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Today I want to rip apart and put to rest 7 awful myths and misconceptions about art!
Artist by Sergio Aragones
These Myths are totally wrong and mess up the integrity and purpose of art.
1. Art means whatever people want it to mean.
No way Jose! A professional artist always has intention, and it’s his or her job to communicate that intent through mastering their craft and applying their skill in the form of hard work.
2. Art is all a matter of opinion and is subjective.
Hello! All of responses to art are opinions, so that’s nothing new. What the myth implies is that all opinions are equally valid. That is FALSE! Some opinions are better than others. Opinions that are based on better reasoning are much stronger than opinions based on bad or zero reasoning!
Not all art is subjective. Some art is objectively good, and some art is objectively bad. The correct assessment depends on the evaluation of the criteria, not on the viewer’s whims or tastes.
3. Art is meant to be totally confusing like a puzzle.
WROOOONG. Professional or sincere art is not there to confuse anybody. Insincere art is meant to confuse, shock, and irritate people.
4. Art is high brow. If regular folks get it, then it’s not art.
This myth is meant to let the viewer off the hook, because if it is true, why bother to even think about the art? All art is understandable, but some art requires more knowledge of the that art form in order to comprehend it.
5. The purpose of creative writing is for me to express myself.
Writing for personal self improvement is a private thing while writing for the public is an artistic thing – The purpose of public writing is to communicate with others, not to unload personal feelings.
6. Artists are random and abstract thinkers. They don’t think in order or sequence.
This is a big wuss-out from people who want to appear artistic but aren’t necessarily interested in doing the real work. In addition to creating art, artists also organize, revise, and hammer out their art to make it more understandable, An artist with strong revision skills means he has organizational skills, understands structure, and a works hard.
7. Art only comes from inspiration and genius.
responding to inspiration is a reactive process. Most artists wait around for inspiration to strike. On the contrary, it is the artist’s job to create inspiration, to make it active.
Art comes from passion and dedication more than from inspiration or talent.
Cartoon by Don Martin
The common theme in these myths is that art is supposed to be esoteric, abstract, and comes from some kind of wacky inspiration or genius rather than intelligent thought, planning, decision making, and hard work. If it’s obtuse, beyond reason, or inexplicable, it must be good. Another theme here is that there is no way to accurately judge the quality of art, that’s it’s all subjective.
All of these misconceptions are WRONG, stupid, and harmful because they ignore the fact that creating art is really hard work. Instead they treat art as created by chance. These myths try to excuse the audience (and the artist) from having to think about the work.
The truth is that the artist is always in control of the meaning behind their art. Professional artists don’t want their audiences to “take away whatever they want” from their work. Pro Artists are trying to communicate thoughts, feelings, ideas, and don’t want everyone to take away something different.
Cartoon by Al Jaffee
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On today’s episode of Man vs. Art I want to explore how the act of drawing has thoroughly shaped our lives.
There was a time when the ability to draw was seen as the primary essential skill of any artist.
But in the age of the cut and paste pixel and digital imagery many see drawing as an outdated activity.
I want to challenge the modern prejudices that say drawing is uncool and that those who do draw are sad Luddite weirdo loners stuck in a dead past.
Drawing is the most rewarding and essential artistic skill at work in the world today.
Drawing lies behind everything we see and use in the our modern world. The building you are sitting in, the computer you are using, even the shoes you are wearing started as a few lines on a page. Then through a series of more enhanced drawings were transformed from a figment of the imagination into the object before you.
Drawing is everywhere people! It has so much to say about artists and how we think, look at the world and express ourselves! Drawing is about how we communicate with each other telling stories through the timeless language of pictures. We use drawing to understand with the world around us, to grasp it’s beauty and especially to grapple with our own place within it!
Leonardo Da Vinci
In the late 1400′s Leonardo DaVinci began anatomical drawing to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about the human body.
For Da Vinci to understand the human body was to understand the soul.
George Stubbs
18th century scientist and artist George Stubbs had a fixation on the subject of horses that culminated in some of the most brilliant anatomical drawings the world has ever seen. His ability to capture the weight and grace and poise of a horse was impeccable. His sheer obsession with how he approached the study of horses is astounding.
Stubbs ended up creating one of the greatest artistic scientific projects of investigation of the 18th century.
John Russell
In 1764 portrait painter John Russell looked at the moon through a telescope and he was hooked. He made a sketch of what he saw and it changed his life forever. He bought himself two telescopes of his own and his life’s work began in earnest.Over the course of the next 20 years he built up an incredible collection of superbly detailed drawings of the moon’s surface.
