The Courage to be Open

Creative
Courage
Series

I believe that great art is usually open — not veiled, sly, or mysterious. It’s not a display of technical skill or cleverness, nor is it some kind of intellectual exercise or puzzle to be solved. And it’s not emotionally blank.

Similarly, the artist’s ideal audience doesn’t have as its primary interest “figuring out” or analyzing the work. There are many intelligent people who seem genuinely interested in the arts and yet don’t understand this simple point.

So if serious art isn’t some kind of secret code waiting to be deciphered — if it isn’t a riddle for the cognoscenti — then what is it? Libraries have been written on this subject (they call it “aesthetics”) without resolving anything. I’ll skip the temptation to play in that lexical quagmire and just say that art is like pornography: I may not know how to define it, but I (usually) know it when I see it. And, like porn, when it’s doing its job well you don’t just feel it in your head.

The same tricksy art whose goal is to be some kind of intellectual puzzle is also prone to be prone — face down and emotions hidden.

Such impassive creations are too dry to draw a large audience, but may attract a hard core of connoisseur-ish fans who prefer to cherish what the masses ignore. Too many intellectuals conflate “clear meanings” with lack of sophistication, and conflate their clever analysis of abstruse meanings with having an artistic experience. (Conversely, they’re also likely to confuse intense emotion with gauche emotionality — although I doubt if opera fans have this problem. More on hyperemotionality in a moment.)

Perhaps as a result of encouragement by this small but élite-ish fan base, there are many contemporary poems, some paintings, and an occasional film that seem to be in this category: sly, filled with clues to make the audience feel clever when they decipher them, but devoid of real feeling.

Ah, you say, but what is “real” feeling? Well, suppose you slip on an avocado peel (banana peels are so clichéd) and the loutish bystanders start snickering. What you experience then — that’s a real feeling. Bad, but real. Or say you find out that the incandescent beauty you’ve secretly been lusting after actually wants to sleep with you. That’s a good, real feeling. I’m not saying “real” must have been personally experienced: a painter might never have seen an actual firing squad, or a cyclone at sea, or medieval peasants reaping, but if his thoughts about those subjects evoke strong emotions in him — at least, strong emotions unrelated to “I might be able to impress an audience with this” — that might be real enough.

But when a creator calculates how to simulate or imply some feeling he’s never felt; when he assembles some mechanical contraption of an “emotion” finely calculated to pull certain strings — that’s cheesy manipulation, not good art. And if the string-jerking also happens to be understated (to reduce the risk of the man behind the curtain being revealed), then it may be interpreted as “subtle and sophisticated” by the more artistically clueless in the audience.

By the way, don’t get hung up on “understated” vs. “overstated”: neither in itself is evidence of good or bad taste. For example, the depiction of raw emotion can be found in great art (see any of Goya’s late paintings, or Turner’s storms at sea) and in terrible art (don’t see the movie “Gladiator”). And the converse is also true: muted feeling can be found in masterpieces, such as any of Vermeer’s paintings, or most great landscapes; but also in bloodless work, such as many “color-field” abstract paintings, which often evoke little but a formalistic design sensation and the stuck-up satisfaction of being opaque to the unwashed masses.

At the other pole from “too dry” is “all wet.” Far more common, and usually more annoying, than bloodless art is its opposite: art that depicts (and hopes to evoke) intense emotion, but does so in a bogus way. It screams concocted feelings in your face. I’ve already mentioned a movie like this — there are many — but the category goes far beyond grimaces, grunts, and gore.

One definition of melodrama, for example, is art that demands of us an extreme emotional response that it hasn’t yet earned. But you don’t even have to go that far. Typically, most art that the general public likes — think effects-saturated Hollywood movies, over-produced pop singers, and formulaic pop genre fiction — seems at first glance like the opposite of the flat creations I referred to earlier.

Such popular art is not overly puzzling (except, perhaps, in the case of mystery novels) and pretends to be emotionally open. The creators may simply forge (in both senses of the word) a pseudo-emotional channel designed to induce emotional states that they themselves don’t actually feel.

