Eccentric Flower:201002/Words
From Eccentric Flower
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Words (and Pictures)
Readers who have been around me and my prose for more than one annual cycle will be aware that it's probably for the best I don't post much in February. My attitude on February is that it's short because no one could stand any more of it. In addition to it reliably containing the most dim and dismal weather of the year, and being the point when we all collectively reach the low ebb on our seasonal disorder/cabin fever, it also contains several grim occasions which ostensibly should be celebratory but are actually not, such as Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day, and my birthday. To my mind, February should be a bye month. It should not count. It should go on no one's permanent record.
My mother, whose birthday is also in February, had the right idea - she went on a cruise for a lot of this month. That's the way to opt out of February. If you can do it.
What follows is a February rant (which, by the by, is why I'm filing this under February even though today is March 1). It's okay to skip it. If you don't skip it, imagine if I wasn't restraining my February posting. You could have had ten more of these!
Today I was reading some comments from wondrous author and illustrator Adam Rex, and it occurred to me: I get tired of people (especially people who make a living at it) saying that the cure for not being a successful writer is to write more, until you succeed, or that the cure for not being a successful artist is to draw more. I find this a bit glib. Dismissive. And it makes me angry, often at people whom I would otherwise love and/or admire. So, please, people who do that, stop doing that.
It's a blatant oversimplification. If the cure for bad drawing were simply to draw until you got good, a lot more people would draw, and a lot more people would have success drawing. There has to be some adjustment, some factor, for innate talent. There has to be something you are born with, some magic. I simply refuse to believe otherwise. There are simply too many people who can pick up a pencil and make a recognizable image of something they saw, without any practice or rehearsal whatsoever. I'm not saying they start off perfect; I'm not saying practice doesn't improve their work. (Practice improves everything.) I'm saying that we do not all start at the same starting block. When it comes to art, or writing, or playing the guitar, or a number of other skills which seem to have some innate component, we do not all begin from scratch. And that advantage, it seems to me, is crucial.
I think Rex is doing the math wrong when he says
Those kids didn't stop because they felt they weren't good enough, Rex. They stopped because they weren't good enough. Because they saw people like you and realized what they were competing against. Because they knew that no matter how much they practiced, no matter how much they toiled, they would never catch up, so why bother? So maybe you should just shut the hell up and enjoy your goddamned privilege quietly and not spin theories which are insulting to the have-nots, okay? And now I'm getting angry when I said I really wanted to try not to get angry. I don't really mean to get angry with you, Mr. Rex. I love your work. But the comment does reek of condescension: "Oh, you could be just as good as I am (pat, pat) if only you hadn't quit. Honest."
Bullshit.
You can draw when I can't not because I stopped and you didn't. I stopped and you didn't because you can draw and I can't. You have it exactly backwards.
I'm tired of not having any skills I'm interested in. I'm tired of the idea that I can work and work and work on something just to be a talented hobbyist at best or a reasonably skilled amateur. I can do any number of things reasonably well, but none of those things matter at the level I can do them.
The Analogy of the Lamp: I'm a pretty good amateur electrician. I've learned how to do it well and safely, mostly because there was a time when I needed to be able to do it well and safely and I was far too poor to get a pro to do it. (Same reason I learned plumbing. And rough carpentry. And drywall repair.) I can change out your light switches, outlets, rewire your light fixtures or ceiling fans, repair that standing lamp that hasn't worked in years - and who cares? The only people who respect that are people who can't do it, and to my mind it's the kind of thing anyone can learn to do (because if I learned it, anyone can) and probably should have. In other words, if you respect it because you can't do it, to my mind, that makes you even more useless in that particular direction than I am. See how this works? Rewiring a lamp is not impressive because to me everyone should be able to rewire a lamp, and those who can't, just haven't been taught properly, or haven't read the right books.
Any skill I can pick up entirely from the right book is beneath my notice. I learned to program computers from books. While many of my programming skills have improved with years of practice (again, I am not underselling the virtue of practice!), I learned the basics from books, and I maintain that anyone who says they can't do basic programming has never had the right teacher.
(I originally intended to be that teacher, but then I realized what a scam educational practice was in this country - but that's another story. Suffice to say, I'm still bitter, and I gave up on my educational degree twenty years ago. These days I can't even bring myself to finish the guide I'd like to do on basic home wiring - because really, what would be the point?)
The skills I respect are the skills which have that innate component, that starting advantage - and those are exactly the skills I will never, never be able to do as well as someone who does have that innate component, who did get that advantage. So I feel like I shouldn't bother. Why compete?
It's like with cooking. I'm an adequate, competent cook. I will never be a genius cook. But I live with an innate, genius cook. Why on earth should I cook, except on the nights when she needs the relief? What other reason than wanting to take some of the load off her could I possibly have for cooking? It's not personally rewarding to me, and I will never do it as well as she does.