John Russell drew this while looking through a telescope over 300 years ago!
Russel was so meticulous with his process he even designed his own crayons with which to draw his lunar landscapes. Scientists today can identify the craters individually from Russell’s studies!
John James Audobon
At the beginning of the 19th century John James Audobon found an unshakable fascination with the wildlife of North America. He wasn’t a trained artist but an outdoors-man yet he wanted to catalog North America’s wildlife treasures with an obsessive zeal! In 1819 the bankrupted Audubon threw himself into compiling an epic work of ornithology, “The Birds of America” He spent 20 years making extraordinary drawings of every single bird species he could find in the woods of America.
Carolina Parrots by John James Audobon
His prints are some of the most reproduced works of art in North America. His compositions showed dramatic scenes that were loaded with scientific information. He chose to make the book with prints of the birds all life sized. Which made the book HUGE and difficult to reproduce. In the end only 200 were ever made. Very few remain to this day, one sold at auction a few years ago for 9 million dollars.
His epic 430 page masterpiece was his way of saying his adopted homeland was God’s country.
John James Audobon Birds of America
Drawing has deepened man’s preoccupation with Nature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and has driven the advancement of modern science!
Thank you Drawing!
Also mentioned in the podcast is
Minion Robyn Mallory’s who wrote in to Man vs. Art http://revulo.deviantart.com/
Andrew Miller from DrewToonz who left a voice mail. http://northshorecartoon.com
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World’s will collide and the multiverse will be in crisis on today’s podcast! Man vs. Art’s Raul Aguirre Jr. and Che join forces with Big Illustration Party Time’s Kevin Cross and Joshua Kemble to tear the art world a new one in an EPIC crossover event so rad we can hardly contain ourselves! The Art Podcast equivalent of Batman Teaming up with Superman in World’s Finest. Only this team up crossover is World’s Raddest!
Big Illustration Party Time
Today on Man vs. Art we have Kevin Cross and Josh Kemble from The Big Illustration Party Time Podcast!
Kevin Cross
San Francisco Bay Area native, Kevin Cross, is a punk rocker illustrator and cartoonist currently living in Portland, Oregon with his rad wife and awesome cat. He has done storyboarding, design, and illustration work for many clients including Marvel Entertainment, IDW Publishing, THQ Games, Real Skateboards, and Spitfire Wheels. When not working on professional freelance illustration assignments, he writes and illustrates his own funny books: Monsters Are Go! and Monkey Mod. Additionally, he received a BFA in Illustration from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Joshua Kemble
Robot by Josh Kemble
Josh is a freelance illustrator and a Xeric Award Winning Cartoonist. He is currently at work on his graphic novel, Jacobs Apartment for NBM Publishing, while creating freelance illustrations for t-shirts, magazines and other media. His illustration clients have ranged from Scholastic to Random House and his comic work has been published in various anthologies and self published mini-comics. An unabashed comic book geek, Kemble was born in 1980 in Tarzana, California and grew up in the Antelope Valley. He received his BFA in Illustration from California State University of Long Beach, and now resides in Long Beach, CA with fiance and fellow artist, Mai S. Kemble, and his pugs, C.K. Dexter Haven and Dozer.
Illustration! What you need to know.
Today my guests and I talk about Illustration and some of the ways an artist can be better prepared to enter the freelance world.
- How an artist can make a living doing freelance illustration.
- Discipline and getting your work done
- Some portfolio and web gallery strategies to follow.
- Self promotion like mailers, web presence, etc
- Generating job leads and establishing professional relationships with art directors.
- Getting into the business mindset. You need to run your freelance business, well, like a business!
- What should your rates be? How much should you charge?
I want to thank my guests, Joshua and Kevin for their time and for sharing tons of a of great advice and encouragement to all of you Illustrators out there!
Here are some of the links mentioned in today’s podcast.
Leah Palmer Preiss Curious Art Lab
Kevin Cross Illustration Coming Soon!
Kevin found a great website called pixelovely to help you with your gesture drawing
Gesture drawings are an excellent method of studying humans and animals in motion. They help artist understand anatomy, and the natural range of motion in the joints, and body language and emotion.
You should start every day with at least half a dozen 30 second gesture drawings. This will warm and loosen you up for your day!
Animatic Directed by yours truly.
Last but not least! I’d like to announce my completion of the Animation series development piece for Mijos.
David Gonzales creator of the Homies and and his brother Father Masseo Gonzales the producer brought me on to storyboard and direct the animatic cartoon for the first act of the series pilot written by Victor Sagastume.
You may now wring out your chonies.
