Process Over Product - The Meditative Value of Creating Visual Art.
Have you ever stared at paintings hung decadently on the museum walls wondering what their worth could possibly be? How do you place a price on craft? I've asked myself several times, "How does someone come to a conclusion on how much an artwork is actually worth?" Is there a "bluebook" value on it? Is there a price tag on the back of the painting that the public doesn't see?
For years I pondered these questions. I also tried to figure out exactly what ingredients were needed to create an infamous artist. What makes up an artist that can transcend time and become immortal? Does an infamous artist have to have a tragic death like Van Gogh and Pollock? Or, in contrast, can they live long successful lives as in the cases of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rubens. Or, indifferent to both, does an artist have to lure the public into their grasp through cunning and trickery until the artist is no longer an artist, but a celebrity that feeds off the energy of media such as in the cases of Picasso, Dali, and Warhol. For many years I tried to figure out what could possibly make these artists any different from myself. What is it that they did that I am not doing? I felt confident that I had technique, talent, and knowledge, but what was I missing? Where was I weak?
Over the past six months I've come to terms with these questions and I believe I've finally found a resting spot in a long, self-battering journey. I was misled before into believing that an artwork had to be in a certain style, or had to be "new," or photographic to be important or valid. I know now that this attitude was full of barriers and limitations. I was literally binding my hands behind my back. I was also misled into believing that I had to paint in the style of, or copy works by other artists to strengthen technique. Through research during this semester, the most important revelation that I've come to is that the process of creating art is more valuable and important than the product. The process, not the product, is the soul of all art. This is not limited to the visual arts, but encompasses all the arts. This was the area that I was weak in. I had no awareness of my own process. All of this time I had been trying to copy the processes of other artists rather than focusing in and developing my own.
In the examples above, all these artists, to include the last group of media hounds, worked fervently at their art. Why did they return repeatedly to it? Was it the lure of other artist's work that drew them? No. It was the process that drew them. They became so engrossed in their own art and process that their art became a part of them. They lived for their art and their art lived for them. They ate, drank, slept and breathed art. Through continuous work, they could keep their connection with their own process alive and fresh. The beginnings of their artistic lives may have begun copying the process of other artists, but at some point they branched off to nurture and develop their own processes.
I came to this conclusion while drawing at he National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I entered the Rembrandt gallery in the West building and saw another artist tediously slaving away at a copy of a Rembrandt portrait. I sat and watched as he squinted, placed a stroke, dipped the brush, squinted again, placed a stroke, etc. When the artist left the gallery for a break, I approached the original Rembrandt to study it up close. Under the thickly, impastoed and carefully placed paint of the highlights and middle tones there was the wild array of direct brush strokes of a madman. These strokes held the fury and power that was Rembrandt. The underpainting had the same carefree and bold characteristics as his drawings. The energy that was locked into the boundaries of that canvas was immense. This power was Rembrandt's and no one else's.
Then, backing away from the canvas to take both the original and the copy into view, I noticed that the copy didn't have the same life to it that the original did. The wild underpainting, with its dangerously placed strokes, was unapparent in the copy. The painting was a hollow shell. The surface was there, but the essence was not. This artist had proved to me that all of us have our own temperament and process. No matter how much I would want to paint like Rembrandt, I'd always paint like Snyder. What has to occur here is there has to be a similarity in mindset and process in order for this artist to copy Rembrandt more closely. The underpainting has to be attacked rather than tickled in order for it to be similar to Rembrandt in temperament. There has to be a connection between what the artist is feeling, rather than what the artist is seeing. The artist cannot possibly go through the routine or motions and believe that he is going to paint like Rembrandt more than Rembrandt himself! This is impossible. Rembrandt had his own reaction to the world around him. Rembrandt's reaction to the world isn't what made him an artist, this is what made him human. As a human, not an artist, he had the ability to recreate his feelings and emotions in a non-verbal way onto a two-dimensional surface. Everyone that is human has this ability. Each person has their own voice, their own way, and their own process. Painting was his method. There's not a single Rembrandt sculpture known of today because that wasn't his temperament. What clinched my thoughts involving the artist losing himself in a process that he cannot possibly accomplish was the fact that he had a beret and beard quite similar to Rembrandt's. He was becoming Rembrandt!
