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Friday, April 8, 2011

Freshness


[From "The Art of Art": About the Book >what is good art?]

Freshness

To me, freshness is almost the "raison d'etre" of art. The whole idea of art is to create, even in the smallest way, an experience that did not exist in the universe before.

There are those who hear the word "fresh" and think of breaking boundaries, shuttering conventions, revolution, something completely different and strange and alien. This is how we get questionable artistic endeavors such as pictures hanging upside down, sculptures made of peacock droppings, or artists like the one I saw on a TV show, whose idea of originality is to tie himself on a rope from the ceiling, cover himself with paint, and then "draw" by repeatedly hurling his body onto the canvas.Well, that's not what I mean by "original". Such desperate gimmicks can only come, I think, from minds that are desperately out of real creative ideas.

The kind of originality I'm referring to is much more subtle and sophisticated. It contains something personal: each of us is an original personality, with a unique life story in the history of mankind. To connect our art to this inherent personal uniqueness, is an important part of true originality.

Another side of real freshness can be described as "unexpected": something a little surprising, off the beaten path, that injects some randomness into an otherwise familiar subject. This can come in the form of an interesting style, a unique detail the juices up the work, or perhaps a unique combination of ingredients.

In the first class of my character design course, I always ask my students to design a pirate. Most of their initial designs contain a wooden leg and an eye patch, props we would all expect a pirate to have. Then I ask them to make a new sketch, and this time add something unusual. What I usually get are pirates wearing some bizarre props such as a flower in the hair or women underwear. These are still not truely fresh ideas. They are the kind of smarty-pants originality of the type I mentioned above. But take a look at the pirate Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean", and you see what a truly original pirate character can be: Johnny Depp took the myth of the pirate, combined it with a drunken rock star, gave him a unique way of walking, , a particular way of speaking - and created an instant classic. Jack Sparrow is definitely a pirate, but not in the way you would expect it - and that's true freshness.

Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow became an instant Classic.

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