Linda teaches art

Tell 'em what you're trying to teach.

The deliciously readable Swiss Miss asked her readers for teaching advice this week and art/design teachers are chiming in from all over. I joined them, of course:

I’m a big believer in foregrounding your teaching objectives. Tell ‘em what you’re trying to teach. Enlist the students as a collaborators in their own educations.

We all know the weaknesses of critiques. Chatty self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Instructor monologues delivering a public grading. Student self-defense over-explaining what they tried to do at the expense of hearing what they actually did. Other students chirping up carelessly (or cruelly) to demonstrate Participation.

But the tone changes noticeably when we remember what critiques teach us. We’re not there to become critics, although some of us will. We’re there to practise observing work and assessing its strengths and weaknesses. This is the most important skill of a creative practitioner: the ability to judge the progress and accomplishment of a piece of work for ourselves. Because, kids, once you leave the classroom and the shared studio, it’s lonely out there and I’m not in charge, any more, of telling you when it’s good and when it’s bad and when it’s fresh and when it’s done. You are.

Critiques look like they’re about external validation but they’re really about the gradual transfer of authority from the instructor to the artist. I like to tell ‘em so.

I husband my courage.

The best creative advice I've read this week comes from a computer scientist, Ivan Sutherland, in his extraordinary essay, Technology and Courage. He says:

If you can find things that bolster your own self confidence, you can use them to good effect. I find that I have only so much room for taking risks. When I can reduce the risk in some places in my life, I can more easily face risk in other areas. I provide myself the courage to do some things by reducing my need for courage in other areas. In effect, I husband my courage.

I'm rolling those lovely words around on my tongue, and chasing them down with this observation by painter Chuck Close, from an interview with Anna Deavere Smith at the Aspen Institute. The hour-long interview is available on FORA.tv, a pleasure I stumbled across by accident and bookmarked immediately.

Those of us who are not destroyed by our problems, we got a lot of self-confidence from being able to compete in a world where we have one arm tied behind our back and still manage to find a way to be successful. And if it doesn't destroy you, it makes you a pretty interesting person.

And back to courage, which is the subtext of all creativity... Wil Wheaton told this story on his blog recently.

Fun fact: David [Gerrold] wrote and sold The Trouble with Tribbles when he was 19. My wife Anne asked him how he had the courage to do that, and David told her, "Because nobody told me I couldn't." That's so awesome, and everyone who is creative should commit that to memory.

Someone emailed me recently asking if it's really possible to paint using a Cyan/Magenta/Yellow (CMY), or "process colour" model. He's run into skepticism from working artists, and I'm not surprised. So, let's start with the most important thing. The late great Douglas Adams once said

"Anything that’s invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things."

Artists couldn't paint with CMY until we had a stable, lightfast M to work with. I didn't see one on the market until the 1990s. So there aren't many practising painters who trained with M paint. We're practical people, artists, and when it comes to making work, we're surprisingly conservative. We use the materials we know. We want our paintings to last for centuries and we generally use only the tried and true materials with which we trained. Hey, we're experts at how to use two different reds, one for orange and one for purple, so that's what we do. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My father drives stick instead of automatic, and I send email instead of text messages. We'd both argue we've chosen the superior technology but you know it's also because we got good at it before we turned 35 and don't see any reason to change.

If you want to persuade a painter, you'll have the most luck with watercolourists, who are fond of a colour called Opera from Holbein, which is a very useful magenta that some people would call pink. It's not quite lightfast but it's still a favourite.

 As for me, I trained in the classic RYB model and my thinking is still rooted there, but I have enough science education to be pretty comfortable talking about the relationship between additive and subtractive colour, the RYB model, the CMY model, and the RGB model we need to describe light.

The CMY colour model is about light, but paint relies on pigment. Pigments don't arise on the planet in optically pure colours conveniently corresponding to wavelengths of visible light. There are single-pigment paints that are close to being optically pure primaries (for magentas, you'll want to look at colours with quinacridone), but nothing perfect. There are manufactured paints that are damned close, usually gouache meant for (ephemeral) use in graphic design, but they won't be single pigment.

Here's a kickass web page that assesses a whack of magenta pigments for lightfastness. It's not a casual read (but then, upon reflection, neither is this blog entry) but it looks rock solid and matches all of my own experience with pigments like quinacridone. Looking around the site, Bruce Macavoy does an outstanding job on colour theory. Not for beginners, perhaps, but check it out.

If you want to learn to paint in a CMY model, I recommend the System 3 line of acrylics from Daler Rowney, which includes CM and Y (and sells a handy five-colour Process Set for just this purpose). It's a student grade rather than high end. It's reasonably but not thoroughly permanent. But the colours are very good primaries.

For your first exercise, take a small amount of Y and mix dabs of M into it, very gradually, painting samples onto a clean page, until you get to red. It's a mind-blowing experience and you'll want to make everyone you know try the same experiment. Especially the painters.

Good things come out of incomprehension.

I can't express how charming I find Maira Kalman's work. You just have to try it on for size yourself. 

Maira Kalman, "May it please the court" in the New York Times

Her blog, And The Pursuit of Happiness,

Maira Kalman, Moleskine sketchbook, on YouTube

She's as quirky and freewheeling in speech as she is on the page, which I find additionally charming in a creative-mystic-guru sort of way, although I concede that some listeners will find her odd. But she won me over early with her observation that "Good things come out of incomprehension." Check her out at at TED on YouTube.

This is what friends gear up for.

This month I attended a memorial for two beloved people and it's left me tender in spots. What I'm noticing a lot while I read isn't necessarily about art but about friendship. I could argue for a relationship between the two, but if you can't do that for yourself, you don't have the right friends. Here's what I heard lately.

From an episode of the lamented Sports Night, mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:

I came here to tell you that, no matter what you decide, you've got friends. This is what friends gear up for.

And from an episode of the great West Wing, also mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:

This guy's walkin' down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole. Can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey, Joe, it's me. Can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here!" The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

I'm also hearing about that particular sort of friend, the ally. Here's an anecdote from the remarkable writer, Nalo Hopkinson, about the legendary writer, Samuel "Chip" Delaney:

Years later, I was at a con with Chip when a young man asked him a question. That young man, gay and black, as Chip is, had just attended a writing workshop where he'd found it very difficult to get recognition about why the things he was writing about were important. He asked Chip how a black gay man could find his voice in science fiction. Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a white woman overrode him with, "well, I just don't see race in my life. I don't make it a problem. I don't see race. It just doesn't exist as an issue."

Very gently, Chip replied, "If you can't see something that threatens my life daily, then you can't help me fight it. You can't be my ally."

And I was charmed and moved by the anonymous one-sentence commencement addresses proposed in the comments column of the PostSecret blog recently, such as:

loving the imperfect makes us love our own imperfections

There is no such thing as a soulmate.

I have mixed feelings about this one, I confess, but it too is making me think about the role of friendship in my life:

As you get older, you need more people who knew you when you were younger.

This advice from Robert Anton Wilson is for my braver days:

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly-omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

And as I was preparing this entry, I was chatting with a friend in another tab. I'd confessed I was blue and asked him to tell me stories. Here's one of the things Parthipan Siva told me tonight:

big sign in your office, home where ever "Am I enjoying what I am doing?"

if you answer no you probably are on top of everest jumping for the moon thinking everyone is on the moon when in reality they haven't even made it up everest yet

not to say you can't reach the moon but it would be easier after resting at the top of everest

That's why we invest in friends, for advice about Everest. (Thanks, Parthi.)