To better clarify the pitfalls involved in copying other artists, Peter London, in his book, No More Second Hand Art, describes the drudgery that an artist would have to go through in order to come close to meeting Monet's temperament. He writes,
Do you want to draw like Rembrandt or Degas? Simple! Just draw ten hours a day, six days a week for forty years. That's how they did it. Ready for that? How did Monet paint those densely woven symphonies of strokes of light, weaving that luminescent Japanese bridge over that swarming lily pond? First he excavated a huge hole, then he diverted a river to fill the hole, then built a Japanese bridge over the whole thing, all at a vast expense. Then he bought a boat, made a floating studio out of it and for twelve hours a day, for over twenty years, he paddled around that pond, and painted and painted until his eye glazed over. If you want to make stuff that has Monet's charm, have Monet's passion, devotion, largesse, sacrifice. (16)
Why waste this energy becoming someone else? In doing everything that London described above the only result would be that you'd become Monet! You'd be nothing more than a hollow shell with Monet's exterior. Similar to the hollow shell of the Rembrandt painting and painter described earlier. All surface without an interior to hold it up. There is much more inside each and every one of us just waiting to be explored through the medium of art. There are several ways to overcome the tendency to copy other artists. One, terribly difficult method is to not look at other artists work. Another, more reasonable, and less demanding way would be to concentrate on your own process of creating art and how it relates to you.
What we do or say is a direct reflection of our personalities. Some people are bold and direct when speaking to others while others are shy and intimidated. This is part of your physical and emotional character. Why is there a reason that your art can't reflect this personality as well? Art is nothing more than an extension of the artist's thoughts and emotions. It is a culmination of ideas, feelings, and values created from within then transported to an outside medium.
Returning to the importance of process over product, a third method of abandoning the influence of other artists is a combination of the first two. This third method is to do nothing more than simply work! By continually working from project to project, you will concentrate and sharpen your process and automatically ignore the distractions from other artist's influence.
The process of creating artwork has a kind of snowball effect in that the more you do it, the easier it is to get into that "mode" to create from deep within. The ideas and emotions carry from one piece and run into the next without an end to the cycle. It is an ongoing thing that never stops. Creative energy is transferred from within the artist to the canvas, paper, or clay to the viewer, where it is then passed on to another and then another. The artist is also able to benefit from this energy in that he or she is able to receive their own energy back from an artwork. The artwork becomes a "catalyst" of the artist's creative energy. The artist's creative energy is inherently imbedded into a work of art without the artist's planning to do so.
A metaphor for creative energy would be that creative energy is like the sun's energy. The sun brings light to plants, the plant lives, then dies. The plant decomposes and becomes dirt. This dirt nourishes other plants, which in turn live and produce the oxygen which we breath. We, in turn, breath life back into plants through carbon-monoxide. It is an ongoing cycle which will go on forever. The source of this energy is inside of each of us. We all have a sun of our own deep inside of us that burns brightly, waiting to light the outside world.
The product is a completely different story. The product deals with the artist's focus on and intentional manipulation of materials to affect the final outcome of an artwork. In the book by Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art, Picasso reinforces this idea and elaborates on it by adding that a picture goes through a metamorphosis during its creation. He says,
A picture is not thought out beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it. (27)
The key phrase in this quote is, "A picture is not thought out beforehand." If the artist thinks of the product before beginning, he or she is defeated from the very beginning. There is no possible way they can outdo or overcome their expectations. The process is tainted or destroyed from the beginning and can never be restored. The artist will be competing with a preconcieved ideal that cannot possibly be met.
