You Have to Know the Rules to Break Them

In a drawing class sophomore year, our teacher had us pick a bust to portray with charcoal. I picked what I thought was the most interesting face, but it also turned out to be the hardest face to draw, especially with a foreign medium.

The end result I thought looked cubist and I told her, hey, I should just quit now and be the next Picasso. She said to me,

 "You have to know the rules to break them."

Fast forward three years and Wired publishes its third annual Design Issue. In his piece, "Why Getting it Wrong is the Future of Design," the editor in chief, Scott Dadish, recounts the moment he realized the power of selective imperfection when creating beauty. Not necessarily throwing the rulebook out the window, revolting against all conventions, but simply breaking a rule or two for maximum impact. He said, 

"Once i realized what I'd stumbled on, I started to see it everywhere, a strategy used by trained artists who make the decision to do something deliberately wrong... like Miles Davis intentionally seeking out the 'wrong notes' and then trying to work his way back, none of these artists simply ignored the rules or refused to take the time to learn them in the first place. No, you need to know the rules, really master their nuance and application, before you can break them."

Picasso knew the rules. Many founders of various movements knew the rules before they changed them. Which means that taking the time to learn what the masters knew is totally worth it, at least to me. 

Yeah. I'm pretty stoked that the CEO of Wired agrees with me.

Love \\ Christelle

Sunflowers

Van Gogh was a bit crazy, but his art... well, you've seen it.

In the third grade, my teacher Mrs. Walton brought in a print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers for us to see. She gave a little lesson on art and Van Gogh, the details of which I've lost with time. She gave us some crayons and some watercolors and encouraged us to create a masterpiece like Van Gogh's. My classmates started drawing right away, but I couldn't think of anything original to paint other than hills, a sky, the sun, maybe a stick figure. So I decided to do my own take on Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I was so enamored by the piece: how did he make it look that way? My artistic tools were obviously limited.

It came out looking like this:

3rd grade prodigy

Mrs. Walton held it up for the class to see, my mom framed it, I was very proud of it. 

Fast forward 14 years I'm sitting in Art History and my professor pulls up a slide of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I'm feeling incredibly nostalgic and a bit giddy.

I've had my qualms with modern art. I've said time and time again I don't really understand it. 19th and 20th century modern artists were trying to dissemble the medium, trying to call attention to the art rather than using art to conceal art. Where the Old Masters saw a flat surface as a negative factor that could be only partially acknowledged, modernist painters came to regard these same limitations as positive factors meant to be acknowledged openly.

So that's where I straddle the line. Most of my peers still adhere to this modernist philosophy. I'm being trained in classical academic art. The thing is there's something about certain works of modern art i.e. impressionism and post impressionism, that touches me in ways that classical art sometimes doesn't. I'd like my art to touch people, in a way that transcends class, race, etc and reaches into the core of what makes us human. (A tall order. I may be taking myself too seriously.)

SO

How do you reconcile the personal experience of a modern piece with the power of a classically rendered painting?

Thoughts?

Love \\ Christelle