In music, this might be the “blues” singer from a pampered suburban background, wailing about torments she‘s never known. In writing, this becomes the potboiler or tear-jerker, the soap opera or cheesy romance novel. In painting or illustration, we usually call this schlock: the pretty but largely structureless landscape, the sweetly blurred portrait of a cute child, or (going steadily downhill here) cats playing poker on a black velvet background.

This little essay is entitled The Courage to be Open. But what does that mean?

In everyday life, we necessarily learn to veil our true feelings about lots of things — often even hiding them from ourselves, since that makes it easier to hide them from others. And we learn, when called upon to show feeling, to frequently substitute fake ones that are more socially acceptable. Yet we expect genuine artists to do the opposite: open up and let us look inside — especially with respect to precisely those things that are normally most hidden (since those are often the least mundane and therefore most interesting). But artists, like everyone else, live most of their lives in everyday life. To suddenly reverse mode is painfully difficult, and requires courage. The all-too-typical failure to marshal that courage may be masked either by dry intellectualism or by its apparent opposite, phony contrived emotionality. So the two kinds of bad art I’ve been talking about can be traced to two different (possibly subconscious) strategies for dealing with the same lack of insight, skill — and, especially, courage.

What we want is a transparent window into the soul of the creator — but only if it’s really their soul, and only if their sensibility is worth gazing into. At best, something genuine in the creator resonates with something genuine in the audience — and this could happen on any level, from The Wizard of Oz to Hamlet.

Of course, good art doesn’t always seem emotionally transparent at first glance. It may be inherently complex or subtle (which is different from willfully convoluted) and therefore hard to understand. For example, I read a fair amount of poetry, and sometimes I have to read it two or three times to “get it.” Fine. But if I have to read footnotes or some academic’s exegesis just to get a sense of what the poem is even about — forget it, I’m out of there.

Some work is worth pondering, but it’s also true that groping for understanding while you’re looking at a painting or reading a poem is not conducive to making direct emotional connections. If the work is any good, typically the creator is at least trying to be clear and not to hide their feelings — and that means their feelings about their subject matter, about themselves, and about the relation between the two. A creator who purposely strives to be difficult or opaque — as many do — is simply a pretentious fraud, mistaking their own confusion about great art with the artistic experience itself. “If I make it obscure, it will seem really deep, just like that great art over there that I can’t understand.” Good art may sometimes seem opaque; but it‘s never purposely so.

Creative Courage Series: Minor Preambles

Creative
Courage
Series

I‘m planning to talk about four fear/courage issues that can affect creative people:

• The courage to be open.
• The courage to focus.
• The courage to confront expectations and be judged.
  
• The courage to deal with the world.

I don‘t think all the issues I‘ll be talking about are equally important for all creators; it‘s almost trite to say this, but each of us is likely to be more fearful in some areas than others. For example, in my own writing and illustration work, the courage to be emotionally open (the first item in the series) is not usually a problem — my personality tends to make this a non-issue. (Actually, people occasionally advise me to be less open!) Obviously, you‘ll have to figure out for yourself which items in the list are issues for you.

By the way, the word “creative” has been so overused and devalued that it has come to mean approximately... nothing. We have CEOs, accountants, and shoe salesmen describing the way they work as “creative.” (If you happen to be a CEO, accountant, or shoe salesman, why, ah… [cough] you‘re welcome to read this, but it‘s not really aimed at you.) I use creative in the traditional, narrow sense — referring to the work of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and similar creators.

I turned off reader comments in this blog for now because I only check in here occasionally. Feel free to contact me by regular email if you like.

Enough with the preambles. Stay tuned for the first creative courage item, which I‘ll talk about soon: the courage to be open.

Don't Bother Me, Can't You See I'm Not Working?

Some creative types -- perhaps a minority -- can sometimes wrench their heads up out of their habitual cloud of fantasy, twist their necks around by about 180 degrees, and take a long look at themselves and their work. When they do, they'll almost inevitably end up pondering why they haven't achieved more.

