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I will tell you what I tell my students; To learn to make art you spend time working with the materials. That is it. When the urge arises to judge the quality

I will tell you what I tell my students; To learn to make art you spend time working with the materials. That is it. When the urge arises to judge the quality of your work, it will be tempting to say this is good or this is bad. Take that energy that you might put into assessing the aesthetic and put it back into the materials instead. Persist and grow. Avoid aesthetic judgements, and instead produce work. Inevitably as you deepen your experience you will begin to autonomously develop techniques and content that you find yourself returning to. As you progress through this process your style will begin to take unique, identifiable shape. Through this process you will become a true painter. Many people mistake technical capacity at predefined aesthetics as painting, but I would argue that this produces uninteresting work. Every identifiable style was born from people who chose to work outside of preexisting style. Goodluck.

morley 8y ago
Surely there has to be some aesthetic guidance along the way? Up until my senior year of college, every writing course I took, I would never get any _aesthetic_ feedback on my work. In grade school, my grammar and spelling would get corrected, but otherwise, what I wrote was what I wrote. It wasn't until I took a sitcom-writing course in college that a teacher gave me feedback that would make my writing better: "this sentence is too long, you don't need to use these words, this character is too inactive, this scene has no point." If someone had been that direct with me when I was in middle school, I'd have spent a lot less time writing crap.
- grawprog 8y ago
  Learn about value, perspective, colour theory, form and how they apply to art and human perception. Things like that I found were useful for learning art as someone who struggled to draw a stick figure for years.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  >Surely there has to be some aesthetic guidance along the way? It's generally better to run the feedback through the same unconscious mental pathways you use to do the activity, rather than the verbal storytelling loop that can think thoughts like "I don't like how I did this". Use the parts of the brain that are good at painting, not the parts that are good about telling stories about your painting. I highly recommend reading "The Inner Game of Tennis" to get a much better sense of this distinction. It's broadly applicable to all sorts of skill acquisition and improvement. The best way to learn how to do something is to quietly and non-judgmentally watch yourself doing it. Your brain is really good at figuring that all out once you've started.
  - repsilat 8y ago
    Interesting, this idea has a well known countervailing theory -- "deliberate practice". The idea goes that practicing with the intent of (and focus on) improvement is more effective. Perhaps "quantity over quality" is better for beginners because they're learning different kinds of things, or because their judgement itself isn't great, or perhaps it's just psychologically easier and less likely to lead to burnout.
    - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
      The Inner Game of Tennis etc isn't mutually exclusive with "deliberate practice". You're still telling yourself what you want to do, but doing this in the language your unconscious mind understands - that is, images and felt emotions, not words.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I don't think writing and painting can be compared. Writing has some elements of art, but it also has a lot of rules that come from the language. Painting is much more free-form.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Depends on whether you are a realist or not.
- massivecali 8y ago
  The problem with aesthetic guidance is it invariably leads to creation of 'product' over 'art'. Just because you can make a pretty painting doesn't make it art.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >Just because you can make a pretty painting doesn't make it art. // How to start a fight at an art school!
  - watwut 8y ago
    It still beating the "unable to create anything" state most people are in. Definitely I am. I would take ability to create pretty painting with mo art ability as it is miles better then now.
  - forkandwait 8y ago
    Well, some of us would be quite happy with pretty, and wonder if Art is all it's cracked up to be...
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Compulsory education is not for that. They're not there to change your aesthetic, if they did then we'd lose a lot of good art IMO: people developing their own aesthetic are often considered to be "no good" because they disobey the conventions. When you've learnt all the tools, and different normative styles, read a reasonable body of work in different genre, that's when to develop your own style. Which corresponds with University/school leaving largely. The sitcom course is almost certainly designed to help you write in a narrowly designed style that is commercially useful. But a sitcom that breaks many of the norms could do really well .. you're not going to learn to write opposing the established styles on a course like that, are you. Writing crap is part of the journey.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    > When you've learnt all the tools, and different normative styles, read a reasonable body of work in different genre, that's when to develop your own style. Which corresponds with University/school leaving largely. This is far too kind to universities. You get taught Theory in university. You are assumed to already be able to paint. If you want to learn to paint in a third level institution you’re better off studying illustration or graphic design, not fine art.
superpermutat0r 8y ago
