14-Day Beginner Series - Why Make Art

Hi, I'm Mackenzie Swenson and welcome to this first video in the 14 day beginner series. So today we are gonna be asking the question, why make art? So I wanna start off by saying, if you don't know and you just feel like it, you're just here because you want to, that is a perfectly valid reason and that's enough and you can even skip the rest of this video. But I place a high value on a willingness to follow a creative impulse. There's something really, really honest and beautiful about that because to me art is about not perfectly objectively describing an experience, it's about honestly representing an experience whether that's something you're looking at and you want to recreate, or an emotion that you're feeling and you want to get down on paper or canvas and share with either just yourself or with other people. So we're gonna get a little bit more into that expressive kind of drawing and creating in one of the later videos. But right now I wanna talk a little bit more about representational drawing. So any sort of art practice where you're trying to make a thing look like a thing, you know? And so yeah, where you're trying to represent that experience, representational, right? So the first thing I wanna say about that is, it's a learnable skill. There's a common misconception about art practice drawing, painting that, it's all about talent, it's all about either I'm amazing, a prodigy, this kid just draws these incredible cartoons or whatever idea people have or the common phrase, "Oh, I can't even draw a stick person." And what I wanna say is that it's likely if you are here watching this right now if you are interested, you probably have enough talent to learn whatever skills you need to make the art that you wanna make. And the way that I think about drawing and painting is, it's just like any other craft, right? It's just not everyone who learns how to write a functional sentence is gonna be the next Ernest Hemingway. Not everyone who learns how to play the piano at five years old is gonna go on to be a concert pianist. And in that same vein, you can learn and become a very proficient draftsman, a very proficient, have the ability to draw. And it doesn't have to be something that it's like, either I'm an amazing professional, or I just don't do it at all. So I just wanna say that so if anyone's out there like, "Ah, but I'm not talented." We'll see, who knows, try to pick up the skill and then you can decide if you're talented enough. So, now that we've come to the conclusion hopefully, that drawing representationally is a learnable skill, why not just take a photo? We all have these magical little devices in our pockets where we can snap a photo of anything we want at any point in time, completely accessible. And what that brings to mind for me is a phrase I often hear either at an art show or a museum where there's a really, really phenomenal, technical, or a technically well executed drawing or painting. And I hear people say, "Wow, it looks just like a photograph." And I don't get offended at that, I know what people are trying to say but I always wonder why is it that we hold up a photograph as the barometer for reality. And just to kind of dig deeper into that, if you were to look at something and then have a photograph of that same thing right up next to it even if you were completely still, would you confuse the photograph with the real experience? And maybe every once in a while, I don't know, but I would say the majority of the time, no. And so my question is, what is it in the unmediated experience of seeing that a photograph doesn't capture? And I wanna emphasize that I love photography, I think it's a beautiful art form, and it's incredibly valuable so there's nothing against it but I want to really explore what is that thing that photos don't capture that we do? One of my favorite painters who I think embodies this exact principle is the Dutch painter Rembrandt. And to me when I look at a Rembrandt painting whether it's "Lucretia" or there's "The Jewish Wedding," there's some of these absolutely stunning images. His paintings aren't literal, they're not perfect, they're not these detailed meticulously carved out images that look like they could have been photos, they really don't look like that at all. But what they do at least for me when I look at them is it is as though I have stepped into Rembrandt's eyes, his body, his experience, and I'm looking at the world he saw, not just as he saw it, but as he felt it, as he thought it, as he processed it, in a way that really transcends just a role snapshot of, "Oh, this was a visual thing that he looked at once and moving on." And so to me that is really, it's one of the most powerful things to me about what we can do with art, with drawings and paintings, is we can actually open up a window for other people to step into and kind of visit our experience. And I have found it for myself that this is really accessed through direct observation. And I use photographic references. I use all of that, but I think fundamentally a big why for me in art is engaging in the practice of an unmediated direct observation. So another reason that this is actually very, very important to me in my own practice is that we live in a world where we are unavoidably surrounded by things, screens that teach us to see what is literal and mechanical in the world. They train us to see the elements that they curate and represent in reality. And we built cameras, right? We built... Not me specifically but human people. And so the things that are captured in a camera are the things about reality that we understand that we know how to look for, that we know how to process and put into a machine. But like we were talking about earlier with that experience of a photograph versus direct observation, there's so much more in the visual experience, there's empathy, there's curiosity, there's mystery, and what no camera can do is the camera cannot see with a human lens, right? That lens that has emotion and experience. And what's interesting is a lot of times when people start drawing and painting, they find that they have so many visual biases and we'll talk more later about what that means, and it can be really frustrating to overcome those things and to like work around them. But once you've engaged in this discipline, the discipline of learning to draw, what you'll find is that those biases, those emotions that experience is actually your artistic fingerprint. Practicing art has taught me how to follow my curiosity, how to pay attention to the things that intrigue me, and then how to record that experience as honestly and skillfully as it's in my power to do at whatever stage of development I've been at. This record, this piece of art, then becomes a way for me to open a window of shared experience just like I had that experience with those Rembrandt paintings and to open that window of my experience to other people. And maybe I never show anyone else and I only share that experience with my future self, but maybe I tap into a truth that resonates further and wider than I ever imagined and that experience really captures and a lot of people are compelled to look at it and to say, "Oh, that intrigues me, I resonate with that." Regardless, if this pursuit of honest unmediated seeing is something that you wanna bring into your life, stay tuned. It's also just fun. So, if you just feel like drawing some flowers you see in a garden and you want to for no other reason, then you feel called, that's enough too. I'm Mackenzie Swenson and hope you'll join us for the next segment in this 14 day beginner series.