If I enjoyed writing, if I enjoyed drawing, if I enjoyed cooking, it would be different. If the practice were its own reward in some way, that would be another story. But I don't enjoy writing. I enjoy the outcome of writing. I enjoy being pleased at something I think I wrote well. I enjoy presenting a piece of finished prose and having people read it and appreciate it. I would love to be able to illustrate many of my ideas, because they are ideas that yield better to pictures than words, and I want you to see them. But unless I can get those ideas out exactly the way my mind wants them to look, there is less than no point in doing so. Negative point. An imperfect rendition of those ideas would be worse than none at all.
If it ain't fun, I'd better be brilliant at it.
If I can't be brilliant at it, it had better be fun.
If it is neither, screw it.
Simple enough!
But - at my back I always hear the chariot - I feel I am moving more and more toward a bad psychological place here, where the things I do enjoy tinkering with are inevitably killed by the idea that I am fingerpainting. You know. You end up with something that your mom says is lovely and she tapes it to the refrigerator, but it's actually a dreadful mess. I'm tired of making messes. I want to make only things where people say "ooh" and their appreciation of them is sincere, and I feel like in order to do that, I'd need to get to a place with any of those things which takes a level of innate ability that I simply don't have, or a level of acquired knowledge that I simply don't have time to reach (because it is actually esoteric), or both. Often both.
I'm tired of having nothing but dilettante skills. I'm tired of being able to do a little of everything but none of it especially well, and I don't really know how to get from where I am to where I want to be, in the remaining time I have left. I'm forty-two this month, so my life is nearly two-thirds over - at my back I always hear the chariot - and I am happy and prosperous and yet unfulfilled - and while that may be a "we should all have such problems" gripe, it's nonetheless a very real gripe, especially when the unfulfilled slops over into the happy.
And saying, "Well, just do it more" is the sort of answer that you don't want to give me. Honest, you don't. It makes me want to reach for a blunt instrument. Drawing for months on end just so you can get to the point where what you draw is vaguely recognizable as what you intended it to be? That's crazy. Look, let me lay this out for you: You know how much Jeph Jacques' stuff has improved in the time he's been doing QC? Well, it would take me the same length of time just to get to the point he started from. I went to school with Carla fucking Speed. I saw her sketchbooks. I know what I'm competing against. My father was a brilliant piano player. My best friend is a brilliant artist. My wife is a brilliant cook. I know several brilliant writers. I know a brilliant chemist and a brilliant mathematician and a brilliant researcher and lots of other brilliant people. I surround myself with brilliant people; I prefer their company, even as I hate and resent them. I went to high school with people who had more natural talent at mathematics and writing and art than I will ever have in my life. I know where I stand.
I worry that it's too late to be what I would like to be - at my back, the chariot - but I also suspect that for many of the things I would like to be, it was already too late at birth.
But I also haven't slept well for two weeks, there has been no sun for four days out of five for the same fortnight, and I'm tired, and, you know, it's been February.
So I could be wrong about everything.
Howard Taylor didn't let his inability to draw ( http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20000618.html ) to stop him from drawing a webcomic (and he improved quite a bit in just two years ( http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20020609.html )). I also hear you about me saying this. So let me take a slightly different tack here---growing up, where you praised (or even acknowleged) for being smart? (and I don't mean by everyone, by people that you trusted).
I ask, because I grew up being praised for being smart, and in time, I grew to associate being smart with the ability to do anything, and if I couldn't do something, it meant that I wasn't smart. Not being smart meant I wouldn't get praised for being so smart. So I avoided doing those things I found difficult (and I didn't do this consciously while growing, up, but I recognize the behavior now as an adult).
It also doesn't help that Dan Brown makes millions for his scribblings and here we are, our brilliance going unrecognized. What went wrong? (another data point: my best friend has two published books to his name and you probably have never heard his name)
About electrical (and plumbing) work: yes, it's relatively straightforward and quite logical. But not everyone thinks that way. I learned that lesson about a decade ago when a friend of mine mentioned she wanted to take a class on Microsoft Word (or some other application, I don't recall the exact one but it doesn't really matter for this point). "Why not just get a book and play around with the stupid program" I asked, and got a blank stare back. She doesn't learn that way. She needs someone to tell her what needs to be done. The concept of self-study was alien to her. The concept of non-self-study was alien to me ( http://boston.conman.org/2009/11/02.1 ).
-- 22:49, 1 March 2010 (GMT)
I think both of those points - about being told I was smart growing up and what that translated into, and self-study vs being handed a process - are profound. The latter I had unfortunately already learned about - which is related to one of many reasons I don't do tech support anymore - but the former is a new insight, and I will want to chew on that for a while.
