Great Art vs. Bad Art /  by Mirena Rhee

I wanted to write today about a topic that is difficult because there is the general opinion that you can't judge art and 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 is not because of the message but because 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 their presentation and because they already delivered the message they never care to remove the imperfections from the work.

You have seen many occasions where great artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo drew many sketches of future work. Do you know why they did that? Because they had an idea and they wanted to gradually remove the imperfections from the idea, from the drawing, from the design before they committed it 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 quickly drew it. Guernica looks like he just sketched something on a big wall however behind each line there are 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 sketchwork behind each shape. I saw this with my eyes in Reina Sofia when right next to the Guernica there was a whole room of preparatory paintings, with many versions of 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 and Lucasfilm make the best digital movies? They have a process where they painstakingly remove flaws.

When I worked at Lucasfilm we had weekly meetings where each artist's 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 that was 500 years old and it was very small and done with simple brown ink on paper. It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen and is 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 stand out from everybody else's? Because 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 who 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 he used that particular paint or that particular stroke and how is it that he made that seeming mess work wonders to the eyes - he is going to have a definitive answer, he would 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 Rembrandt's paintings, 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 was not working and would reapply paint and then he would wipe again and reapply until it worked. He would use sticks, fingers, forks, rags I don't know. Now all these scientists poking around are trying to figure out all these different composites in his work. He was getting rid of stuff and then reapplying stuff and rinsing and repeating until it worked.

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 all kinds of things on there, but they collectively had no staying power, like the sum of the parts was no greater. Because they did not gradually remove flaws from the underlying idea. Many people in contemporary art make a design on a computer and they commit that design to the canvas. It's mostly painting by the numbers and you 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, in your own drawing and painting, or even do-it-yourself projects at home, things never work right off the bat.

Because nothing works right off the bat, if you have tried to draw and paint and you went, 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 by removing the flaws and imperfections in many rounds of judging and arriving at something if not entirely flawless - much better than the first piece. If you do this consistently for 20, 30 years you get great art.

I ask you, humbly: don't click away. /  by Mirena Rhee

Hi art lover, today, for the 1st time in my life, I ask you to defend my public art projects, performance art and installations independence. Until now I have financed and covered all project expenses completely on my own, without any commercial involvement. If my art has given you $2.75 worth of light, take a minute to donate to keep my public art thriving. If you are one of my rare donors, I warmly thank you.

Hand Drawn Archimedean Solids /  by Mirena Rhee

A series of pen and ink drawings, 8 x 11 inches, 2019
The series eventually came together in a handmade book called “Hands and Archimedean Solids, a Hand Drawn Book of Hands and Solids, vol.2”

I made a downloadable pdf with all of the Archimedean Solids that you can print at home, cut and decorate your Christmas Tree with. Download print at home Hand Drawn Archimedean Solids here

Thank you and Many Good returns to You /  by Mirena Rhee

Last night I was watching a movie about Charles Dickens. in the movie he complained about London being expensive and noisy and dirty. And then his sidekick told him - I know you always complain but London is your magic mountain isn't it?

New York City is my magic mountain, I wouldn't be the artist I'm today without New York City and its challenges. I haven't found another city willing to get down on their knees and paint on the sidewalk, elsewhere in the world people are just too skeptical.

Today I wanted to honor New York City and all its wonders - which is actually the people. The following photographs were sent to me by people who participated in memory replacement election day 2020 on Union Square on November 3rd this year.

I remember a little painter she was probably maybe seven years old and she stayed and painted for literally 3 hours in the cold.

I wanted to say thank you.

Summer Playfield - an installation in Central park /  by Mirena Rhee

An installation with Giant Hands at the Wisteria Pergola in Central Park created illegally over the summer by American Artist Mirena Rhee. A series of Three One Day installations in Early September where the artist would hang the hands in the morning and take them down in the evening. Photographed by the Artist.

