Do Be Do Be Do

In a recent post on painting my sister-in-law asks if I have suggestions for those who lack that drive to create, for whom it doesn't come naturally. “Do you or any of your readers have ideas about how we artistically-challenged might become less so?”
I want to assure her and let her know that this inquiry hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. Still, I am not sure if I am the person most qualified to answer this question. What do I know about making art except that art does not make itself? I know about the making of art, though I don’t know as much as I would like. I know about painting, but not everything there is to know about that.

I suppose when it comes to making art I am of the “To be is to do” variety. You have to make art, and develop those skills through practice. No amount of thinking about it is substitution for the act itself.

Hmmn. My little inner voice just rang and said “I think I heard somewhere recently that a study was conducted comparing people who thought about practicing the piano with people who actually practiced and that the results between the two groups were negligible.”

I was talking to a professor of mine once who said, that in a typical painting class there is usually only one or two artists in the group, and that he concentrates his efforts on those few. I remember my reaction being something along the lines of shock mixed with indignation. It is tantamount to teaching only to the A students, and it made my blood boil.

Can’t anyone be inspired to make art? Inspiration is at the heart of any endeavor after all. The equation ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration is equal to hard work, plus a tap from the muse.

Plato says as much in his Ion. Poets and their performers, the rhapsodes, are divinely inspired. The performer is not guided by rules of art, but is an inspired person who derives a mysterious power from the poet; and the God in like manner inspires the poet. The poets and their interpreters may be compared to a chain of magnetic rings suspended from one another, and from a magnet. The magnet is the Muse, and the ring which immediately follows is the poet himself; from him are suspended other poets; there is also a chain of performers and actors, who also hang from the Muses, but are let down at the side; and the last ring of all is the spectator.

Plato’s argument confuses poiesis with praxis, making with doing, or production with action. Plato uses examples like cobblers and painters who, like an historian deals in specifics, while the artist like the philosopher deals in universals. Plato would have you believe that a shoe maker works in a vacuum, where leather and nails magically appear, while the artist focuses on the interconnections (like strings of logic tied together?).

There is no easy way to explain why an artist makes or even what it is that the artist wants to make (do). I suspect that those answers are found the hard way by each and every artist; by making art, by failing and trying again, stumbling forward with every attempt through writers block, with schedules, and life and everything else trying to interfere till at you emerge victorious or defeated and then you try again…