This originally appeared on my blog as part of a series. You can find all of them here. This seemed appropriate here, as well, and I’m dealing with some stuff that makes my writing a little… fuzzier than usual. More on that later. I have no answers, and as I wrote a while back, humans need answers.
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile
Art is long, life short, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgement difficult
This is the first part of a series of essays I’ve long wanted to write, but it wasn’t until I saw the full of the quote I knew best as ‘ars longa, vita brevis’ that I knew how to structure what I wanted to say. Art is long. Long enough to fill up a lifetime, and still you cannot reach the end of it. I’m not sure there is an end, or if it is like infinite pie (Pie, yes. After all, when you eat it up, you can make more!).
By art, this isn’t what we instantly think of as art – the fine art that hangs in museum, or the work gifted digital artists of the modern era create with glowing electrons and pixels. Art is the craft, the skill. A skilled plumber installing pipes is an artist – a craftsman. We appreciate his art because it functions for years, out of sight and mind, but dependably there. The length of his installation is a testament to his mastery of his art.
It used to be common for young ones to apprentice to a master to learn skills. It took years for them to work their way through apprenticeship, journeyman, and finally master. Today, it’s rarely explicitly called apprenticing. Mentorship, teaching, tutoring… they have some of the flavor of the past practice but rarely the depth. Some few can master their craft without the assistance – directly, since I would argue that coming up in a vacuum isn’t possible in the modern era. You can’t be raised by wolves and come out of that a master artist – but in general there will be an elder influence that challenges, encourages, coaxes and threatens the padawan into becoming the jedi.
Which brings up a conversation I recently had with my First Reader. He’d been asked by a coworker: “How do I hire an 18 year old that will become a you?” When you unpack that question, what the engineer was asking my tech husband was: “where do I find a young man with the potential to work cheap now, but acquire the skills you have as time goes by and I can afford to pay him more? And he should be loyal, driven, and multi-talented.” The First Reader’s answer is that it can’t be done. You can’t just take a selection of 18 year old kids and know that they will turn into master craftsmen when they are 50. The variables that went into producing his specific and varied skills are so many, and so peculiar in their aggregation, it’s highly unlikely that you could even repeat the path that has taken him from 18 year old enlisting in the army to mature adult running an R&D lab and making it look easy.
What motivates the apprentice? Some respond well to praise, working harder with a crumb of encouragement. Others rest on their laurels, content to have succeeded once, and unwilling to risk trying something else and possibly fail this time. Others respond best to a failure, taking it as a personal challenge to do it again, do it better, and then go on to bigger and bigger challenges. And you can’t predict that. Nor does it stay the same – some will respond well to both praise and a dollop of derision that sets their back up and makes them stubbornly persist on the difficult path.
Even when mastery is achieved in some area, there is still more to learn. Narrow specialization in a subject does not yield an artist, but applying bricolage to one’s field and life does. Creation from many differing inputs brings forth that which is new, original, and heretofore unknown. Listening to a photographer talk about his style of photo editing, he applied painting techniques to digital editing – not, perhaps, something that seems unlikely, but he was evidently one of the first to do what he did. And his artwork from camera to what comes out of his computer shows the efforts of having thrown out the rulebook and done what looked good to him.
Artists and craftsmen alike must usually learn a foundation of skills before they can begin to improvise on the theme and create original work that shows their voice. Although it is certainly possible to learn it all on one’s own – even easier in these days of online courses, youtube, and books – often mistakes are made that would have been easy to avoid with a watchful senior eye catching the error or making a suggestion before much frustration was had. A friend, and a nurse, described to me spending nearly three hours on a task, only to have a senior nurse show her an easy, if unorthodox, method to get it done. It was still safe, but… as she said, it’s not something you’d ever find in a book. Only a master of the craft would know it, and that was an oral tradition passed down the long line of her skill-ancestresses.