Thoughts /  by Mirena Rhee

It has been an incredibly intense year where I used the fact that the lockdown closed a lot of the foot traffic and the fact that authorities have been sort of lenient towards illegal installation makers like myself so I worked a lot and I also worked for the Census bureau which was bat s**t crazy. I worked with the ( lack of sense ) Census in Manhattan but I also went on assignment in rural Georgia which was even crazier than asking wealthy Manhattanites about their precise origins and the genealogy of their kids. Just kidding.

Although I love summer only of all the seasons and partially spring because it leads up to Summer I think winter is very beneficial in the sense that allows for a very reflective mood. I really enjoy meditating and reflecting on future projects and past work. I don't think it's very trendy to think about stuff but I do that a lot I contemplate a lot of works in quick succession and hold them in my mind and I do that for long periods of time and I think one of the reasons my projects come to fruition is because I think about them a lot.

Nothing about my work is random although I make a lot of spontaneous decisions - chances are none of it is random none of the numbers are random nor the ideas nor the shapes, everything comes from a solid foundation of previous work, experiences and visceral and tactile, or should I say close proximity to objects or people or being part of a soup of an environment that fosters certain germs of ideas.

I believe we humans have very limited range of choices starting with the fact that we were born kind of randomly into the universe but what is not random about us is that we can create intent, we can create outside of the encoding of our DNA , I don't think Van Gogh painted his cypresses because that's what was in his DNA and he had some urges to do it.

This is what is unique about art, art is this very special extra intent for doing things that are completely unnecessary but necessary for our culture.

Intent is very important even the law considers intent very special, you can get away from something bad if it was a complete accident but you can die if you did something really really bad with a lot of bad intentions.

The same thing is with art -it is our intent that creates the work it's not the medium it's not random acts of thoughts or random acts of flicks of brushes, it's just a convergence of thoughts, of intentions, of experiences maybe some urges mixed in but as a whole

art is an extra intent, the cream on top of the human experience.


And honestly because I'm dictating my thoughts and because we have invented such marvelous things as speech to text - I've missed out on a lot of the commas because this essay is just a stream of thoughts.

This Reality check is a part of my State Of The Material World series of essays /  by Mirena Rhee

Reality check

Well, it's not that when I drink coffee in the morning I think about supernovas, or that I dislike wealth, or money, or material things per se, I used to love going into Victoria's Secret stores for example, and checking out all the fragrances - it was an experience like in a Salvador Dali world with lingerie.

I love the small pleasures but they have become a part of a really large large world.

I like physics and astronomy because they keep me grounded in a reality that's much larger than the small world we live on. I don't want to be a worm with my nose down in the dirt. I want to be a pair of eyes fixed on the Stars.

I grew up with the foundation novels of Isaac Asimov,

I recently even re-listened to all seven foundation series, although I have to say that some of the, well, gender issues were a little bit dated.

But I dream of the day when our descendants are going to cover the Stars the way we just hop between the continents today, and they're going to have or think nothing of passing by a planet or supernova.

But for this day to come, we need to utilize the resources of our civilization and, all human beings, the greatest resource of our planet. Unfortunately, a lot of kids grow up in terror and darkness, just the way I grew up - if it wasn't for a little computer lab to give me extensive and free time with computers so I could realize my potential... I would have been stuck cooking for some dumb elf somewhere, sorry but that's the reality for a lot of creatures on this Earth., If you notice many Hollywood movies immediately show a female person, a female human with an apron doing dishes near a sink usually in the kitchen.

So we have to change the reality for huge segments of humanity - first and most importantly is kids who are currently stuck and unable to contribute and grow because of their environment, and of course, freeing the brains of women to be used and work for the betterment of humanity.

Knowing of physics and astronomy grows my world to include the entire universe, and its entire lifespan, so I could measure my little life here against the entire reality of our world. When I get up in the morning I want to know that everything I do in the world is part of a very very large universe, so I don't want to worry about the little things. I want to worry about the little things very little.