Well, enough with that superior pronoun "they"; I'm talking about "we," of course. Being creative, we can spin out endless reasons for how little we've accomplished. ("Little" in this context is a relative term which results from comparing what we've actually done to what we're sure, deep down, we're capable of doing -- kind of like making an invidious comparison to ourselves.) Our rationales slog wearily through our minds, like embarrassed tramps with worn-out shoes and sad expressions. Ultimately they become boring, because they're always the same: I didn't write that book because... That painting didn't quite work out because... I never found a publisher for that story because...

Of course, not all rationales are rationalizations; some are true. It's hard to tell which kind these are, even though we concocted them ourselves; but if we know anything about art history it's pretty hard not to suspect that we're lying to ourselves. You think you have... ah... impediments? What about the great painters who were so poor they had to chose between buying paint or food, or the painter who did some of his best work while going blind, or the painter who sometimes woke up lying in the gutter? What about writers who lived in cramped ghettos or freezing attics or back alleyways, or the one who wrote his masterwork in a medieval prison cell? (Extra brownie points to anyone who can identify these true examples.) You think you've got good excuses not to work?

Still, external cirumstances really do intervene -- or even interdict -- sometimes, so maybe it's... um... not our fault?

It's hard to tell, because we are by our nature good at manufacturing little fictions cloaked in an atmosphere of verisimilitude. (Wait a minute -- that's just my fancy-pants way of saying what I was trying to avoid saying outright -- that we're good at lying and making it sound real.) I'm not just talking about fiction writers, either. I'm both a writer and an illustrator, and although they generally feel very different, I know that in a few respects they're strangely similar pursuits. Both writers and artists learn how to simulate realities, how to -- in essence -- "defraud" the viewer into believing something is there which actually isn't. That's an orientation which makes it all the easier to con ourselves, sometimes.

So which is it, true impediments or creative deceptions? Let's not give ourselves the benefit of the doubt -- let's assume we artsy types are mostly a bunch of self-deceiving rationalizers. (C'mon, you know it's true.) I'm sure you're familiar with our usual litany of rationalizations, so I'll just allude to them briefly here -- you know the list: no time/no money/no quiet place/dumb audience/biased editors/tasteless galleries/no connections/etc. Okay, now skip the baloney for a minute -- what are the real issues? The hidden, self-imposed demons that hold us back?

They fall into several categories, but I'm convinced that the most common impediments to creating good stuff aren't lack of talent, skill, desire, or discipline, although those all come into play. I've come to believe that the most common, and most destructive, impediments to creative achievement ultimately boil down to this: lack of courage.

Lack of courage -- or, to use the simplest term, fear -- is, in this context, actually not just one thing; it's more like a small family of malevolent critters. In the days to come, I'm going to write, one-by-one, about each of the different kinds of courage I think we creative types need if we hope to accomplish the two things we all claim to want: getting good work done and finding an audience for it.

Perfectionism Not A Blog Trait

I've been away working on my "real" website, but in the back of my mind I've been aware that I haven't been posting here. I suspect part of the reason is that, as a professional writer (and illustrator, but that's not relevant), I'm used to carefully reviewing and revising everything I write -- even emails I send. This is generally a good thing; there's an old saying, "Good writing isn't written -- it's re-written." However, I suspect that careful revision -- or maybe any revision -- isn't really in the spirit of blogging. The only way I'm ever going to keep this thing going is to write quick impromptu remarks about my current creative process -- which is the official subject matter of this blog -- and then let them stand.

I've spent a lot of time creating a new Radnor Wentworth cartoon story (much more elaborate than the one that's currently up there), but I haven't posted it yet. I've also been working on adding new sections to my Sanstudio website -- sections for sketches, illustration, and other things -- and I've been working on the Site Map. What's the big deal with a site map, you ask? Nobody uses those things anyway! Well, that may be true, but for me it's an excuse to improve my JavaScript and CSS skills. Learning more JavaScript is time-consuming, and it pulls me away from my drawing, writing, and... um... making a living. So I guess I should stop. However, I find JavaScripting kind of addictive, or maybe I just can't stand the thought of not knowing how to do something I want to do. I guess I should add JavaScript to my mental list -- along with perfectionism and a few other time-sponges -- of things I need to limit.

