I wanted to write today about a topic which is difficult because there is the general opinion that you can't judge art that there's some quality to drawing and painting that is difficult to understand. Even great artists themselves have written that they don't know what beauty is or they have implied that they kind of work on intuition or some other unidentifiable quality or action.
There is a definitive and very clear difference between great art and bad art. One of the reasons why social or political art has very little shelf life and it's not because of the message but the message is the only thing that has been left to carry the work. When artists create social or political work they leave that aspect to be the main pillar of what they present of their presentation and because they already have the message they never care to remove the imperfections from the work.
You have seen many occasions where great artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo draw many sketches of future work. Do you know why they did that? Because they have an idea and they wanted to gradually remove the imperfections from the idea from the drawing from the design before they committed to the canvas or to the board or to the wall or whatever they were working on.
Do you know why Picasso is so famous for his work? I don't know if you know this but his paintings were not done in one go although they look it. His paintings look like he just came up with something and he quickly drew it. Guernica looks like he just sketched something on a big wall however behind each line there hundreds of studies that he did to find the perfect expression for each head be it a human or a horse. They only look like they've been quickly conceived but there are days and days of deliberate sketch work behind each shape. I saw this with my eyes in Reina Sofia when right next to the Guernica there was a whole room of paintings which were only to prepare for the actual shapes that went into the final painting. He gradually removed imperfections until he arrived at the precise shape that worked.
I used to work at Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm and Pixar are the two companies in the world with some of the highest standards committed to film. Do you ever wonder why Pixar films while Lucasfilm films make millions of dollars and are considered some of the best (digital) movies? There's painstaking removal of flaws.
When I worked at Lucasfilm we had weekly meetings where each artists' work would be deliberately scrutinized on a theater-sized screen by not only the art leads but everyone on the team. Everything that didn't work was scratched and had to be redone.
While I was still working for Lucasfilm I used to come over to New York City to brush up on my old school drawing and painting and I would go to museums and study all the old Masters. This went on and on for years. I also went to each major museum in the world to each major painter and studied their paintings in person but that's an entirely new topic that I'm not going to talk about today.
I once went to the Morgan library museum in New York, there was an exhibition of Albrecht Durer, I saw a drawing which was 500 years old and it was very small and very simple brown ink on paper. It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen and it's the underdrawing for his famous engraving Adam and Eve.
They're hundreds of variations of this drawing by Durer. In the final work which was one of his masterpieces all the flaws that he could see to the best of his ability have been removed.
Do you know why major Hollywood directors the Masters of the film craft make movies that are standing out from everybody else's? Because Hollywood and of course other non- Hollywood masters of film are persistent removers of flaws from their movies. They nitpick on every single detail to the great pain of their producers, of movie studios and of course people that work under them.
Great work is really hard to do not only because it has to be free of flaws but because the person who does that work needs to know how to go about it.
There's a second and significant aspect to great work and it is the ideas in the deep work that underlie it and serve as a solid foundation for the work. How can you possibly tell deep work from shallow work, the difference is that there's absolutely nothing random or accidental in great work.
If you were sitting next to Rembrandt and you asked him why did he use that particular paint or that particular stroke and how is it that he made that seeming mess work wonders to the eye-he's going to have a definitive answer, he will know exactly how the white that he uses works with other paints to create brilliant highlight effect, the mess was a result of meticulous wiping and reapplying paint simply because he was trying to remove the flaws from whatever he was trying to achieve in his painting.
So if you look at a Rembrandt painting especially the ones that look almost three-dimensional and look like a total mess when you put your nose right next to them it is because he accrued paint layer after paint layer where in each he would wipe out whatever’s not working and reapply paint and then he would wipe again and reapply until it works. He would use sticks fingers forks, rags I don't know, and now all these scientists poking around trying to figure out what is it, that there are all these different composites in his work and he was just trying to get rid of stuff and then reapply stuff and rinse and repeat until it works.
I've seen many many paintings where there was tons of paint and visible and recognizable shapes made on a canvas and there were colors and kind of things on there but they collectively had no power or no staying power. Because the paint was not used to gradually remove flaws from the underlying idea. Many people in contemporary art make a design on a computer or a table and they commit that design to the canvas. It's mostly painting by the numbers and you would see that it was just applied once and it was considered done.
Well, the problem is like with any work once you commit it to the medium you have to go into a process that's called flaw removal, or in other words, you have to work on it:). You have seen this process yourself when you've tried to do projects on your own or drawings and painting or even do it yourself at home, things just don't work out right off the bat.
Because nothing works right off the bat. If you have tried to draw and paint and you went like well, I can't do this it's not because you can't do it but because you haven't learned how to remove the flaws and improve it. Because even the greatest artists in the world start with something really stupid and lame that doesn't work and they gradually work on making it better more beautiful and with a higher standard.