-- 22:58, 1 March 2010 (GMT)
I sort of agree with you, in spots. A bit. Which is to say, if this was lj, you would not automatically be getting my "think so, do ya?" icon for this comment.
I think that some people clearly pick up certain things more quickly than others. And I think it's more satisfying to keep working on things when you see progress. I expect that those two reasons play into most (though not all) of the greats in whatever field being naturally talented to at least a certain extent.
I also think that there are plenty of people who have a raw talent for something but who do not, for whatever reason, have the gift of the kind of sustained, intense interest it requires to get really good at it. I think the two things are handed out separately. And I think you have a much better chance of becoming a good artist (for example) when you got only the determination than when you got only the raw talent. I think the people who got raw talent and no particular will to work at something very often overestimate how close they are to being really good at it, because breezing through the intro levels is not actually as rare as they think, and not at all the hard part.
It's hard to say chicken and egg on, for example, my piano skills. I am a competent pianist, but I felt from the time I was 9 or 10 that it was clear that practice was going to make me a competent pianist rather than a great one. And when I practiced more than, say, an hour a day, I wasn't thinking about the piano past the hour mark, I was thinking about whatever story I was working on or other things in my life. Whereas my ability to work on fiction is a lot more limited by "are my other life tasks getting accomplished and am I burning out" than by "am I bored with this now." If I had been more naturally talented, would I have been able to sustain the amounts of practice it took? Maybe. Maybe not. If I had been less naturally talented but more dedicated to the piano, would I have gotten there a harder way? Again, maybe. Hard to say.
You can make somebody do a lot of something, but you can't make them pay the kind of attention to it that makes them improve. When I was a teenager, the neighbors across the street played driveway basketball *all the time*. And they *never improved*. Part of it was that they were stubby little people with no natural gift for the game. But part of it was that they were not actually thinking much about driveway basketball. They were not working at it. Work would not have made them famous basketball stars. But not everything is as body-type-dependent as basketball.
-- 23:36, 1 March 2010 (GMT)
"Already too late at birth" is a little harsh, but it won't do to argue. Can I say things you won't think are glib or condescending? Several of these brilliant people around you would tell you that they think *you're* excellent and equal company, but, of course, they probably all have, quite coincidentally, the same blindspot regarding your skills. I don't think you're a dilettante at all. I will say that the "I'll be the best or nothing" polarity will leave you with nothing to do.
Do not worry about age, unless you think people stop learning.
Do you think you've lost the ability to form new thoughts and synthesize different things? What do you think practice *does*? It gives you the opportunity to see how your muscles might change in a new direction, move with some new force, move with some new subtlety, notice some new sensation. If the student isn't prompted, critical areas might go undiscovered. Helpful teachers can do this, but of course not everyone needs teachers. Some students who have different starting blocks internalize those prompts and constantly search outward for things to indicate a need for change in technique, and search inward for the means to move differently in order to achieve it.
I hate to talk of innate limitations, but I would have to respect that people are wired in all sorts of ways. I don't know about how permanent certain roadblocks to creativity might be. In someone's case who wanted to draw, I won't say "just draw more" but I do wonder if the pathways are more firmly tangled than might be understood, rather than simply absent. It's true that early teachers struggle with a pack of students because they get into trouble that the new teacher has never had to climb out of because their path had different trouble spots! So, maybe a drawing student simply has not found anyone who understands the existing degree of tangled.
I have seen people struggle, and if I'm ever useful to them (at least in ceramics) it's because I questioned their assumptions about how to move their arms/hands/fingers/whatever, and alterted them to good news signals coming from the clay. My guess is that the plastic arts which involve moving keys on a piano, smooshing clay, waving a brush, cutting hair, etc. have to do with interrupting your assumption process about how you move, how you're interpreting the goals, and start again to gauge reasonable expectations.
I am unhappy about people having limits, but I do not think many of us reach them.
-- 06:39, 2 March 2010 (GMT)
i would agree with Mrissa: some people can, some people won't, and some people can't. i know that i could probably learn to draw passably, but unless i can do it like any of these people i'm probably not going to even try. i have two original pages from DREAM SEQUENCE with the company office and McNeil makes it look easy! though she does light-box all her final so you can't see the work...
i swim and i'm fairly good, but at this point i no longer have any chance at making a national team. the goals change a little though: "how many Olympic Trials can i qualify for and be the oldest swimmer in my event?"
-- 16:24, 2 March 2010 (GMT)
OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE TELL ME KALUTA WAS TRYING TO BRING STARSTRUCK the comic that failed because it was too good for most of the universe BACK
(I have the original graphic novel AND the first five issues of the original run AND a bound script of the Elaine Lee play with original cast photos.)
ahem. sorry. little squee there.
(If you like Michael Kaluta you will also want a look at Charles Vess. Which you probably already have. Also, Chris Bachalo is my dream illustrator except in the places where Kaluta or Miguelanxo Prado is more appropriate. Actually M.Prado will remind you of Bachalo in places.)