Now if I can post this draft without revising it -- imperfections and all -- that will be something special for me!

Reading War and Peace While Munching Candy

I realize in looking over my previous post that it may seem to contain an implicit contradiction. In referring to the difference between popular and serious art, am I disparaging the popular arts?

If so, then it would seem like a contradictory (or at least very odd) thing for an illustrator and cartoonist to do. After all, almost everyone classifies illustration and cartooning as popular arts; how can I belittle what I myself do?

The short answer is that, much as I’d like my cartoon stories to be more popular, I’m not sure they’re in the category of popular arts — I think that’s defined more by a sensibility and approach than it is by a particular medium. The long answer — well, that gets a little personal, but I suppose that’s what this blog is for. I don’t partake of much popular art myself (unless you count all the old revival and art-house films I go to — I suppose they were popular movies once upon a time). Cartooning, especially “comic strips” (a term I dislike but have become resigned to), are a major exception to my abstemiousness. I pay attention to cartoon strips past and present, from the late nineteenth century (and their eighteenth-century precursors) right up to this morning’s newspapers. But that’s not because I think cartoon strips are superior to, say, television or pop music or the circus. I probably focus more on cartooning simply because I’m a cartoonist — or did I become a cartoonist because I was focused on cartooning? Well, no matter.

In general, my attitude toward the popular arts is similar to my attitude towards chocolate: I like it a lot, and sometimes I even eat it, but I know that it’s candy. I don’t sneer at chocolate bars but I also don’t confuse them with real meals, much less with gourmet cooking. I’m not “against” television any more than I’m “against” chocolate or ice cream — but I tend to avoid them, and for much the same reason: my lack of self-control, and the resultant tendency to overindulge. If I bring home a half gallon of ice cream, I’m likely to eat a quart in one sitting, and gain three pounds in the process. (By the way, can somebody please explain to me how it’s possible to eat one pound of ice cream and gain three pounds?) Similarly, when I had a TV set, I’d turn it on to watch a specific show — but then never turn it off, or not until I was about to pass out in stupefaction.

In other words, my restricted diet for pop culture has more to do with liking it too much than too little. I cope with my lack of self-control the best I can: I know from experience that I don’t have the discipline to keep ice cream in my freezer, but I do have just enough discipline not to buy it in the first place. Similarly, if I had a TV I’d probably watch it a lot; but I’d rather spend that time creating things. (Tell me this: how much time do you think the people who create the TV shows spend watching TV? Creating anything — including popular culture — is a very time-consuming activity!)

Most cartoon strips historically fall into the category of popular art, but I don’t believe this is an inherent characteristic of the art form; it’s more like a self-perpetuating pattern. Imagine a country — let’s call it Carrotopia— which has the reputation of being friendly only to people with red hair. Anybody else gets sneered at in the streets — or, worse, ignored altogether. What kind of people do you suppose would move there? And what kind would move out? Obviously, over time, the reputation of Carrotopia as a country of, by, and for redheads would be reinforced, perhaps to the point that carmine filimentation seemed intrinsic to the place. But the prevalence of cherry-colored fuzz would, in fact, be the result of a self-perpetuating culture, not an inexorable attribute of the land itself.

Cartooning is like our mythical Carrotopia: it mostly attracts creators with a pop-culture sensibility — or who are limited by their natural talents to the realm of pop culture — simply because it has the reputation of being an appropriate venue only for such creators. “Serious” writers and artists usually avoid the medium. Who wants to be snubbed?

Note that I said usually; not always. There are and always have been a few exceptions — talented creators exploring cartooning as a serious artform — but unfortunately they tend to be barely visible specks of light in the general fog of interchangeable mass culture. Well, if you haven’t already pegged me as a hopeless snob and dismal pessimist, and decide to come back… I’ll probably have more to say about the nature of pop vs. serious art in the future. In fact, I’ve barely scratched the surface here. But that will have to wait; I’ve been drawing and writing all day, and need to get some exercise. I think I’ll take a walk to the local bookstore… and buy a chocolate ice-cream cone on the way back.

