Standing in the sunlit halls of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles California, I was overwhelmed by the art filling each wall. Intricate oils, gentle watercolors, and rugged sculptures dazzle the viewer at every turn. Truly, a feast for the senses through and through. Its easy to see these master works of art and marvel at them without thinking of the countless sketches, studies, and scraped works that littered these great artist’s studios in their life time. When I see these works of art I am struck with each paint stroke, pencil line, and lighting choice. Each stroke represented a decision: a discovery.
Art is less about the final result, for me, and more about the process. When I work on a project I feel it in my bones. It is a voracious, wild, flitting thing, like a bird trapped in a room, and the only solution is to throw open the doors and windows and try to help it find its way out on the canvas. I slip into an intense focus. My mind whirs into action, and my eye scrutinizes every line while I carve out the vision. It is that process that actually gives me the greatest sense of satisfaction. Once the piece is completed, I am left with a sense of hunger. I crave the creative process once again.
This is the push and pull of creativity: the high tides of completing something you have worked on for hours, and the low tide of beach combing for ideas and discovering the path to create again. This is the feeling that is fundamentally misunderstood by today’s AI race.
There is a growing need to produce, and produce quickly. Yet, art is slow and deliberate by nature. There is something innate in the desire to sit, to think, to plan, and to put one component into action after another to make something new. It is as natural to the human spirit as breathing. This is the “joy” part of life. After the work and chores and the upkeep and meal prep and planning, house cleaning, and errand running, it is the quiet moments in your own home where you can crochet, write, read, paint, tell stories about your day, and just connect with yourself and others that makes life worth living. These things take time. They are supposed to. They are what we hurry up for. If we rush these parts, we are skipping the good part. We are rushing dessert to get back to our vegetables.
It can be tempting as young artists of any kind to look at the works of masters in your field and feel awe and jealousy over their skills. I once felt that I would never be able to draw as well as my older siblings and certainly not as well as those I admired in the professional realm of art and graphic design. But I was barely literate then, and my hands were not so coordinated and trained as they are now. I have grown my skills one day at a time with practice and patience. Every art piece was a victory even when they were not perfect… or even good. It was my dad, a mechanical engineer by trade, who encouraged me to stop scribbling out my mistakes in embarrassment, and instead let them stand as a sign of my growth and progress. I took that lesson to heart and started accepting everything I made as a stepping stone. Imperfections became proving grounds; lessons to help me hone my skills. One year after another, I built my skill and trained my eye until I could create the things I saw in my mind. Now, its the problem solving that ends up being my favorite part of the creative process. The final piece is just a by-product of the truly delicious process.
Skipping past the “ugly” phase to get to the “good” phase robs young creatives of the chance to find their voice and train their eye. You are not born an artist, you become one by learning how to see the world through an artist’s lens. That is the road we all take, and it is on that road that we learn to articulate what is in our minds into our chosen mediums. You do not get there by skipping the mountain. The mountain is the art form.
As the AI race-to-the-bottom continues and creatives everywhere hold their breath in the storm, I urge anyone reading this to create something for creations sake. Make something today that didn’t exist yesterday with your own hands and imagination. Don’t make it perfect, don’t even make it good, but make it your own. Enjoy the process. Play around in the “finding out” journey that is creativity and build your own space within it. There is more satisfaction to be found in an ugly craft than a pristine collection of regurgitated pixels—no matter what the tech billionaires may say. Don’t lose touch with what makes all this toil and trouble worth it.
Be creative, be messy, but most of all, be human.
