Why Art Endures

 "It's an astonishing fact of human culture: what lasts is what mystifies. Time is an acid that destroys answers. It ruins our certainties. What remains instead are those stories and paintings and characters that find ways to contain what they cannot fathom, hooking us with their unspilled secrets. They are alive with the mystery of the universe. Which is why they live on."

~Jonah Lehrer, Mystery: A Seduction A Strategy, A Solution

Copywork - A Writing Technique

Woman writing and reading

Since the dawn of time, people have learned their craft through apprenticeships, learning to immitate the craftsman or artist they were tied to, and helping them in their works in exchange for that knowledge. Then, as their own skills improved, they would diverge and start experimenting new things, finding their own style, and sometimes even outshone their master.

This is true of any of the great artists whose works have transcended time--Michaelangelo was apprenticed to painter Ghirlandaio who was himself known for his murals, while Da Vinci himself apprenticed in the workshop of Andrea del Verrochio. 

Even if they hadn't apprenticed directly with someone, they still learned through immitation of others' works. Mozart, praised as a genius in his time already, one as "such people come into the world once in a hundred years"(1), started off by mimicking what was in vogue at the time, and worked extremely hard all his life to continue to improve and innovate. "Quite a bit of the music is reassuringly routine; Hermann Abert writes, in his massive biography, that Mozart 'evolved along sound lines, without any supernatural leaps and bounds.'"(2)

Nowadays, artists still learn from the greats--imitating their works, from their composition and color choices, to their gestures and proportions, before applying bits and pieces of what they've learned from various artists to figure out their own style. Picasso's early work shows how he worked on his fundamentals, favoring a much more realist style, before he diverged to the more "modernistic easthetic"(3) for which he is known.

Plaster Male Torso
Picasso, 1893

"Good artists copy; great artists steal." ~

Steve Jobs (mis)quoting Picasso, referring to Stravinsky, derived from T.S. Eliot, influenced by W.H. Davenport Adams (4)

It is therefore surprising to me that copywriting is often ignored when teaching writing.  Sure, the Great Literary Works are taught in school, where students have to dissect meaning, themes, and historical impacts of the original texts. And, yes, we were always told to read as much as possible (advice repeated ad infinitum by any current author). But that, I find, is not enough to truly improve one's writing. It's still too...passive. 

Ron Friedman explained what copywriting entailed in his book Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success: 

"Both King and Hill were utilizing forms of copywork, a technique popularized by Benjamin Franklin and practiced by literary greats F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, and Hunter Thompson. It involves studying an exceptional piece of writing, setting it aside, and then re-creating it word for word from memory. (...) What makes copywork so effective is that it forces an artist or writer to do more than simply recall content. Reproducing a piece demands that he or she pay careful attention to the organizational decisions and stylistic tendencies reflected in an original work. It is an exercise that enables novices to relive the creative journey and invites them to compare their instinctive inclinations against the choices of a master."

Quill pen

Yes, it can seem tedious. Yes, it is hard work. Yes, the struggle is real for me too. 

But I believe that it's through continuous hard work and proper application of our newly learned skills that we will improve our writing.

Sources and Resources:

(1) Prince Kaunitz, Emperor Joseph II's chief minister, as reported in The New Yorker's article The Storm of Style - Listening to the complete Mozart, by Alex Ross

(2) The Storm of Style - Listening to the complete Mozart, by Alex Ross, The New Yorker

(3) Picassos' Incredible Childhood Paintains Reveal a Different Side of the Modern Artist, by Kelly Richman-Abdou, My Modern Met

(4) Quote investigator for "Good artists copy; great artists steal"

(5) 25 quotes to help you steal like an artist, by Austin Kleon

(6) Great Artists Steal, UVU School of the Arts

October 1913 - The Year Before The Storm

Apocalyptic Landscape by Meidner, painted a year prior

The levity of the summer months is past, tensions grow, along with the number of people with the sniffles.

Ludwig Meidner invites other great artists to his studio to showcase the art he's been working on for a while--a series of tableaux he calls 'Apocalyptic Landscapes.' These, in turn, worry his friends, who wonder if he isn't losing his mind.

But the visions Meidner depicts in his paintings will very soon turn out to be prophetic--cities on fire, people exploding, the world destroyed.

He writes: "A painful impulse inspired me to break away from all straight-lined verticals. To spread ruin, destruction and ashes across all landscapes. My brain bled amid these awful visions. All I could see was a thousand-strong roundelay of skeletons prancing around in front of me. Numerous graves and burned-out cities with plains winding through them."

Source:
1913, The year before the storm, by Florian Illies

February 1913 - Chronicles Of The Year Before The Great War

Woolworth building

Grand Central terminal

According to Florian Illies's 1913 - The Year Before The Storm, just a day
before Valentine's day 1913, Professor Rudolf Steiner gives a lecture, in which he talks of the impending doom he senses, but attenuated by a feeling of hope for new things to spring after:

For in those dying forces we finally sense, even see, the forces preparing themselves for the future, and in the sunset, the promise and hope of a new dawn moves closer to us. Our souls must always respond to human evolution in such a way that we tell ourselves: All progress is so. When what we have created turns to ruin, we know that out of those ruins, new life will blossom forth.

