Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Brevity

For any art form, talent is measured by an artists ability to convey something huge with the least amount of "effort".

Dancers can't just add a bunch of steps in.
Painters try and bring an image to life with the least amount of brush strokes.
Writers can't ramble on tangents in the middle of a poem.
Etc, etc.
It's the purity of the message being conveyed that is so beautiful to appreciate.

For those artists who are blessed with talent, I'll just say that I am exceedingly jealous.
For the rest of us, art is the product of much cursing, terrible first-drafts, falling down, smudging paint, and things that are sometimes truly ugly. We need first, second...fifty-second drafts, and marks on the floor to guide us, and sometimes a graphed-out Paint-By-Numbers Canvas to paint on is really awesome.

The truly great thing about Paint By Numbers is that YOU CAN PAINT OVER IT AND NO ONE WILL KNOW!
No one knows or cares how many drafts a novel went through before it became what it is; No one cares how many bruises a dancer has if they put on a great performance; And, if you created the Paint-By-Numbers grid for yourself after much experimentation and several layers of paint, no one will know that those ugly first attempts were the key to having so few brush strokes on your final canvas.

In short - just because the final product will be polished, don't be afraid to get messy in the earlier stages. Take risks. Experiment. Paint a bush orange to see what it looks like. Try writing from the perspective of a bunch of rabbits. Even if it's a complete failure, who cares? There can always be another draft. In the meantime, you'll be creating a paint-by-numbers diagram that is full of depth and creativity.