Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

How to be an artist.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

(...or writer.)

First, learn the science, the rules -- whatever you want to call it -- of the skill. For an artist, learn how to draw; learn the basics of drawing and color and composition. Learn how to work in three dimensional sculpture in many mediums. Learn how to work with paint and charcoal and collage and paper and printmaking. Learn all the technical and traditional skills you can. Practice drawing still life and human life and landscapes and abstracts and gesture drawings and sketching and in places that aren't conducive to drawing.

Before you can speak, you need to learn the language.

Next, you must learn to hear and see.

Watch people. Watch how they say, what they say, what they do. See what books they are reading and read them yourself. Be unobtrusive. Take their music and movie suggestions seriously and listen and watch. Go places, travel, observe and absorb. Make note, either on paper or in your mind, of colors or moments when something close to perfection showed its face. Find a way to remember and recreate that. Notice what is going on around you. Listen to people when they talk, no matter what they are talking about. Everyone has something to say.

You can draw nice pictures in a vacuum, but an artist does not live in a vacuum. There are too many nice 9and boring) pictures, anyway.

To be a good artist, you must absorb what is around you, the people around you, the life and moments around you, and reinterpret it onto paper or canvas or clay. That is your duty, to make beauty and something whole, out of pieces that don't seem connected.

So, how can you be an artist? A writer?

Learn the language. Then learn to be quiet and absorb what is all around you so that later you can use that language to translate for everyone who wishes to see.

That is how to be an artist.

It is more than just drawing lovely pictures of fruit to hang in the kitchen.