I want my work not to be just objects but to answer the biggest questions as to what is it like to be a human being, what is a beautiful thing that a human being can do in their day, and breaking down as many walls and barriers without actually demolishing anything.

So we live in a world with a Moon and many stars, and a can of paint is just a single wavelength of light entering our brains. Why do we like color?

I don't know but I'd like to give it to you freely.

The Artist as a Hero - from my modern myth bible - The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. /  by Mirena Rhee

The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one's visions, ideas, inspirations come.

Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man—perfected unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore (as Toynbee declares and as all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.

Second edition of my book How to make $100,000 in dreams, games and fun or 102 Art, Life and Games Lessons from a Former Video Game Artist.. oops Star Wars Artist. Tale of Not Two Books /  by Mirena Rhee

Guess which book I was allowed to publish! The second edition of my book which started long time ago in a galaxy far far away. I created it more as a comic book rather than a reflowable document that you have to read, a fun thing with a few serious pages in between.

A tale of Two Covers and Two Titles but Not Tow Books

You can read my book on Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YP26D6J

my book How to make $100,000 in dreams, games and fun or 102 Art, Life and Games Lessons from a Former Video Game Artist.. oops Star Wars Artist

original cover of my book with a title I wasn’t allowed to publish: How to make $100,000 in dreams, games and fun or 102 Art, Life and Games Lessons from a Former Video Star Wars Artist

This book began a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away. This is the second and greatly improved edition which I will keep improving and polishing with things whenever I can.

It is also epic, it measures 549 pages, over 100 memes and over 300 megabytes of entertainment.

I did not have enough cat pictures to illustrate the second edition so I am using instead screenshots of actual Video Game levels I worked on, glitches, photographs I took, boring documents I wrote and some frivolously Photoshopped memes which you can luckily skip –just swipe left. I never use images or levels I haven’t worked on myself.

Despite the lack of enough cat pictures, the book contains useful things that you can immediately use in your workflow - Tips and Tricks and Best Practices in how to develop great games, and how to get the most of your creative drive. Hard core stuff like Asset Spec Sheet templates. The Video Game Playbook gives you play-by-play on what you need to do to get your game done, as well as ideas on what to do before, during and after making your game.

Some chapters I devoted to my personal understanding of Video Games and Digital Entertainment, my experiences as a Video Game artist and how I tackled hard stuff.

The later chapters are very personal, some are lessons from my Star Wars afterlife as an artist and creator of many things, including photography, drawings, paintings, installations, animations and performance art. Some chapters towards the end contain my very own special productivity hacks which may surprise you. Don't throw your Kindle!

I developed this book as a comic book because the pictures are as important as the words. What is amazing about digital books is that you can always make them better - their printing press is very light - just a button and the efforts of the Author.

If the universe is indeed a simulation it is probably the best video game ever. I am sure aliens fall off their chairs giggling whenever one of us falls through the world. There’s nothing you can do about it.

But there’s something you can do to play it the best you can, and I think being an artist, a creator, is the most fun way to do it. Just make sure not to fall through the cracks. Remember that The Game of Life is the best and most important video game you will ever play.

One of the best things that happened in my life was working on Star Wars. One of the greatest things that happened in my life was outgrowing my old life, and finding, growing and pushing with my own special Force.

State of The Material World - Essay number Three /  by Mirena Rhee

It's time for my State of the Material World 3.0 essay and as it’s always the case - I criticize the material world. I don't actually criticize it, I critique it. But today I'm going to start with a positive statement.

Whereas a few centuries ago I would have been burnt at the stake, now I get to write and share my thoughts freely. Humanity has come a really long way from a daily activity of murder, savagery and destruction.

I commend humanity for becoming much more humane.

Evolution of Human

But we still have a lot of work to do and the major area of focus should be the philosophy and the credos of our lives. In ancient times people spent a lot of time thinking and developing philosophies of how to behave and act honorably in the world.