But was Steiner aware of the heavy sacrifices humanity would have to bear for this new era to come forth? 

In other news, in February 1913 Stalin returns (illegally) to Russia, undercover as a woman, only to be captured in St. Petersburg and subsequently exiled to Siberia; the Woolworth building in NYC is completed, the first building to beat the Eiffel tower in height; the Central Station in NYC is also finished; artists are turning more and more towards the abstract; Arnold Schönberg has his Gurrelieder performed, which includes 5 vocalists, 3 4-part male choirs, and a 150-piece orchestra; Charles Fabry is about to discover the ozone layer; and in Vienna, a real Beauty and the Beast scenario unfolds with the intense (though short-lived) romance between reputedly beautiful Alma Mahler and the supposed ugliest of painters Oskar Kokoschka.

Alma Mahler and Kokoschka
as painted by the artist

Questions On True Love By Surrealists

Les amants - René Magritte

I am currently getting acquainted with the roaring twenties for a future story, and fell on this little extract from a surrealist magazine, La Révolution surréaliste, which asked its readers the following questions on love in 1929:

1. What kind of hope do you place in love?
2. How do you envision the passage of the THOUGHT OF LOVE to the FACT OF LOVING? Would you, voluntarily or not, sacrifice your freedom for love? Have you done it? Would you be willing, if necessary, to sacrifice a cause you until then thought you should always defend so as not to prove yourself unworthy of love? Would you accept to not become the person you could have become if instead you could fully taste the certainty of loving? How would you judge someone who would betray his/her convictions to please the one s/he loves? Can such a token be asked of someone, could it be received?

These questions, among many, are quite thought-provoking. How would you honestly respond to such questions?

Tips On Storyboarding

Here's a great image with some basic (but very important) concepts of storyboarding--of use to anyone in the visual arts and to writers, so thought I'd share :)

For more background info, check out the article on screencraft.org, or read the original article on jugaadanimation.com for even more details!

Creative Geniuses

Art by AnnSoDesign

"Ideas can't be created out of nothing. Ideas are created by you when you take something and combine it with something else." [Dean Keith Simonton] Logical thinkers will exclude the things that can't be combined and creative thinkers don't exclude anything.

Thus starts an interesting interview of Creative Thinkering's author Michael Michalko (which you can read fully here).

Michalko goes on to say that "genius is tantamount to th[e] theory of evolution, because genius requires the production of many ideas"--many through the forced and challenging combination of two dissimilar things--of which only a select few will survive (just like a select few genetic mutations that create new species will survive, while the majority perish). Or, as Da Vinci called it, "connecting the unconnected."

Attention Artists Of The US, Your Copyrights Are At Risk!

This really interesting (and terrifying) video about what's going on in the Copyrights Law market in the US has been brought to my attention, and I figured it was too important not to share it with you.

Right now, Copyrights Law in the US (and most of Europe) states that artists (of any kind or genre) have copyright over their own work for the entirety of their lifetime + 70 years after their death, and that without having to register your work anywhere. You created, it's yours. Period.

Note: These are taken from the video interview of Brad Holland, a lifelong professional artist and expert in the matter (see bottom of the post).

But there's a law that some have been trying to push past Congress (previously known as the Orphan Works Act) based on their claim that because there's no registration of said art, then people can't find the copyright owners so libraries and museums that want to digitize their collections (for preservation and research purposes) can't do so. Basically, the law would allow these institutions "good faith infringement" of copyrights. Sounds somewhat OK, right? Except that these same people are now trying to do the same, but for commercial infringement of any work of any artist, living or dead, regardless of circumstances. And the entire thing would devolve from the Copyrights Office into the private sector so that those individuals only (and not the artists) could profit from it.

So what exactly does this proposed law entail?

When Technology Meets Art - How To Train Your Dragon 2

I don't know if I've mentioned it before on here, but growing up I wanted to be an artist working for either Disney or Dreamworks. So when I went to college, I decided to study computer science (not knowing much about computers except how to type in Word and play minesweeper, I thought computer science and computer art were pretty much the same thing). Of course, I ended up deviating from my initial goals, quite a bit in fact, but my fascination for that art has always remained.

So here are a few interesting facts regarding the making of How To Train Your Dragon 2 which I thought I'd share with you:

1. Total number of artists to work on the movie: 495
2. Total number of storyboards created: 100,000+
3. Time taken to craft the film: 18-24 months (90 million+ render hours for the computers to render the frames)
4. Total number of digital files: 500 million+
5. Total amount of storage needed: 398 terabytes

It's quite impressive to see how far technology has come as far as animation goes. It used to be artists had to "scan an image into a computer, then "draw" the animation by typing numbers.... With a giant spreadsheet, they could change the way a smile looked or how a shadow fell across a face." Now, however, artists can work directly on the computers and change the final image in real time, as Fredrik Nilsson (workflow director for animation/crowds) explained regarding Dreamworks' Premo tool:

Animator using the Premo tool
Image Credit: Dreamworks Animation

"I used Premo with a touchscreen-sensitive pen. The display could show me any given frame from the movie. I could make a change to the main character Hiccup's face, clicking on him. Then I could use the pen to pull his face downward, turning his smile into a frown. I could then tell the computer how long he would hold that pose before he would start smiling again. Then I played the frames and watched it all happen in real-time. It was easy and intuitive."