A detailed method, such as I use in the lab, gives enough guidance to accomplish the desired result. The small techniques that are taught only by those who do that method day in and day out are invaluable. I struggle with this as I try to teach myself some things – like Photoshop. I know there are easier, perhaps better ways… but I bodge along learning what I need to do right now, without a foundation of skills to build on. I really ought to take the time to learn it properly from the ground up.
I came to art late in life. I was in my twenties before I started trying to learn how to create art, other than some drawing classes in elementary grades. I look at some of the young artists I know, who are gifted, talented, and obsessed with their work, pouring hours a day into it. I don’t have that kind of time. I have been seizing a few minutes during my lunch to work on a piece of artwork, but it wasn’t that long ago I was doing art every day, part of a year-long challenge that I believe improved me greatly. It’s not just art. I’m going to learn a computer programming language, starting perhaps tonight (there’s an MIT online course, see…) because I think it will be useful in my coming career. I’m 40, but it’s not too late.
I’ll be learning right up until the day before I die. Seeking out new areas of knowledge to plunder them for information that can add to what I know, and make it more useful. Art is long. Longer than my life is, I am certain. If I don’t seize it now, I shan’t be better in a year. And so, I grasp.
(header image: “Exploding Spaceship” by Cedar Sanderson)
Mad Genius Club 
Aviation is very much (or was when I came through in the early 1990s) an apprenticeship program with a vital oral tradition. I learned a lot of things that, as you say, are not “in the books” but were taught bey people who honed their skills in WWII, Korea, flying out of cow-pastures, and other things.
Something I’ve been mulling over for a decade or two in regard to the visual arts is the loss of apprenticeship. We do not see art like that painted by Rogier van der Weyden or Velasquez or Caravaggio or Caspar David Friedrich. Granted, part of it is the collectors have “moved past representational art” and want “transgressive” pieces. But how much is that people are discouraged from taking the years needed to become master draftsmen and to learn all the rules, follow the rules, and only then bend or break the rules? Likewise modern literature.
There are still some superb artists producing absolutely gorgeous ‘representational’ art, but I think that the ‘literati’ ignore them because they (at least the ones I’ve seen) are ‘Western’ artists, producing pictures of cowboys and western life. This is something that the ‘literati’ would like to ignore, because they like to pretend that that way of life is gone (and the Left is trying to make it so). There may be others producing art in other genres who are just as good, but these are the ones I’ve seen.
Tim Cox is one who comes close. But as you say, he’s “just” a Western artist, not a “real” painter. Robert Taylor was another whose finest work happened to be airplanes in the air, not “real” painting.
Stubbs was “only” a horse painter.
Some get recognized. One of the local hotels has an artist in residence program. Last year or year before it was a guy named Mike Wimmer who does realistic, representational art. The guy interviewing him in the one I saw was rather surprised he wasn’t following the fancy trends. His response was, essentially, “I make art to communicate with people. Realism is best for that.”
and film.
I think there are a lot of unwritten stuff that gets passed on. Even in my lab, which is highly regulated and regimented.
23 skidoo
This just found: https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/12/IMG_1098.jpg?w=676&ssl=1
Enjoy!
But it was at Sarah’s blog at midnight.
What?
The cartoon of a writer and his demons.
[And why do I keep trying to spell that “daemons?” I have no idea.]
Because it is a-musing.
Seriously. Greek mysticism strongly flavors a lot of how we think about the creative arts. Especially for those of a historical and writing bent.
Ah!
Plato would approve.
You’ve been around Unix too long?
Image he posted above was also posted to, I think, yesterday’s ATH thread by RES at 12:00 server time.
Programming skills are a good additional for many fields, including photography, because you should be comfortable doing things like writing macros, or maybe even plugins, for photography software, CAD software, etc, or putting things together for maker projects (e.g. you can do a lot with Arduino by stringing together libraries and bits of code other people have written).
One plus of working in a small company is getting to do a variety of tasks, in my case including software development, designing simple PCBs, OCR (optical character recognition, including figuring out what kind of lighting to use), learning about SPC and then writing SPC software, testing, debugging, training, writing manuals, making cables, using a 3D printer, and more.