I like to look at drawings, paintings, and sketches. Then I found out that I seemed to be better than my peers in drawing things on paper and I became interested in drawing, painting, and sketching. Soon, this interest started to make me feel the need to learn from other people who I think are better than I am.
However, I often cannot understand what (people who call themselves or are called) artists mean when they describe their work and their working process. For example, it was only recently that I found out that "organic look" means something in the line of "non-geometric look". Before that, I never understood what "organic look" meant whenever I read or heard this term.
As I continue drawing, painting and sketching, I found a lot of fuzzy concepts that I learned from going back and forth between practice and reading books on drawing and painting. Examples of such concepts are (1) the reason behind squinting eyes when painting and (2) the difference between drawing lines and painting strokes. I realize I need labels/words/terms/vocabulary to describe these things and organize them in my mind (I personally believe that organizing what I know helps in learning things that I do not yet know). It is at this point that I started to understand why artists usually use words that I did/do not understand. They try to describe fuzzy concepts that they know exist (because they use these concepts when creating things) but people in general are not familiar with. (I wonder if this is a universal problem because of specialization.)
I felt the need to write this article because of my recent experience collaborating with a friend from my drawing group. She shares similar interests in drawing, painting, and sketching (let's put "visual arts" label to this set of things), but her background and experience are very different from mine. There were times that I realized we were having difficulty to communicate (to describe what look that we want to achieve, for example). I wondered why this difficulty was there at all. As I pondered on it, my train of thought helped me to formulate the cause as I wrote in previous paragraphs. We both tried to explain what we meant using inexact words either because there were no exact words or because we did not fully understand what we wanted to describe.
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Related to this experience, there is another fuzzy concept that I started to see. I'd like to attempt to describe it here.
I find myself often using the words "high level" and "low level" to categorize things. The things can be concepts related to visual arts, programming, or anything in general; but let's to stick to visual arts concepts. A high level concept is not necessarily better/greater/more advanced than low level ones. A high level concept is built on top of a number of low level concepts (perhaps the metaphorical "top" is the reason for the term "high level"?). For example, walking is a high level concept while swinging arms, shifting body weight, moving a leg forward, and so on are low level concepts needed for walking. Low level concepts are more concrete than high level concepts. The fuzzy concepts I mentioned earlier above are high level concepts I learned from practicing low level concepts many times.
Now, an artist has his own knowledge, which is a set of high level concepts. As he practices, he learns more concepts.
- On the one hand, people are naturally interested in new things, so usually they want to learn new things.
- On the other, learning is a personal experience; thus learning what you are interested in means that you are likely to care about the topic deeply. Most of the time your care is deep enough to make you tie your self-worth to what you know.
I think this is why people are likely to be defensive/argumentative when discussing the concept they are currently learning. At least I often catch myself being so.
Artists with less experience care more about low level concepts, such as drawing the correct proportions, smoothing line curves, tightening up & cleaning up sketches, or even minute details of character (e.g. exact number of spikes in the case of anime hair). At some point, all these would sink to the background. The artist still thinks about all these, but they are in a background process that do not need much attention. It is at this point that he can learn new concepts because his conscious mind is free from all these. It is at this point that he starts building high level concepts using the low level concepts that now runs in the background process.
I think it is also at this point that he starts to use words people don't understand :)
Reality is no doubt much more complex than this; but, hey, that's what I can formulate in words for now.
