It’s very important for each person to have one thing in life that doesn’t have to be done well to be enjoyable. For someone like me who has trouble enjoying things at which I do not excel, it is doubly so. A few years back, I picked up oil painting because it was the most interesting looking evening class being offered by the community college. It was hard not to get hooked on it right away. Make no mistake, I have no talent for it but the relaxing effect of playing with the color and the seemingly endless possibilities offered by the medium forced me to drop any pretense of ability and enjoy it.

Since my move to the expanse that is The Republic, I haven’t done much with it. It’s hard enough to squeeze in time for my musical work and having a little boy who is into everything all the time galavanting from room to room at mach 4 isn’t conducive to quiet reflection or, quite frankly, open tubes of paint. But I had an idea while I was playing with a piece of software called Scribbles. The idea seemed pretty good and I thought it might be nice to use some colors that would work in the living room. I pitched the idea to my wife and she was totally into it (she loves purely decorative paintings). Off I went to ye olde art shoppe.

The project came to a close last night. It was so much fun. I turned on some music and just pushed the paint around the canvas. The scratching of the brush is a wonderful sound. The finished work (which I am loathe to call it) isn’t half bad. In fact, if I had any amount invested in the craft of painting, I would say that it’s some sort of minimal primitivism (or um…something like that…). But to feel good about that, I would have to be able to paint a still life that actually looked like its subject. These were the thoughts going through my head last night as I cleaned up my supplies. How much craft should one have to have mastered before being able to critique and classify one’s own work?

It’s my opinion that art and craft are two different things that are not entirely interrelated. I think one can have craft without art though it is difficult to go the other way around. During my schooling I was (and still am) always highly suspicious of composers who wrote aleatoric music or took on free jazz without being able to write a four voice chorale in the style of Bach or explain the basics of harmony and counterpoint. Something in my gut told me that it wasn’t acceptable to simply break the rules when there wasn’t a solid understanding of them. One can’t effectively go against the grain without knowing the grain intimately. After all, how can one create an effective reaction without having a precipitating action?

This all reeks of academic silliness best discussed with espresso and berets, but I think there’s something to this. Having a blog doesn’t make one a writer any more than my trip to the Artarama (not a joke! Great store!) makes me a painter. What does it take to cross that line? I believe that it’s craft. Knowing the medium. Appreciating it. Loving it. And time. So much time. A great deal in music that comes down to woodshedding. Those hours spent learning patterns and scales. The days of working on tone and intonation. There’s a reason it’s called a discipline.

Looking back on my painting classes and the time I spent with the canvas after them, it’s small wonder that I painted the same salt shaker time and time again. Something in me must have realized that the real work of learning a craft is in the etudes, not the masterpieces. The more time one spends with the etudes, the shorter the gap to the masterpiece. That is what separates the Professional, to borrow a term from The War of Art (yes, I’m still fully in love with this book) from everyone else. A Professional knows that there must be an investment in craft to achieve art. We can’t have art without it. Or at least we can’t sustain art without it. There are always outliers but they have that name for a reason. Who really wants to be a one hit wonder?

But I didn’t pick up the brush to make art. I did it to have fun and make something that would match the living room. The process of creating it was purely recreational and allowed me a space that did not have the demands that I place upon myself in my musical work. It is successful, but I don’t think it is art.

The Byronic Ideal.

There is an image of the artist as a lonely individual wrestling with a recalcitrant muse somewhere on the periphery of society.  This creature on the outside looking in and fashioning what he sees or feels into art that is then absorbed by that of which he cannot be a part.  I have always had a love-hate relationship with this idea.  There is something so alluring about this Byronic image that it pulls people in and allows them to create rich and full fantasies about what it must be like to feel that isolation and how that led to a piece of art.  Yet, most people who create are not antisocial.  The most serious artists fully understand that engagement with the community and culture is essential.  After all, what is a piece of art without an audience?  I would argue, without the requisite citations to greater minds than mine, that something that is created purely for personal pleasure and not for an audience can’t really cross the line that separates craft or recreation from art-with-a-capital-A.

