Practice and Improvement

I've been thinking about drawing again.

I am not a good artist.  My proportions are off, and my line drawings are too light.  I don't have confidence in my abilities, so I tend to use too light a pencil, so that I can erase and redraw as often as possible.  When I scan my work to show my artist friend J, a lot of what I have drawn is lost because the scanner can't pick up or misrepresents the faint lines. 

Every time I think about drawing, though, I shy away from it, because I tend to have a static concept of my abilities.  People in general have that idea about any artist, though, I think.  We believe that everyone has a set amount of talent and that ability cannot be exceeded.  If it is exceeded, we suspect it as forgery or some kind of cheating, particularly with today's tools.

My friend J ran into this problem a few years ago.  When she was in college, some thirty years ago, she was an artist, but life and a Ph.D in history intervened, and she put her pencils down.  In the late 90s, she picked them up again because she was inspired by different works to try again.  She sent me copies of some of the first things she drew, some scenes and character studies from stories I had written, and they were fun, but they weren't at the level we consider art.  Some of the proportions were strange, and there were some adaptations of other works of art, changed to represent my characters.

But she never stopped drawing, and she started working in various media, playing, working, getting into practice again.  She then got inspired by the Hornblower series, by the character Bush in particular, and her work really took off.  Not only were her proportions correct, but she captured levels of emotion in her drawings that just blew me away. 

In the mid- to late 2000s, she started sharing some of her work on the internet beyond her friends, to people in the Hornblower fandom and others.  She left academia and got work in design.  Her drawings got even better, which didn't seem possible, and that's when the trouble started.

Some people began accusing her of simply Photoshopping photographs of the characters with graphic design tools used to approximate hand-drawn works.  In fandom, we call this kind of controversy, in which both sides become hugely offended and battle lines are drawn, a kerfuffle.  It was an ugly thing and my friend was greatly offended by it. 

One of the complaints about her work was that it was too good to be real, as though she, as a member of fandom, was only allowed a certain level of ability and was not to exceed it.  Many people in fandom have visited her while she was working on these projects, saw them in various stages of completion, and could vouch for their legitimate creation by hand.  The sad thing is, those corroborrations were dismissed because those people were her friends, and it's the nature of the internet community to be both excessively skeptical and naive at the same time. 

She did the work, no doubt, and knowing my friend's absolute standard of honesty, I know that it would be impossible for her to even consider faking something like this for approval. 

That is not my point.  My point is that somewhere in our brains, as humans, we do not allow people the ability to improve their abilities through practice.  We think of talent as static, and whatever a person can do at one time is what they can do for all times.  A person is not allowed to go from strange proportions to transcendent art.  That is suspect. 

What I realized this morning, though, as I was working on one of my portfolio pieces for class is that we hold this same standard to ourselves.  Think about what Stephen King says in On Writing.  A competent writer can become a good writer, but a bad writer cannot become competent, nor can a good writer become great.  There is a disconnect here.  You can have this much improvement, and no more.  You will never really be any better than you are right now.  You will not have epiphanies and breakthroughs and great art.  Whatever you are at 20 is what you will be forever.

That, my friends, is bullshit.  (Sorry, Steve!  I call bullshit on you!)

How did my friend get from where she was to where she is?  She never put down the pencils (or charcoals or pastels).  Her lines improved, her shading improved, her eye improved.  She worked and worked and worked, and now her art is amazing. 

This can be done with writing as well, but how often do we really do it?  My friend's art didn't improve because she kept drawing the same lines over and over.  Every time she picked up that pencil and looked at her subject, she made a conscious effort to improve what she did.  Yes, the physical skill of linedrawing improves with constant practice, but she was rarely satisfied with a piece. 

Once I complained to her that I was having trouble finishing a story, and she said, "You know, I don't get you writers.  Why do you have to finish it?  I don't finish every piece I start.  Sometimes a piece just has a purpose, and when that purpose is complete, you put it aside.  Or if it's an experiment that failed, you throw it away.  Why do you have to finish everything?" 

Maybe she's right.  Maybe some pieces are just a tuneup, a problem to be solved.  Solve the problem, set it down and walk away.  Write the piece and discard it.  We don't have to finish everything.  We don't have to finish everything.  There's only one writer I can think of who's ever had almost everything published in his lifetime, and that's Robert A. Heinlein.  And his estate is still trying to pimp that last piece out there, from what I remember.  A great many great writers got very little published during their lives but had volumes of genius or near genius published after their deaths.  Dickinson and Peirce, to name two.

(To be honest, I'd rather not emulate Heinlein.  Thanks.) 

In those tuneups, those pieces, those problems to be solved, are the key to development.  They are the practice that leads to improvement.  There's more to it than that, though.  We have to also break through that barrier of ourselves that is comfortable with what we are, and we have to reach for higher than we think we can stretch.  I believe that is what those great writers do.  They are not the incomprehensible freaks that King tells us they are.  They are people who all their lives refuse to be limited by their own minds.  They constantly stretch higher than they can reach, and have been doing it since they were in diapers.  Naturally they can reach far beyond us--they have been stretching their whole lives.

My friend picked up her pencils again in her late 30s, early 40s.  She has grown immensely as an artist.  It's not too late for me.  I just have to do the work.  I have to practice, solve the problems, tune it up....work. 

Time to stretch!