My Experience With Art

As you know, one of my featured Twitch streamers is delinquentMuse, who is offering, if you subscribe to her channel, one of her prints of Butters from South Park. Considering her art is incredible and gorgeous, I feel that this is a steal. Excited that I'm going to get some of her artwork, I have been thinking about my experiences with art, which leads me to this post.

Growing up, my Mom used to take us to the free art and science museums in Boston rather frequently. I remember the modern art wing. I wondered why the Jackson Pollock painting is on display because it looked like scribbles. Also, Kline that looked like calligraphy, and I was like, just read a Chinese newspaper, it's the same thing. I'm sure I saw one of Picasso's periods (perhaps the Blue Period?) where the paintings were not photo-realistic, and I wondered if he knew how to draw. I then went home, and was surprised that Picasso was capable of drawing very realistically.

Fast forward to college, and one of the classes I took was taught by an internationally renowned professor, specializing in Picasso. Her classes got highest ratings, so everyone takes her class. One of her lectures made me laugh as she noted how modern art is so accessible that even babies would hug a Picasso statue. Babies tend to be so curious that they end up hugging and touching everything so that doesn't mean that a statue is intrinsically loved, so that made me laugh. She then said that children intuitively understand modern art, whereas when I was that age, I was more like "wtf is that?". 

However, due to her passionate teaching style, I do find Modern Art fascinating. My favorite period is the Abstract Expressionists, especially Kandinsky and Rothko. Her passion spilled over to my wanting to finally learn how to draw. As I'm very left-brained, my drawings are stick-figures. Since Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has reached a lot of acclaim, I decided to borrow the book.

The first exercise was to draw a picture right-side up. It was very bad, because as a left-brained person, I drew what I thought was the concept of the picture. The next exercise is to draw it upside down, and just copy the lines on the paper. It worked! Although the proportions were off and not "perfection" it looked like the drawing.

The next exercise I believe is drawing your hand and to focus on the lines and not what the concept of a hand looks like. The interesting part of this exercise is that I noticed that my palms had what seemed like an infinite amount of lines, so I didn't know if I should draw all of them, or should I exclude some of the minor lines, but then which ones? Even so, it looked like a hand and was impressive for someone who previously can only draw stick figures, albeit the fingers were out of proportion and was 2-dimensional.

I then came to the awareness that since it was so easy for me, who doesn't have an artistic bone in her body, to pick up drawing something photo-realistically in under 1 hour, drawing realistically is one of the easiest aspects of drawing, but the harder aspects are what lines do you put in to make the artwork aesthetically pleasing? So, of course the Abstract Expressionists can draw realistically, but they did something way more impressive by bringing something new to the table.

A great artist is able to find out which things to include and not include, and I just don't get where this talent comes from, so alien and foreign it is to me. It's pretty incredible that with art, you're faced with infinite possibilities, so it's in fact impressive that the Abstract Expressionists are able to come up with something new and fresh, but also compelling. I mean, where do you start when you're faced with a blank piece of paper?

At any rate, the next step of the book I couldn't master, and that's learning how to draw with correct proportions, so I stopped at that part of the book. 

I'm curious about your experiences with art, so please feel free to discuss. 

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