This sounds like a very bottom up approach to painting. It requires tons of trial and error and time. The result is that only the most persistent learn how to paint well. If I were to try learning competitive programming, I'd much rather work through known algorithms and practice my problem solving, instead of trying to reinvent everything from sorting to iterative deepening search to number theoretic algorithms. I'd much rather learn tools and solve problems (in painting) than just trial and error through it, hoping that I have the aptitude to really methodically sift through my mistakes and find the right approach to painting.
- kingkawn 8y ago
  Tools too early in the process can seize control of the imagination. I agree completely; there is room for technique. But I prefer to let the student find where that room is by discovering something about themselves first, rather than vague promises of freedom that comes after satisfying arbitrary minimums. My preference as a teacher. A good student knows to overthrow my worldview when the time is right.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    The downside is, there are techniques and tools that make sense together. If you just start, maybe you find something interesting. Maybe you just spend days feeling frustrated because nobody told you it's a good idea to prime a canvas, or that metal solders better when its clean. My preference is to study techniques like I'd study anything else - learn the principles, etc, and stay pretty agnostic about what it actually means to make art. I mean, is art really about self-discovery? It's somewhat rare for a good artist to be particularly self-aware. Is art really about freedom? Art has consistently bloomed under absolutely absurd strictures - only being allowed to paint specific things, write on knife-edge-narrow themes, and so on. Seems to me that it's ideas like these that really seize control of the imagination. I've definitely known artists that have been permanently inhibited by internalizing one or another idea about what it is to make art. Tools, on the other hand, extend and alter the human senses. A screwdriver is a feeler you stick into the radio, oils are an invitation to a whole light-oriented conception of painting, a chisel tells you stuff about wood you'd never know just by running your hands over it. I don't really believe there's a raw sense-experience. I think everything we do is mediated socially, conceptually, technically. In this sense, to actively engage with the world, it makes sense to be greedy about grabbing every technical or concept that increases the engagement surface, or makes it more varied.
ortusdux 8y ago
Reminds me of this advice from Ira Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI I often tell myself to 'mind the gap'
ericsoderstrom 8y ago
This advice reminds me of an anecdote from Art and Fear [1]. A ceramics teacher divided his classes into two groups. One group he told would be judged only based on the quality of the best pot they made, the other group would be graded based only on the number of pots they made. After the two classes had finished, the teacher noticed that all of the highest qualities works came from the class that was aiming only for quantity. It seems, at least for artistic/creative activities, simply diving in and making lots of attempts is the key to rapid improvement. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_and_Fear?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_and_Fear?from...
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  If you follow the citation trail for that you end up with nothing, no individual who says they did that and had those results. The same anecdote shows up in the War of Art.
  - Kye 8y ago
    I made 1000+ melodies without regard for quality, and now quality melodies are effortless. There you go. How it works: I create good bits in every one by accident, then use those bits on purpose going forward. Quantity leads to discovery.
    - sincarne 8y ago
      The same is true with photography. Take tonnes of photos, and some will be great. You begin to take on board what makes some photos better than others. It seems to raise the quality of all the photos. We're basically talking about focused practice, but applied to aesthetics.
forkandwait 8y ago
What if your student really just wants skill and doesn't care about a personal style or whatnot? Personally, I get a lot of satisfaction working as a software developer implementing practical solutions to complex problems, with no need for personal expression etc. I think it would be equally fun to produce lots of pretty illustrations in the style of Heath Robinson of, well, whatever someone paid for. I think a lot of people agree with me, and then get a teacher like you and are only frustrated.
Theodores 8y ago
Your comment differs from a lot of the 'copy a photo' comments in this thread. There is an assumption that painting has to be a 'hand crafted photo' whereas we have plenty of people doing that already. For someone coming from a programming background I think that a topic worthy of doing in paint is 'abstraction'. In code we 'abstract things out' into classes and what not but we don't have 'abstract coders', it is part of what code is. With painting there is abstract done properly and understanding what it is about. Abstract painting is hard for people used to still life and landscape scenes to understand. Some people just don't get it. Hence my suggestion is to learn through doing what abstract art is, good abstract art is not the same breed as bad abstract art. There is also a difference in knowing when a piece is finished, there is also an aspect of minimalism akin to neat code. Intellectually I think that it hits the high notes and if a coder with one idea of what 'abstract' means in code goes on a journey of learning what 'abstract' really means in art then they should be able to engage in a creative journey with a difference. Transferable skills and all.
a3n 8y ago
This is also the essence (but not the all) of how to learn to program. And maybe how to learn everything else. To learn to do a thing, you have to do the thing, a lot.

