[From "The Art of Art": The Art of the Process > Casual Art ]
Anyone who has ever created anything, knows that art seems to comes out best when it just "happens". We talk on the phone, there's a pen nearby, and suddenly there's a cute doodle on a colorful note. We do some guitar improvisation before going to work, and to our surprise we find ourselves humming a potential hit. We make up a silly good night story for our kid, and when he falls asleep, we discover we just wrote a charming children book. And we realize that the only reason it worked, is that we never really tried. When we need to succeed, when we really put in the effort, when we think and struggle and fix and improve - the result is, more often than not, mediocre. As usual, life is playing tricks on us: it seems that the only way to succeed, is to not try.
We may dismiss the matter as the artistic version of Murphy's Law, but there are actually some pretty good reasons for casual art to be working well:
Anything goes. The main goal of casual art is mostly not the end result, but the very act of producing it. There is no specific demand; we let our work flow freely to where it wants to go. If we started doodling a mouse and ended up with a rather successful drawing of an elephant, we get to enjoy the elephant. There is no point in spoiling the drawing by trying to force it into something else: no one cares that the elephant began as a mouse.
No requirement for quality. Casual art is incidental and inexpensive, and generally not designed for a specific audience. Since there is no pretension, there is also no fear of failure, and we are free to dare, to experiment, to create.
Short time. Casual art is done in a short space of time - typically somewhere between a few seconds and a a couple of hours) - and continuously. Our mood doesn't change, new ideas and external criticism don't get us confused, and it's relatively easy to stay focused and produce coherent work.
Failures are forgotten. The truth is that even with all these advantages working for us, most of our casual art isn't very good. But because we did not have high expectations or specific requirements, we can throw them away without regret or self-flagellation and forget them immediately. Every once in a while though, such casual work produces a surprisingly good result, which we keep and remember forever as an astonishing success story.
Small wonder, then, that our causal art so often surprises us for the better: the work is light and enjoyable, focused, fearless, free of fixes and patching-up, and most importantly - with casual art, our losses are forgotten but our gains are counted. For once, the game is rigged in our favor!
Deliberate Art
This is all well and good, but what happens when we do actually want to create something deliberately? What if we make a living Composing music for films? What if we have a specific idea for a painting? What if we're writing a thick novel that can't be finished within a few hours? Obviously, not all successful art works happen quickly and unexpectedly. There must be a way to achieve good results even with a planned, long-term and demanding art.
The way to achieve good results with deliberate art, is really what "The Art of Art" is all about.
Anyone who has ever created anything, knows that art seems to comes out best when it just "happens". We talk on the phone, there's a pen nearby, and suddenly there's a cute doodle on a colorful note. We do some guitar improvisation before going to work, and to our surprise we find ourselves humming a potential hit. We make up a silly good night story for our kid, and when he falls asleep, we discover we just wrote a charming children book. And we realize that the only reason it worked, is that we never really tried. When we need to succeed, when we really put in the effort, when we think and struggle and fix and improve - the result is, more often than not, mediocre. As usual, life is playing tricks on us: it seems that the only way to succeed, is to not try.
We may dismiss the matter as the artistic version of Murphy's Law, but there are actually some pretty good reasons for casual art to be working well:
Anything goes. The main goal of casual art is mostly not the end result, but the very act of producing it. There is no specific demand; we let our work flow freely to where it wants to go. If we started doodling a mouse and ended up with a rather successful drawing of an elephant, we get to enjoy the elephant. There is no point in spoiling the drawing by trying to force it into something else: no one cares that the elephant began as a mouse.
No requirement for quality. Casual art is incidental and inexpensive, and generally not designed for a specific audience. Since there is no pretension, there is also no fear of failure, and we are free to dare, to experiment, to create.
Short time. Casual art is done in a short space of time - typically somewhere between a few seconds and a a couple of hours) - and continuously. Our mood doesn't change, new ideas and external criticism don't get us confused, and it's relatively easy to stay focused and produce coherent work.
Failures are forgotten. The truth is that even with all these advantages working for us, most of our casual art isn't very good. But because we did not have high expectations or specific requirements, we can throw them away without regret or self-flagellation and forget them immediately. Every once in a while though, such casual work produces a surprisingly good result, which we keep and remember forever as an astonishing success story.
Small wonder, then, that our causal art so often surprises us for the better: the work is light and enjoyable, focused, fearless, free of fixes and patching-up, and most importantly - with casual art, our losses are forgotten but our gains are counted. For once, the game is rigged in our favor!
Deliberate Art
This is all well and good, but what happens when we do actually want to create something deliberately? What if we make a living Composing music for films? What if we have a specific idea for a painting? What if we're writing a thick novel that can't be finished within a few hours? Obviously, not all successful art works happen quickly and unexpectedly. There must be a way to achieve good results even with a planned, long-term and demanding art.
The way to achieve good results with deliberate art, is really what "The Art of Art" is all about.
Casual Art from my other blog, animgug. original post text: "One of my Danish class absent-minded doodling papers. I'm not sure my Danish is getting any better, but I'm having a lot of fun with the pencil!". I like the deer, it feels so freshly different from my usual style. Take a look at all the forgotten mediocre art around...
Deliberate art from animgug. Original post text: "Been trying to get it right for a while now. Wonder if it works now."
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