My last post is a bit of a spoiler for
this one, but I'll go ahead with it anyway.
While I was in New York I went to the
Met, and in the special exhibit there I saw this piece:
Take a wild guess—who do you think
drew this? (I'll tell you in a moment.)
If I didn't already know, I'd never be
able to guess. In person this drawing is so life-like. The eyes and
the mouth seem real. I was impressed with how well the face was
captured. I felt like I knew this boy.
In order to create this piece, the
artist had to have sound technique. None of the lines are haphazard
or out of place. The drawing took real skill, attention to detail,
and a solid foundation in the rules of composition.
This piece was drawn by Pablo Picasso.
Does that surprise you? I was certainly surprised.
When I think of Picasso, I think of the
artistic absurdity of Cubism. I think of an art form that breaks all
kinds of rules in order to create something new that had never been
done before.
But as I stood in front of this
drawing, Head of a Boy, from 1905, I realized that Picasso would
never have been able to break all those rules successfully if he
hadn't known how to follow them to begin with. So it is with any art.
And maybe that's a lesson that most of
you already know and have moved beyond. I know that for me, however,
there's a temptation to dive straight into the chaos without first
becoming familiar with order. Here's an example:
When I was in middle school I had this
thought one Saturday morning of “Wouldn't it be cool if I could
write a conversation between several characters in which the
personalities and speaking habits of each of the characters are so
distinct that the dialog can make sense without tags?” So I tried
it. I wrote a page-long conversation with a happy character, a grumpy
character, some others (Sleepy, Doc and Bashful, maybe?) and
excitedly took this page to my mother to see if she could distinguish
the various voices without any tags. You can probably guess what
happened. She couldn't. She was completely confused. I was completely
crushed.
I hadn't learned the rules yet. I
didn't understand the subtleties of tagging and voice and dialog. I
didn't know why tagging and distinctive voices were both important.
So I was going in a great direction in one sense—trying to make
very clear characters—but diving straight off a cliff in another
sense.
So what's the take-away in all of this?
For me it's that there's always another layer of subtlety. I will
always have to keep studying and developing my instinct for the rules
and why they work. Because the more I understand the foundation
behind the rules, the more I can stretch myself to create something
new.
What's the take-away for you?