morley 8y ago

Surely there has to be some aesthetic guidance along the way? Up until my senior year of college, every writing course I took, I would never get any _aesthetic_ feedback on my work. In grade school, my grammar and spelling would get corrected, but otherwise, what I wrote was what I wrote. It wasn't until I took a sitcom-writing course in college that a teacher gave me feedback that would make my writing better: "this sentence is too long, you don't need to use these words, this character is too inactive, this scene has no point." If someone had been that direct with me when I was in middle school, I'd have spent a lot less time writing crap.

grawprog 8y ago
Learn about value, perspective, colour theory, form and how they apply to art and human perception. Things like that I found were useful for learning art as someone who struggled to draw a stick figure for years.
ThrustVectoring 8y ago
>Surely there has to be some aesthetic guidance along the way? It's generally better to run the feedback through the same unconscious mental pathways you use to do the activity, rather than the verbal storytelling loop that can think thoughts like "I don't like how I did this". Use the parts of the brain that are good at painting, not the parts that are good about telling stories about your painting. I highly recommend reading "The Inner Game of Tennis" to get a much better sense of this distinction. It's broadly applicable to all sorts of skill acquisition and improvement. The best way to learn how to do something is to quietly and non-judgmentally watch yourself doing it. Your brain is really good at figuring that all out once you've started.
- repsilat 8y ago
  Interesting, this idea has a well known countervailing theory -- "deliberate practice". The idea goes that practicing with the intent of (and focus on) improvement is more effective. Perhaps "quantity over quality" is better for beginners because they're learning different kinds of things, or because their judgement itself isn't great, or perhaps it's just psychologically easier and less likely to lead to burnout.
  - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    The Inner Game of Tennis etc isn't mutually exclusive with "deliberate practice". You're still telling yourself what you want to do, but doing this in the language your unconscious mind understands - that is, images and felt emotions, not words.
ams6110 8y ago
I don't think writing and painting can be compared. Writing has some elements of art, but it also has a lot of rules that come from the language. Painting is much more free-form.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Depends on whether you are a realist or not.
massivecali 8y ago
The problem with aesthetic guidance is it invariably leads to creation of 'product' over 'art'. Just because you can make a pretty painting doesn't make it art.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >Just because you can make a pretty painting doesn't make it art. // How to start a fight at an art school!
- watwut 8y ago
  It still beating the "unable to create anything" state most people are in. Definitely I am. I would take ability to create pretty painting with mo art ability as it is miles better then now.
- forkandwait 8y ago
  Well, some of us would be quite happy with pretty, and wonder if Art is all it's cracked up to be...
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Compulsory education is not for that. They're not there to change your aesthetic, if they did then we'd lose a lot of good art IMO: people developing their own aesthetic are often considered to be "no good" because they disobey the conventions. When you've learnt all the tools, and different normative styles, read a reasonable body of work in different genre, that's when to develop your own style. Which corresponds with University/school leaving largely. The sitcom course is almost certainly designed to help you write in a narrowly designed style that is commercially useful. But a sitcom that breaks many of the norms could do really well .. you're not going to learn to write opposing the established styles on a course like that, are you. Writing crap is part of the journey.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > When you've learnt all the tools, and different normative styles, read a reasonable body of work in different genre, that's when to develop your own style. Which corresponds with University/school leaving largely. This is far too kind to universities. You get taught Theory in university. You are assumed to already be able to paint. If you want to learn to paint in a third level institution you’re better off studying illustration or graphic design, not fine art.

superpermutat0r 8y ago

This sounds like a very bottom up approach to painting. It requires tons of trial and error and time. The result is that only the most persistent learn how to paint well. If I were to try learning competitive programming, I'd much rather work through known algorithms and practice my problem solving, instead of trying to reinvent everything from sorting to iterative deepening search to number theoretic algorithms. I'd much rather learn tools and solve problems (in painting) than just trial and error through it, hoping that I have the aptitude to really methodically sift through my mistakes and find the right approach to painting.