In emphasizing your energy on the process rather than the product you are also freeing yourself from the burden of competing against a long history of artists that painted for many reasons that are quite different from ours today. Artists of the past did not have to contend with the photograph, television, computer, and other forms of mass media. Art, for them, was mass media! The Sistine Chapel, for example, is a sixteenth century form of biblical mass media. It was painted to show the wrath and glory of god to all who laid eyes on it. What better place to paint it than in a church! Today, the story God and creation can be told in a movie or audio book. The intentions are the same, but the media has changed. By trying to compete with art of the past, you will be fighting a losing battle. In most cases they will win!
Rather than fighting this battle, the alternative would be to focus in on your own way of creativity. What is your creative process? What inspires you? What subjects do you like? The key word in all of these questions is you. Not Monet's favorite subject, or Van Gogh's creative process. Not Degas inspirations, but yours. What is it that makes you tick as an artist, as a person, as a human being. What is deep within yourself that you want to let out? These are the questions that spur creativity.
The first step is finding your own process. You may ask, "How I go about doing that?" The answer to that is simple. Just work. By consistantly working your process will come out. It is then that you need to harness it and make it work for you. The hardest part of a long journey is the first step. Once you have the first step accomplished, the second step falls into place without you realizing it. The second step is recognizing the feeling of deep meditation that take place while creating art. Your art does not have to be laborious to accomplish this. It does have to be the utmost focus of your attention in order for this feeling of "separateness" to take place. Some indicators that deep meditation is taking place are you: lose track of time, suddenly feel hungry or thirsty at the beginning of a break from work, realize how heavy your breating is and are startled by it, become deaf to sounds and noises around you, forget about your bladder and realize at a break that it's developed into an emergency!
All of these are indicators that a deep focus is taking place. All of your energy is harnessed and projected at the task at hand. By creating and developing your creative process frequently, you will find it easier to come in touch with this meditative state of absorption. By concentrating on the task, or process, you will become more "in tune" with it and be able to identify when it sets in. After a time you will be able to control it at will until it work for you!
Although I know bringing another artist's process into the picture goes totally against the grain of my earlier point, I'd like to bring to light the working process of Degas to illustrate a point. Degas' process involved copying drawings repeatedly using tracing paper, rubbings, lithographs, and etchings. He did not go through these monotonous labors because he was searching for the "perfect" image. He did this because, for him, this was a form of meditation. This was his process. Through deeply focused work he was able to gain a new understanding of his subject. He was not trying to compete with a preconceived ideal that he thought about beforehand. He let his process lead him to a solution. Approaching his work in this unplanned way brought about results that he could never have achieved by systematically planning his work. This is not to say that this is your method and process. That is for you to figure out. Again, through continuous work, without working toward an ideal, your process will come naturally.
I came to this conclusion when I began drawing everyday during the beginning of the semester. By drawing everyday for an hour, I began to notice a "groove" that I was falling into. I found that even on days that I didn't feel like producing anything related to art, if I drew, the feeling to produce would slowly come to me until I was chained to my easel. The process is addictive in that the more consistently you do it, the more you want to do it. It seizes you but yet at the same time you seize it so that after a time, I was able to call upon my process at will, regardless of my mindset at the beginning of a work.
In regards to the questions that I asked before. I can now say that I am convinced that there really isn't a price that you put on an artwork. An artwork should only be judged by the process of the artist that created it. This, I believe, is what collectors and museums should be pricing. Not the work itself, but the artists unique process. Then again if this were the case, all art would have a place in museums due to the fact that all artists' processes are unique as well as priceless. This is the beauty of art. What the museum is essentially buying is a visual example of humanity.
Through a long period of self-evaluation, I was able to come to the conclusion that my process of creating art will always be stronger than the artwork that I create. I have also come to the conclusion that the more frequently and consistently I practice my process, the easier it is to shake the shadows of past artists. Through constant work I have become aware of and been able to harness an energy that I was totally unconscious of: my own creative process.