There was a guy, in the days of Epic magazine (like Heavy Metal but actually good - like "Starstruck," too good to succeed - I have a box of them) named Kent Williams. At the time he was an art student at Pratt. He set some kind of record for having stories in successive issues. He just kept sending them stuff and it was ALL GOOD. And each was in a different style. These days he seems to have settled on a very Schiele style. He has accolades and all that. He's only six years older than I am, which means that when I was a teenager and was reading those Epic issues, he was only just barely not a teenager himself.
Tom Lehrer: "It's a disconcerting thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age ... he had been dead for two years."
-- 16:51, 2 March 2010 (GMT)
You know, the Starstruck history link seems to imply that Vess was connected with Kaluta from the very early days. (Certainly Vess is credited on the new covers.) I guess that would go a long way toward explaining their similarities.
-- 16:58, 2 March 2010 (GMT)
as a long-suffering Starstruck fan, i always assume that nobody else cares! you always seem cool to all but a specific range of comic book things anyway. ;)
it's been a fabulous representation so far (sometimes the colour styling is a little... too assertive) with the extra material and everything. IDW will have a beautiful hardcover (as is their habit) when the 13 issues are up and someone is supposed to be doing some readings of the play soon with an official recording available afterwards. Kaluta has expressed interest in continuing it if it's financially viable. he's actually done a bunch of interior work lately over at DC, including five full honest-to-jove-monthly issues of Madame Xanadu.
Kaluta was in a studio at one time with Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith and Jeffry Jones (draw a straight line back to Rackham and Dulac). i seem to remember reading that Vess was "that kid who hung around for a while" or something like that. he inked/is inking the Girl Guide stories in this reprint (no word on if the 'lost' Linda Medley drawn ones will show up).
i have a full run of Epic (and of Cheval Noir and a lot of fun 80's stuff when things were different and weirder in American comics). Kent Williams was always really impressive! (also comes to mind painted work in Epic from Marc Hempel which is very different from his linework) i think he's probably the first name and style i started to recognize when i discovered painted comics (i was drawn to all that red...)(and then there was Ted McKeever, which is a different story). then i figured out how he fit together with Jon Muth, George Pratt, etc. (blow mind, repeat) the last big thing Williams did was an adaptation of Aronofsky's original script for The Fountain. i think he discovered that it was a better living selling paintings. he's married to another impressive artist, Sherilyn van Valkenburgh , with a completely contrary style (not much work out there on the internets).
um. :) sorry about the weird paragraph. really, everything comes back to Archie Goodwin who ran the Epic imprint at Marvel, doesn't it?
Prado i've seen a little, but haven't actually experienced a big chunk. probably only the little Sandman thing he did.
(edited better Cheval Noir link)
-- 21:40, 2 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain:
OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE TELL ME KALUTA WAS TRYING TO BRING STARSTRUCK the comic that failed because it was too good for most of the universe BACK
If you like Kaluta -- as opposed to simply liking Starstruck -- then you ought to see if you can find the "Madame Xanadu: Exodus Noir" trade, where Kaluta went back to a character he apparently co-created. (It's also the chapter that got Madame Xanadu what even I will consider a reasonably well-deserved nomination in the GLAAD Media Awards this year. At least, this year's nominations did not bring out the urge to beat the nominating committee vigorously about the heads and shoulders with many more deserving titles, so I suppose that's something. But I digress. Again.)
-- 19:51, 5 March 2010 (GMT)
Mel:
I'd never heard of this Kaluta person but (we are all geeks in our own ways)... look at the Tolkien calendar!! Squee!
(http://www.kaluta.com/pages/tolkien/calendar.html)
-- 09:43, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
That calendar is actually one of his rare works I don't care for; I feel he's trying too hard to be Barry Windsor-Smith there.
(Do an image search on him. There's plenty.)
-- 15:30, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
how odd. it's like someone took Kaluta-people and Kaluta-props and made Parrish or Leyendecker pieces with them.
-- 16:48, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
I think Maxfield Parrish is what he was trying to invoke (or was commissioned to invoke) there, but it doesn't ... quite ... work.
-- 19:07, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
i can't remember if this will catch the proper attention, but:
the audio recording of the Starstruck play is due October 31st
and
the hardcover collection of the recent representation of the comic is due in March 2011. IDW does a bang-up job with their collections, and it will be larger than standard 'comic book' size (probably the same as magazine width). if i remember correctly, the Galactic Girl Guide stuff will be left out of this and collected separately.
-- 16:11, 6 October 2010 (BST)
Ysabel:
I'm not sure you're wrong about everything (in fact, it seems unlikely) but I do believe you're wrong about most of this.
-- 19:59, 1 March 2010 (GMT)