Pretty amazing, eh? And to think I took an animation class (which was awesome, by the way), where I had to draw each frame myself (it took me close to 500 drawings to draw a couple of seconds, and that was a very basic cartoon).

As for the animated feature film, I know it came out quite a while ago, but I thought it was a great movie (I'm always skeptical about follow-up movies)!

Source:

Venture Beat - an absolute read for those into animation and technology in general! Filled with tons of details and great interviews!

And Another St. Valentine's Day Goes By...

...dripping poison into the hearts of those without a life teammate. And who's to blame for this affliction?
Poison Heart Bear! "The cousin the other Care Bears never told us about."

Source: instagram

Haha! Just kidding :) But I love the adorable monsters Bobby Chiu creates (see more here).

A Few Notes On Progress

One of the (many) things that has (unfortunately) slowed down my progress with Rise of the Fey is my desire to write better than I did in my first book, and my fear of failing to do so.

But then I try to remember that one thing I've always enjoyed when watching shows or reading comics/manga is seeing the progress in the art over time. Hopefully, people will be able to see that same progress with my work as well...

Here are a few examples:

Mickey Mouse at his very beginning (and I believe I spot a Minnie as well!)

The Simpson family may not have aged over the years, but their style has.

Here is Snoopy over the years--he never lost his smile!

The original Smurf drawing (their hats have gotten a little rounder over time).

I hope this inspires you to keep working towards your goals and not give up, for you see, no one starts "perfect." :)

Art And Critics

I'm reading a short piece, Art Is a Journey, written by Bob Eggleton, an artist.

In it, Eggleton talks about fame and artists' desire to achieve it. In particular, Eggleton warns artists against letting any positive or negative criticism get to their heads. Because, really, what does such critique mean?

He then goes on to give an example:

Salvador Dali did his epic painting Persistence of Memory (the one with the melting clock) and critics praised this as some life-changing, almost existential, self-defining work of inner truth. In reality, his entire inspiration was from...Camembert cheese. That was it. It did not detract at all from this fine work, but some people who wanted to read something more into it felt betrayed.

This reminds me of a French lesson back in high school when my teacher, Mr. Hayet, talked about Rimbaud having written a poem which critics of the time lauded as being quite deep and meaningful, and Rimbaud enjoyed listening in on classes where they would dissect and analyze the poem because, he later admitted, he wrote it without attaching any meaning behind it. (Unfortunately, I don't remember which poem was in question :( ).

Eggleton concludes his piece with this advice:

[B]e the best artist you can be; don't worry about being the best there is. You'll be a lot happier in the long run. Later on, history will judge your work to be the work of some genius--or not. Then again, it could all be the Camembert cheese.

I think this is great advice for life in general as well!

Credits

I like to sometimes compare the movie credits for, say, an earlier Disney movie like Robin Hood, to the ones found at the end of, say the latest Marvel movie and am always amazed at how long they've gotten over the years.

And I must say, it's amazing how much the industry's grown since then, especially in terms of visual effects (VFX). That is because it's this is a very labor-intensive, time-consuming industry. 

And one can't deny how much work goes into creating such astounding visuals, as can be seen here in the popular show du jour Game of Thrones:

The crazy part is that, despite how in demand VFX companies are, they also operate on a rather low profit margin (what with all the competition out there). In fact, Rhythm 'N Hues Studios who did the visual effects for Life of Pi and won an Oscar for their work, went bankrupt...11 days before receiving it!

Anyway, props to all of them for all the amazing work they do--as someone who's dabbled a little in computer programming and animation, I've learned to appreciate all of their hard work (even if it's for something really small)!

Additional Sources:
Effects Corner
Rhythm 'N Hues Studios on what went wrong

World Atlas Of Disney Feature Animations

So now that I'm (finally) getting back into art, I've decided to get "more" active on my deviantart page. And browse the website, of course. While doing that, I found this really, really cool map!

It looks like the US is the big winner, followed by England! I know the next one Disney's working on right now is another one set on the wonderful islands of Hawaii... I wonder which it will be after that?

Life Without Lights

What would happen should the world revert to its untainted origins?  Those demons the Fey would like nothing better than to bring us back to them.  In the meantime, artist Thierry Cohen shows us what it would be like...  and could it really be that bad?

New York

Rio de Janeiro

Tokyo

Paris

Amazing Time Piece

Found out about this treasure (literally and figuratively) the other day--and I want one!  Not only have I always told myself that I wanted to gift myself with a pocket watch when my first book got published (which I'm making happen in April), but on top of that my first story uses Arthurian legend elements!

Two minor details are off though...

The first is that it's not a pocket watch.  The second is that it costs about $200,000!

I present... Excalibur!  :)

Source: Perpétuelle