The central thesis of my personal artistic creed is simple: intent.  It is art if I intend for it to be.  By virtue of presenting it to an audience I admit that I planned for someone else to experience it and therefore must have considered that during the creation of the work.  How it is actually received is another matter but the fact that it was presented is the key.  It proves that I am a part of the culture and community and there can be no claim that I am somehow outside.  To say that would imply that I am somehow immune to the influence of the culture and yet am adding to the body of work that creates it.  That feels silly.

Instead, the model that seems to make the most sense is the artist as canary.  Perhaps the creative spirit is more in tune with its environment and is better able to express the things which are so obvious as to go unnoticed.  This puts the artist in opposition to the Byronic hero model in that now there is a hypersensitivity and awareness to everything in the culture.  Thus art becomes less of an objective observation and more of a deeply felt reaction.

As my personal beliefs fall on the side of the reaction, I see that the artist needs an audience and in this age, the audience needs the artist.

Enter the Internet.

In some small but real way the Internet has become the great equalizer (a lovely cliche in 2009!).  Given that an individual has the financial wherewithal to have access to a computer and the Internet, it is possible to share creative works with an astoundingly large audience.  A writer needs only to set up a web presence, and with certain free services and social networking sites this is incredibly simple, and place work in the open.  A composer can place sound files or scores online.  An artist has the ability to create a gallery space.  None of these is ideal.  There isn’t the feedback of the physical book or a concert hall or even the traditional gallery space, but the work can reach an audience. 

There will be no discussion here about the quality of the work or the audience.  That has been beaten to death by critics and various organizations with a significant state in the status quo.  Yes, more access means more work of lesser quality.  Without some sort of cultural gatekeeper the audience may be subjected to some poor examples of art.  But is that single nugget of gold worth all of the silt in the stream?  And how many such nuggets of gold might have gone unseen?  I say we should err on the side of too much and let time sort it out as it always does.

My primary concern is with the connections between the creative minds.  The culture we inhabit today is a far cry from even 50 years ago when people knew and regularly socialized with their neighbors.  It is even further removed from the time of community functions that brought together people from great distances to enjoy large celebrations.  The closest we come today might be greeting our neighbors as they light fireworks in the street on New Year’s Eve.

There is also the restriction of the current standard of living.  To live the way we do requires the expenditure of a great deal of effort.  This means more painters working in offices and more musicians programming computers.  The Internet provides a place for people who are physically separated to come together asynchronously.  Today it is easy to follow a group of blogs in a few minutes.  One can keep up with interesting trends and there are enough people publishing their work this way as to create a steady diet for anyone who has an appetite.  In many cases, the most insatiable appetites belong to other artists.

This is a key component that makes publishing on the Internet so important.  Artists need other artists.  The input that can only be gotten in the form of other creative work is so important to personal artistic development.  The creator is in the position to reach an audience in the generic sense and also to get feedback and input from other minds.  This can’t be ignored.

Islands.

With the advent of the blog and RSS feeds, the people who are putting loving detail into their work in a spare bedroom at odd hours are able to share with the world.  In turn, through comments and perhaps counter-posts on other blogs, the world gives back.  This give and take inspires continued work and discussion.  It promotes creativity and connects these islands in a very real and tangible sense.

I know of plenty of people who are in the same boat that I am.  There is the day job that eats 11+ hours.  There are meals to plan, a household to run, a family to raise.  But that urge to create something else bubbles up and claims maybe an hour or two out of what’s left.  This is what I used to call my “other time” and what eventually became my personal website. 

A spare bedroom becomes a studio.  A laptop turns into a portfolio.  Resources are arranged in a way as to allow for that creative energy to find release.  A new instrument is learned because the available time is not contiguous or a connection can’t be made with another musician.  One person slowly becomes an ensemble.  An entire creative ecosystem is created, terrarium-style, in the available space and time.  With the Internet, cross pollination becomes possible.  Collaborations begin.  Someone takes a piece and turns it into something new.  An illustrator teams up with a distant writer.  Musicians work asynchronously to create pieces together.  Beautiful things move from possibility to reality because some of the restrictions on time and space are relaxed.

I won’t begin to touch on what putting that work out in the open creates in terms of new possibilities.  “Mash-up” and other derivative works can generate new genres and more importantly add new life to the art that is being created around us.  It is a great time to be a creative mind.  Limitations are few and opportunities are many.