Current Sanstudio Development

I'm going to place brief notes here concerning the ongoing development of my graphic-arts site at Sanstudio.com, and perhaps of my other domains as well.

The site is currently entitled Cartoon Stories for Thoughtful People — but that's destined to become only one section of the site (I hope). It currently contains four graphic stories:

The Hurricane is by far my most popular story, based on the feedback I've received from both reviewers and readers.

Everybody who responded to it seemed to love it, except for one reader who criticized the story as being a philosophical endorsement of passivity or defeatism. I thanked him for his remarks, but didn't really respond beyond that; I certainly wasn't going to get into a discussion of Buddhist philosophy with him. I think he expected me to "defend" the story, and was disappointed when I declined. Although I love feedback, including the critical kind, I have a policy of never arguing with, or even discussing, readers' interpretations of the meaning of my work. Any meaning I wish to convey is in the story itself.

There are many reasons for this. One is that I believe that the best artists supply only incomplete meanings; only the lowest form of pop culture is presented in a neat, complete package. This is not an endorsement of willful obscurantism, which is a form of pretentiousness that I despise. But great works of art (in any medium) gain strength for each reader by being completed by that reader. Each reader (or perhaps I should say audience, since it applies equally to the non-literary arts) creates a unique work by filling in the holes with their own meanings, with the collaborative result holding special power for them. I don't want to preempt that process by displacing their interpretations with mine.

This isn't really an original idea of mine — it borrows heavily from John Dewey's ideas about "doing" and "undergoing" in the arts, where he emphasized the collaborative role of the audience; and frankly I don't even remember whether seeing this role (or the lack of it) as a key distinction between the popular and the great arts was his idea or mine. (I wouldn't be surprised if many people had made this point.) Regardless, the idea is simple enough: great art owes much of its power to the implicit creator/audience collaboration, while mass-consumption art is fully pre-cooked — so the audience doesn't have to do any work, which of course many people prefer. I suppose this whole distinction between "pop arts" and "high arts" must sound elitist to many people (although even such a lively advocate of the popular arts as Gilbert Seldes seems to have admitted the distinction, more or less); and it must sound outright ridiculous to post-modernists — but I'll let them go argue with Dewey on their own. (The fact that he died in 1952 shouldn't hamper the conversation, because to a true pomo the difference between dead and alive is presumably just a matter of looking at the same protoplasm from a different angle, after all.…)

My unwillingness to preempt my readers' collaborative interpretations also explains why the "About This Story" pages that are linked to each of my cartoon stories disappoint some readers, who expect a philosophical discussion there; those pages are sometimes lengthy, but all they contain are press reviews, ancillary materials about background and process, and so on. I'm always happy to describe my drawing, computer graphics, and other production processes if anyone's interested (usually they're not).

River Journey is the only story I've written in verse (light verse). One small comics newsletter in Britain (the dead-tree kind of newsletter that gets handed out at comics conventions) said that the verse seemed to be influenced by Ogden Nash and the drawing by Dr. Seuss. This didn't exactly bother me — it was a glowing review overall, I think the remark was meant as praise, and I certainly love the work of both people mentioned — but I find the resemblances rather slight. However, you can decide for yourself.

Psychology Can't Help is my least popular story, which isn't surprising since (unlike my other stories) it has no plot. A couple of reviewers liked it, more or less, and a few readers as well. It seems that the only people who connect strongly with this story are people who've had personal experiences with therapy that left them, shall we say, underwhelmed.

Radnor Wentworth's Theory of Friendship is a graphic story about the world's smartest computer programmer — or maybe he's the world's dumbest computer programmer, depending on how you look at it. But (unlike some "geek comics" I've seen) this isn't a story about coding; and it's not like Dilbert either — Radnor is a freelancer, and has so little contact with people that he couldn't even have those kinds of nasty office experiences.

The poor guy is struggling to figure out why he can't hold on to friends or pick up women — not that I've ever had that problem, you understand (cough). The story was meant to be the first in a series — Radnor Wentworth's Theories of Life — and now, by golly, it seems like that's on the verge of being true! More about that in a future post.