Recently I saw a documentary about two-three very glad people who were very glad to have been involved with the cartels doing weapons and women with naked breasts, and they sounded very satisfied with themselves that their lives were devoted to facilitating murder and exploitation.

People are comfortable and satisfied to have had their lives devoted to such pursuits.

I don't know, it's hard for me to really wrap my head around a person in the 21st century, having all the knowledge and lessons from history, and with the ability and resources to literally do anything in the world, who can choose to do moral and corporal savagery.

But I'm glad everyday that I can complain freely unlike the Free press. Because everybody seems to think that there's such a thing as Free press where journalists write about things that they believe in deep in their hearts. You're better off finding random Reddit user or anonymous Twitter with more sincerity than the Free press.

Because the Free press isn't free. I can't really dislike when somebody goes out and makes a living for themselves. I dislike the labels not the act. When a journalist goes to work they get a call from their boss and their boss tells them what to do and what to write about and what leads to pursue. Can you imagine going to work and you boss tells you do this and you say nah I'm going to do something else.

When I really totally have nothing against people writing out there and having other people reading their stuff, I dislike it being called honest free journalism. I call journalists writing workers -they make a living by writing about whatever their bosses tell them to write about.

But see we don't really know what the boss's agenda is, the only newspaper boss whose agenda we know of is Bezos, so we know for sure that whatever the Washington Post is writing about is making people sign up for Amazon prime.

Remember when the New York times posted the names of all the dead from Covid?

I know for sure that the New York Times doesn't care about people dying because people die on the streets of New York, as I have written many times, and I haven't seen a single New York times person helping them in any way. They only care for people who are diying in entertaining ways.

My biggest complaint is actually the concrete reinforcement of groupthink which I see everyday and I'm appalled to think that the lives of many people revolve around goal posts that are almost set in stone. First we start seeing pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere, then we all dress for Halloween, immediately after that we start getting ready to carve turkeys, guess which one is the next goalpost.

And somehow all these activities include drone shopping for things no one needs.

People move through life through shopping goal posts.

Our consciousness is so overwhelmed by this imagery - an entire nation simultaneously starts carving pumpkins like our lives depend on it.

Between pumpkins, carving turkeys and decorating Christmas trees we forgot that the entire manufacturing and engineering core of America has been outsourced to China and other countries, that we forgot how to make and engineer things and most of the population has to resort to service jobs at McDonald's and other fast food and not so fast chains and our only hope is to save enough for an iPhone so we can do selfies.

Selfies are pretty reasonable goal to aspire to as well as scrolling and swiping left and right.

We don't need teachers, engineers and scientists because there's nothing really they could do for America, but we have an army of swipers and scrollers who know how to get good selfies, and get AI and Bot liked.

Of course the social media/shopping networks enforce the glorious images of people who don't do anything. Models and influencers work really hard at reinforcing the social/shopping networks and become role models for people who aren’t fulfilled at work and don't have great jobs to aspire to, because all the great jobs have been taken outside of America. So all people have to aspire to is work hard at making social media profiles and getting in turn likes from more bots and AI.

I'm painting a grim picture and of course I'm exaggerating but at the core of it all is cold and calculated observation from my own experience. And no one's paying me to say it so you can trust it's at least sincere.

I am currently working on the second edition of my Game Book - How to make $100,000 as a Video Game Artist or 102 Art, Life and Games Lessons From a Former Star Wars Artist /  by Mirena Rhee

Most of my beginning chapters were garbage and I am re-writing all and adding some levity, humor and cartoons. Who wants to read lectures? I am also reworking the images - all towards having and distributing more fun.

As some of you know I really like voice to text so I mostly dictate into my phone everything that needs to be typed, Google Voice has become really good at speech to text recognition and they probably have giggle meeting at all the stupid things people dictate to their phones, and instruct the voice recognition AI to change random words to funny things just for kicks.

