Picasso was asked what art was. He answered that if he knew, he would keep that information secret. Today, not much is kept secret. It almost goes without saying that if you seriously want to push your art on the net, you must share your process. Such a thing is so easy to do. It is part of the zeitgeist of art. You have, for example, the ability to record the production of a piece of art, pixilate the artist making the art. This is lots of fun to watch. I imagine most of us artists wish we could work that fast, maybe not all the time, but some of the time, to meet deadlines.
Pixilate the art making the art is but one example of sharing one’s method. We are compelled, these days, to share our process. Instagram forces us, practically, to give everyone a daily studio visit. (Never mind that my studio is a mess. I tell myself that adds intrigue. Anything to get you through the day. Right?) Time for Instagram. Let me take an insta-photo. Add some hashtags, and, voila, you feel as if you have accomplished something. Then let us personalize our Facebook by talking about the art. Advisers tell artists to talk about the art, as if sharing our deep dark secrets will create a sale. And it might. But what is the cost?
I am of a mind not to share my process. I don’t feel compelled to do it. Nor do I think it is necessesarily a good idea. It may be like what they say about writers: sharing dissipates the energy. Don’t talk about the book until you have written it. Therefore, as I write, I am conscious that I do not want to talk overly much, if at all, about my process. Yet here I am, writing when I should be sculpting. Why am I writing? Because I’m sitting at the computer waiting for Bluehost to fix my wordpress site so I could get into it.
Yeah, I have a blog, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. This is standard procedure. And yeah, I have talked about my process. I have been at this for awhile. I watched the net evolve. I’m old. Not a millenial, like my son. One has to be thoughtful about how one shares one’s process, if one shares at all, which is very difficult not to do these days. The very idea of blogging, in whatever form that takes, is sharing one’s process. It has become an art form in itself, a very natural thing for artists to do. Lol. We come to expect it so much that when we look at old or deceased artists, we want to see inside their lives, too. Most of all, we want that. For some celebrities, this is somewhat possible. But not like now.
So what I am going to do is talk around my process. Really, there is such a thing as showing too much of one’s process. It gets boring, even. We have all seen the artist pixilated. Speed through. Let’s see what the art looks like on the other end.
In truth, no one is going to understand – or love – the process like the artist him or herself. The process is a mystery. Perhaps that is what Picasso was suggesting. I could talk all day about my process, and never convey what it is to me. I would bore you, quite possibly, after you got over the rubbernecking aaspect of it. My process is not so fascinating to anyone but myself. I am going to go with that. It’s fascinating to me. But to an outsider, which anyone else is, even another artist, even someone doing something similar, it is potentially boring. Besides that, my process is also personal. I wouldn’t want you to understand it, even if you could.
Furthermore, I have trade secrets. Why share them? Of course, many on the net advise we do just that. It depends on the secret, whether it is to be shared or kept private. It is said to artists, as I recall from a drawing class decdes ago when I was a young college student, “steal it and make it yours.” The artists is encouraged to steal. Why make it easier for them? And yet, at the same time, I do not go in for thinking that my knowledge is so precious and valuable that if I divulge it, my process is not worth much anymore. Just because you know this or that doohicky works such and such a way is not going to make you me, the artist, who made that art.
If I do not talk about my process, what do I talk about? Other people’s process? That runs into the same problem. You think you understand someone’s art by watching the process. As fascinating as that may or may not be, it does not give you an understanding of the art. Better to say, what understanding it gives you is incomplete. Will you ever understand the artist’s perspective and his process? Rather, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Hey look, don’t get me wrong. Every time I look at art, I want to know how it is made. That is the first thing I think about. I am, after all, a sculptor. And sculpture is very much about making things, putting them together, and how that is done. Am I saying, go ahead and talk all you want about your process. I will keep mine to myself. Maybe. I don’t get bored. But in this DYI age, it is very easy to get bored, unless what you stumble upon is exactly what you are looking for to enhance your own process.
But I am also saying that talking about process is definitely potentially boring, not to mention that, presently, I would run out of things to say. And then, good writer as I am or try to be, I would start manufacturing stuff. Not the direction I want to go.
What, then, do I talk about? Well, you know me (or if you don’t, you may if you keep reading my stuff; although, then again, you probably won’t), I can talk… But that would not suffice. Or maybe it would. I could just yack into space. While I’m not sculpting. But this is too much like talking about process. Potentially boring. Who is going to want to read it? There’s enough spam out there already. What’s the content?
Ok, you got me there. I will have to talk about art. But I will talk about other things as well, like spirituality, the economy, politics, and so forth. Let us see where that leads.
What you have just read, then, is a kind of Zen thing. (What is the sound of one hand clapping? That’s the sound my biological father makes when he approves of something I did.) You have just read an artist’s blog entry not about the process of making art. Typical. Actually, atypical, is what I am saying.