kingkawn 8y ago
Tools too early in the process can seize control of the imagination. I agree completely; there is room for technique. But I prefer to let the student find where that room is by discovering something about themselves first, rather than vague promises of freedom that comes after satisfying arbitrary minimums. My preference as a teacher. A good student knows to overthrow my worldview when the time is right.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  The downside is, there are techniques and tools that make sense together. If you just start, maybe you find something interesting. Maybe you just spend days feeling frustrated because nobody told you it's a good idea to prime a canvas, or that metal solders better when its clean. My preference is to study techniques like I'd study anything else - learn the principles, etc, and stay pretty agnostic about what it actually means to make art. I mean, is art really about self-discovery? It's somewhat rare for a good artist to be particularly self-aware. Is art really about freedom? Art has consistently bloomed under absolutely absurd strictures - only being allowed to paint specific things, write on knife-edge-narrow themes, and so on. Seems to me that it's ideas like these that really seize control of the imagination. I've definitely known artists that have been permanently inhibited by internalizing one or another idea about what it is to make art. Tools, on the other hand, extend and alter the human senses. A screwdriver is a feeler you stick into the radio, oils are an invitation to a whole light-oriented conception of painting, a chisel tells you stuff about wood you'd never know just by running your hands over it. I don't really believe there's a raw sense-experience. I think everything we do is mediated socially, conceptually, technically. In this sense, to actively engage with the world, it makes sense to be greedy about grabbing every technical or concept that increases the engagement surface, or makes it more varied.

ortusdux 8y ago

Reminds me of this advice from Ira Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI I often tell myself to 'mind the gap'

ericsoderstrom 8y ago

This advice reminds me of an anecdote from Art and Fear [1]. A ceramics teacher divided his classes into two groups. One group he told would be judged only based on the quality of the best pot they made, the other group would be graded based only on the number of pots they made. After the two classes had finished, the teacher noticed that all of the highest qualities works came from the class that was aiming only for quantity. It seems, at least for artistic/creative activities, simply diving in and making lots of attempts is the key to rapid improvement. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_and_Fear?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187633.Art_and_Fear?from...

barry-cotter 8y ago
If you follow the citation trail for that you end up with nothing, no individual who says they did that and had those results. The same anecdote shows up in the War of Art.
- Kye 8y ago
  I made 1000+ melodies without regard for quality, and now quality melodies are effortless. There you go. How it works: I create good bits in every one by accident, then use those bits on purpose going forward. Quantity leads to discovery.
  - sincarne 8y ago
    The same is true with photography. Take tonnes of photos, and some will be great. You begin to take on board what makes some photos better than others. It seems to raise the quality of all the photos. We're basically talking about focused practice, but applied to aesthetics.

forkandwait 8y ago

What if your student really just wants skill and doesn't care about a personal style or whatnot? Personally, I get a lot of satisfaction working as a software developer implementing practical solutions to complex problems, with no need for personal expression etc. I think it would be equally fun to produce lots of pretty illustrations in the style of Heath Robinson of, well, whatever someone paid for. I think a lot of people agree with me, and then get a teacher like you and are only frustrated.

Theodores 8y ago

Your comment differs from a lot of the 'copy a photo' comments in this thread. There is an assumption that painting has to be a 'hand crafted photo' whereas we have plenty of people doing that already. For someone coming from a programming background I think that a topic worthy of doing in paint is 'abstraction'. In code we 'abstract things out' into classes and what not but we don't have 'abstract coders', it is part of what code is. With painting there is abstract done properly and understanding what it is about. Abstract painting is hard for people used to still life and landscape scenes to understand. Some people just don't get it. Hence my suggestion is to learn through doing what abstract art is, good abstract art is not the same breed as bad abstract art. There is also a difference in knowing when a piece is finished, there is also an aspect of minimalism akin to neat code. Intellectually I think that it hits the high notes and if a coder with one idea of what 'abstract' means in code goes on a journey of learning what 'abstract' really means in art then they should be able to engage in a creative journey with a difference. Transferable skills and all.

a3n 8y ago

This is also the essence (but not the all) of how to learn to program. And maybe how to learn everything else. To learn to do a thing, you have to do the thing, a lot.