I am also due for my State of The Material World 3 essay and I have the habit of publishing very raw words assemblies which I later on improve on.

Use Your Voice - Memory Replacement Election Day 2020 November 3rd, Union Square /  by Mirena Rhee

Use Your Voice - Memory Replacement Election Day 2020November 3rd, Union Square Performance and Installation with Public Participation on Election D


After memory replacement

It has been two weeks since I made memory replacement and as it's usual when I do performance and installation I spent every ounce of energy, every strength of will towards making it happen. It's very high intensity work although on the surface it's like throwing together some installation and just asking people to paint on it. But under the surface there's a lot of planning, execution, planning for the day, planning for the installation itself. Some last minutes tweaks to the work, like for example I had to mitigate winds, I also had to worry about the cold so I called these the weather concerns, and of course I had to deal with whatever the entire planet needs to deal with which is Covid and its implications.

About 3 weeks before the installation I spent days in rural Georgia driving for the Census Bureau and it was absolutely intense experience on its own and as soon as I came back to New York I had to go into quarantine, and then I had to start constructing the installation.

So mentally I had to deal with all these things and I have to say I was not entirely ready for the installation and the performance, I was slipping a little.

I had to change my sleeping cycle - I'm a night owl so I will sleep all day and work during the night which is not very helpful. I had to do the Memory Replacement during the day and it was very difficult switching my sleep cycles and as you can see on a lot of the pictures I'm sleeping. I'm always sleeping on most pictures of myself but in this case I was exceedingly sleeping.

Adding to the excitement was the fact that I had decided to add another complexity to the project by looking for a photographer on Craigslist which I decided going to be the last time I do that, anyways, I want the photographer to be in the spirit of the moment so to speak because I really hate working with assholes and people who just show up and take pictures for cash, that's not what my work is about. Anyway finding a photographer on Craigslist was very difficult. So from this point on I'm going to try and deal with that before work happens. I want to find somebody whose ideas and ideals match mine, which is more important to me than the actual taking of pictures.

The intense experience of memory replacement literally left me completely spent and I could not think or do anything constructive for almost two weeks afterwards. I become like a zombie or sleepwalker where all things literally swirl in my head. Everything that happens in the world everything that happens in my world and all the future projects and ideas clash with my surroundings.

I do extreme kind of work. And for that I have to maintain extreme sort of mindset. This extreme mindset really doesn’t care for the approval either in the people near me or institutions near me and I have to work on maintaining my focus and maintaining my spirit and keep working on the projects that I feel I should do.

It's just like any other work except that other people simply are being tasked by somebody else but in my case I'm not being tasked by anyone, I create the tasks I create the work I execute the work and I have to manage all the outcomes.

Despite the chaos and my dreamy state - I seem to have had everything organized somehow in the folds of my brain and I also had a day of the performance checklist where on the night before I wrote NASA like sequence of steps I need to do the next morning when I wake up.


Don’t fall asleep checklist - Memory Replacement Election Day 2020 November 3rd, Union Square

So the way it worked is that on the night before I still had some planned objects to construct but I decided to stop, put everything that I had done in order and ready for the next morning. I decided to forgo working and instead put everything together and ready and then spent the evening thinking.

When I say thinking it's not that I work out in my mind exactly how everything is going to work because to be honest until the work hits the pavement I usually have no idea how it's going to work. I know what I'm going to do but what's going to happen is really up to whoever is in charge which is definitely not me on the day.

So I really spent a lot of time holding the entire contraption in my head like a chandelier dangling it here and there and looking at it from all sides. I cement the image of the work in my brain and in that way I get accustomed to it being completed so on the day of I don't have to think of its construction. On day of I was basically an automaton who simply completes certain tasks in succession.

I don't quite remember thinking how exactly I'm going to lay down the installation but I remember simply holding the whole thing in my brain for a long time before I fell asleep. so I guess the next morning all I had to do is go there and unfold it.