Tag: autodidactic

Owning Your Influences

Fighting the playlist mentality

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay titled Proudly Autodidactic. I pretty much wrote it so I could write this one. I felt that I needed to explain where I was coming from before diving into this topic, which has been on my mind for a while.

This may be your perception of me by the time we get to the end of this essay.

In fairness, this may have an Old Man Yells at Cloud vibe to it for some of you. I hope not, but the risk is there.

So anyway, topic has been on my mind for a while, blah, blah, blah…

For the last four years, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching young artists in my capacity as a professor at Illinois State University’s Creative Technologies program. Because emulation has been a big part of my own artistic growth, I lean heavily into it in my classes, too. Of course, this is nothing new. Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, and countless others learned the fundamentals of their craft by taking apart the work of the geniuses who came before them in order to understand how the work, well…works.

Artwork by the ever-amazing Steve Rude. I first encountered his sketchbooks in the 80s and have avidly consumed them when he releases a new one. Watching his process is an insight into how his work has developed and grown over the years.

For me, it was learning about Steve Rude’s process, and how he studiously copied work into his sketchbook. Anything that impressed him as an artist, he wanted to figure out what made it tick. This kind of copying, of course, is different than what we all did as kids, where the objective was just to reproduce what we saw. The idea behind master studies is to understand what we see, and to apply that understanding to our own work.

The classes I teach are 75-minutes, not the longer 2-hour 50-minute studio sessions. With that in mind, and the other stuff we have to cover over the course of a 15-week semester, it’s not realistic to devote the necessary time to master studies. But we do talk about examining work that inspires us and reverse-engineering it in our own work through emulation.

Last spring, I noticed a phenomenon I’d never experienced in all my years of talking with artists. I sat with a student who showed me a jpg of work they admired, and I asked them about the artist. They didn’t know the artist’s name. The most information they had was that the artist was “someone I follow on Instagram. Let me see if I can find them.”

A quick search of the term “comic art” yields thousands of pieces of art. How can an artist keep track of it? Even when you’re following artists you like, the churn can be intimidating—and that’s not even considering the algorithmically-suggested crap that pollutes even the most fastidiously-curated timeline.

After 10 minutes of fruitless searching, scrolling through some of the 1,000+ artists they follow on Instagram, they shrugged and told me they couldn’t find the artist.

Seriously, it’s no exaggeration to say I was gobsmacked by this. There’s an artist who’s work you like enough to download one of their images and study, so as to incorporate some of that magic in your own work, but you don’t know their name? For someone like me—who has way too damn many art books as it is, and gets more and more every year, and jots down the name of every interesting artist they come across online or in conversation with other artists—this is unfathomable.

The convenience of a platform like Instagram, where artists’ work flashes across your timeline and the algorithm inserts new ones you may like (or artists and influencers who have paid to have their work inserted onto your timeline) is readily apparent. But the shift of young artists going from being active collectors of visual knowledge to passive consumers of a curated “playlist” is troubling to me.

I realize that just because it’s different from how I learned and assimilated influences, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But after reading Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism, and seeing how much of our culture is dictated by a few massive tech companies, it gives me pause.

Similarly, I had a different student who told me how much they loved comics, and how much they wanted to make comics. When I asked them about their favorite comics, instead of hearing comic titles and creators, I got a list of characters. And movies. And TV shows.

They did have some familiarity with the characters as they appeared in comics. Not by actually reading comics, but by watching YouTube recaps of the comics.

There’s nothing wrong with these recap sites, but if you want to make comics—whether you’re a writer, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, or editor—there’s not substitute for actually reading comics. And studying them. Lots of them. Over and over.

I can’t imagine an aspiring film director limiting themself to watching movie/recaps and then feeling that they can direct a film. Or a writer that only reads Wikipedia recaps of novels. Or a musician that picks up an instrument and avoids listening to complete songs.

In both of these instances, these students are ceding their creative autonomy to revenue-generating algorithms. And that’s not great for the creative process.

So if you’re a young creative who’s reading this, I apologize if my thinking comes off as antiquated to you. But please consider rejecting the playlist mentality and embrace your nature as an artistic hunter-gatherer, seeking out cool work that inspires you.

Proudly Autodidactic

For the longest time, I was self-conscious about being a self-taught artist. Now, after going back to school, and completing my undergrad and graduate degrees, I realize that my autodidacticism is what I’m most proud of.

Let me explain.

Vito Acconci, doing a different performance art piece, thankfully.

My first go-round with Higher Ed ended with an Associate’s Degree and a general distaste for contemporary gallery art. I vividly remember my 20th Century art history class, where the professor, Marlene, devoted half a class period to gushing about Vito Acconci, the 1970s performance artist who positioned himself under the gallery floor and masturbated into a microphone for eight hours a day. I didn’t get it. Still don’t. I realize this makes me an ignorant philistine to some fine art folks, and I’m okay with that.

I just wanted to learn how to draw and paint better, man. Still do.

Rosetti, Booth, and Elvgren.

At the same time, comic artists—through published interviews—were directing me to the artists I ended up studying. While I was in High School, Barry Windsor-Smith introduced me to Dante Gabriel Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Mike Kaluta opened me up to Art Deco, and Bernie Wrightson showed me Franklin Booth. During my community college days, while Marlene was fixating on Vito, George Perez shared Alphonse Mucha, Steve Rude trumpeted Andrew Loomis, Harry Anderson, and Haddon Sundblom, and Dave Stevens hipped me to the likes of George Petty and Gil Elvgren.

And the exploration of those artists revealed an even larger artistic lineage. Talking to artist friends, peers, and colleagues opened up even more new worlds, from JC Leyendecker to Joseph Clement Coll, from Robert Fawcett to Dean Cornwell, from Frank Schoonover to Robert Maguire, from Albert Dorne to James Montgomery Flagg. And on and on…Drew Struzan, Thomas Blackshear, Roy Krenkle, J. Allen St. John, NC Wyeth, Howard Pyle, James Bama, Tom Lovell, Robert McGinnis…and hundreds more.

Leyendecker, Cornwell, and Blackshear.

Those disparate voices inform how I look at art. I’m not unique in this, but that particular blend is distinct from the oeuvres covered in the standard art history classes. Those same classes beat the same drum, too, that narrative art dominated visual arts for centuries, but the Impressionists and Post-impressionists—and everyone who came after—found that approach boring and abandoned narrative art in the pursuit of pure form and the pursuit of “art for art’s sake.” The implication being that narrative art somehow disappeared.

Which it didn’t.

There’s a wonderful anecdote from Leonard Starr, which goes like this:
The artist Andy Warhol explained to Albert Dorne, “Art must transcend mere drawing.”  “Pardon me, Andy,” Dorne interrupted, “but there’s nothing all that fucking mere about drawing.”

Warhol, Dorne.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to incorporate messaging and subtext into the work. But there’s such a focus on it in art schools, that young artists dive into the messaging before they’re even able to draw very well. That’s a shame, because badly-drawn work turns me off before I have the chance to contemplate the meaning behind your work.

So thank you to all the great artists and illustrators who came before, lighting the path and educating me. And thanks to my friends, colleagues, peers, and mentors—illustrators, cartoonists, and fine artists—who have shared their passion and enthusiasm, broadening my artistic worldview along the way. However slow my growth has been, I’m in your debt and continue to move forward, proudly autodidactic.

And thanks to Marlene, who made “fine art” so unpalatable to me that I was forced to seek education on my own. Without you, I’d have probably pursued a path I didn’t have the chops to pursue and would have given up in frustration.