judgment, and they look to other non-artists to tell them what good art is and what it isn’t. They don’t look to artists. Most people, when they happen to meet an artist, are terrified that the artist might try to sell them something and do their best to get away as quickly as possible, as if they were in a store selling overpriced clothing. Only the genuine art lover who has seen enough art to be confident of their judgment recognizes the opportunity to connect personally with an artist and to glean something of how the artist sees the world and what the artist is aiming to achieve.
It would be one thing if non-artists were the only ones making this mistake, but too many artists themselves look to non-artist authorities in determining their artistic course. If we artists could shut out all the noise coming from insensitive, uncurious, shallow, and pompous authorities and follow our own hearts, we would be able to fill the world with much better, much more meaningful art.
Finally, as for there being nothing new under the sun: as long as there are new humans in the world, there will always be new art—not only new art but original, true, and honest art, art that speaks to the people who see it.