Why Not Greatness?

I’m reading the autobiography that Norman Rockwell dictated to his son. Here is one of the passages that I highlighted regarding the effort required for greatness:

I wanted to be a great illustrator. I was so dedicated and solemn that the other students called me “The Deacon.” The lunchroom crowd, students who wore beards and soft wide-brimmed hats and chatted about art all day long over cups of coffee in the lunchroom, regarded me with a mixture of scorn and awe. One of them said to me once, “You know, if I worked as hard as you do I could be as good as Velasquez.” I just asked, “Why don’t you?”

Can-Do Attitude in a Can’t-Do World

Matt Archambault recently introduced me to illustrator Alphonse Mucha (1860-1930). Mucha was an amazing artist that I’m very surprised to have never heard of before. I recognized his influence, though, in comics today — most notably in the work of Adam Hughes.

Apparently Mucha’s talent didn’t completely surface early in his life. Here is a tidbit I found on the Mucha Foundation website:

1878
Mucha applies to the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. His application is turned down with the recommendation: “Find yourself another profession where you’ll be more useful.”

One of my favorite artists, Andrew Loomis, had a similar experience. In Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, Loomis writes:

May I confess that two weeks after entering art school, I was advised to go back home? That experience has made me much more tolerant of an inauspicious beginning than I might otherwise have been, and it has given me additional incentive in teaching.

If academies and universities are such poor judges of potential, why don’t we just assume potential exists in everyone? Instead of looking for evidence of talent, we would do well to look for a willingness to make an extreme effort.

Loomis goes on to write:

I not only assume that my reader is interested in drawing but that he wishes from his toes up to become an efficient and self-supporting craftsman. I assume that the desire to express yourself with pen and pencil is not only urgent but almost undeniable, and that you feel you must do something about it. I feel that talent means little unless coupled with an insatiable desire to give an excellent personal demonstration of ability. I feel also that talent must be in company with a capacity for unlimited effort, which provides the power that eventually hurdles the difficulties that would frustrate lukewarm enthusiasm.

Don’t Skip the Easy Stuff

The first days of my algebra 2 class in high school were easy. I remember Mrs. Davis up at the board going over the lessons, and thinking, “when do we get to the interesting stuff?” Then I went to sleep.

A semester or two later I woke up, looked up at the board and thought, “What the hell is she talking about?” She made no sense to me. Somewhere between those easy first classes and the ones later in the year, the class got hard — at least for me. Those who paid attention found the classes later in the year just as easy as in the beginning of the year.

The key to unlocking the complexity of a subject is to understand that there are layers and layers of simplicity that need to be digested in the correct order. Jump ahead or skip early lessons at your own risk.

I’ve skipped some of the easy stuff in art. I’ve tried to work around it as best I can, but it’s much easier to just go back and learn the basic material.

Below is an exercise recommended by Ernest Watson in his book Creative Perspective. He recommends drawing cubes freehand (without plotting vanishing points) to get a feel for how they look. After all, a box is easy to draw in perspective, but a perfect cube takes some practice. Since a cube is a basic unit of measure for proportion in perspective and since the ability to draw squares in perspective is essential to being able to draw circles in perspective, I’m taking Watson’s advice. He recommends 50 parts practice to one part theory.

This weekend I constructed six cubes out of bristol board for reference and plunged into the first picture. Forty-nine more to go.

Following the Leader

Almost by definition, if you set an example worth following, you are leading. You don’t need to be in charge to set a good example. Nor do you need to hold a high position in an organization to set a good example. You simply have to understand what a good example would be and become it.

Being in charge does not always mean coming up with the best ideas. Sometimes it means recognizing the best example set in a group and following it regardless of who set it.

My daughter sets a good example. She doesn’t attempt things — she attacks them. When something gets hard for her, she just gets more determined. She’s only six but we could all learn from an example like hers.

Recently she picked up on some of the perspective instruction I’ve been reviewing. I didn’t intend to teach it to her yet because I would have thought her too young to understand. She is proving me wrong on that count. She was single handedly going through enough paper doing exercises like the one below to make a forest cringe. My wife got her a chalkboard/whiteboard easel to save a tree or two.

She is dedicated to figuring perspective out. She was the same way when she was learning to read. Watching her struggle through the early stages was painful at times. Sounding out every single word was a major endeavor. Simply reading the word “the” would take 15 to 20 seconds and would be pronounced wrong. It didn’t bother her that it was hard, or that it didn’t come naturally. She stuck with it and got better in imperceptible strides. Now, not surprisingly, she reads very well for her age.

As adults, we forget what it’s like to not be good at something. Kids, being new to everything, aren’t expert at anything. They have no comfort zones to cling to. We adults often do have comfort zones and we hide in them very well. No one wants to do something poorly, but when building a new skill we can choose to do it poorly for a while or not to do it at all. Too often, adults choose the “not at all” option.

Kids don’t though. My daughter doesn’t worry about perfection. She seems to understand the futility of that. When she shows me her latest drawing, or even throws a frisbee, she never asks if it is perfect. Instead she asks, “Was that my best one yet?”

Yesterday I told her I wanted to be like her when I grow up.

“But Daddy,” she said, “you are grown up.”

Yes. But as long as I follow her example, I’m not done growing.

Changed to a Bull

I picked the wrong mascot for the picture when I drew this in pencil. Turner Hilliker colored this in and added the text.