How did you learn art?

[Artyczar]

Those are great sno! I love them. But isn't sewing fun and relaxing? I think so. It's like therapy for me.

Here's my mom:

 

[snoball]

Very nice work, sno.

Thanks Musket. I appreciate that.

 

[snoball]

Those are neat Arty! I see your mom was a smoker.

 

[snoball]

I even sewed Dolly Parton.

 

[Artyczar]

I love Dolly! Or is it, hello Dolly?

Yes, Mom smoked like she was constantly on fire.

 

[snoball]

Thanks Arty.

 

[musket]

One more. This never made it to WC.

He's sort of a hybrid. Mostly a white-breasted nuthatch, but they have almond shaped eyes and I wanted a cuter look (cute sells), so I gave him round eyes like a European nuthatch. I only used driftwood this once in a professional piece (it's a staple for seminar birds). This one fit the bird so well the piece practically composed itself. The base is thuya burl from Morocco. Actual color is somewhere in between the two photos. I made the base less thick at the front to add to the illusion of motion about to happen. Tupelo and acrylics.

This is the only "songbird" (passerine) I ever did, if you can classify a nuthatch's call as a song. He was very cooperative and didn't give me the usual hair-tearing fits of frustration. The beak isn't anatomically correct but he sold anyway, in record time.

 

[snoball]

We have lots of these little "up the tree backwards" birds. Like you say, they do have more almond shaped eyes but the little guy is very recognizable.

 

[Artyczar]

I love that one, and you made the perch and stand so pretty.

 

[musket]

The red-breasteds are our real favorites and I had planned to do a carving of one, but then my hands went bad. They're tiny birds, not much bigger than a chickadee, but very feisty and highly animated.

I suppose while I'm at it I should post my only quadruped. This was my sole commission and my final piece. My hands started to hurt around halfway through. I figured I'd just over stressed them working on the clay model, but they kept getting worse so off I went to the doc. He asked some questions, then sent me to the hospital for a test and oops, I've got an incurable auto-immune disease.

North American River Otter, 2005
Half life size, around 18" from nose to tail tip, measured around the curve)
Tupelo
22KT red and 24KT gold leaf
26 gauge 14KT gold-filled wire (sixty whiskers total)
White quartz (collected at a local abandoned mine by my sweetie)
Two part epoxy over a wood frame'
Acyrlics and acrylic modeling paste

 

[snoball]

Love the little otter. I don't remember ever seeing this one. You are very good with the attitude of all these, they look quite natural.

 

[musket]

Thanks sno. It was a dicey project. I'd never done anything with four legs before and was inclined to turn the commission down but the fee was just too substantial. There are a lot of things I would do differently if I had it to do over again. Acquiring RA in the middle of it didn't help anything either. But it got done. One thing is for sure--I must have looked through a thousand reference photos. There's no such thing as an otter that isn't cute.

 

[snoball]

There's no such thing as an otter that isn't cute.

True this.

 

[musket]

The way I really learned most stuff was to take a limited number of formal lessons, then go off alone and do things by trial and error. It wasn't the most efficient way to learn, but the best way to avoid copying someone else was by screwing it up on my own.

 

[snoball]

I've always preferred going along on my own. I like to look at an artist and decide how he got to the point he did in a painting and then try it for myself. I am mostly self taught.

 

[OliveOyl]

I peg “my audacious art start” at about 6yo. In grades 1-3, I was selected to sit at my desk and draw for the parents who came for our annual “art night.” It was like our Oscars. Bratty me hovered over my drawing so they couldn’t see what I was doing. I sold my first artwork to the high school janitor, and when I won a $100 art award, I cut school because I didn’t want to walk on stage in front of everybody at the ceremony. Also bratty. And probably disrespectful.

Then, I went to a small liberal arts college in Ohio, across the river from West Virginia. Majored in art. Took a year off to work as a waitress at the Tally Ho Restaurant that had pigs feet in jars on shelves and lived in a $45 a month dump with Mike (now, the hub) which we could barely afford. Geesh. Transferred to a large university (Syracuse in NY) and I graduated with a BFA in illustration. Honestly, I don’t know what I learned there and don’t think I specifically applied anything learned to anything experienced. My first post-college job was in NYC doing mechanical work for porno ads. And it was all uphill/downhill from there for the next 35 jobs in 37 years (not counting all the freelance and temp jobs).

I retired a year ago. Well, really... I just quit working because I couldn’t handle any more bossy bosses telling me what to do. I got a little snappy and snotty with the last two. And now I’ve discovered that there’s no big difference between a retired painter and a quarantined painter....you just get up and go paint. Despite the fact that I’ve painted steadily between the jobs and kid raising and moving around...I’m not sure I know how to paint “all proper.” Still.

I don’t think art school made a whit of difference for me.

So there!

 

[Artyczar]

I hear you guys on the art school thing. Many of my friends that have gone to art school say similar things and even consider themselves self taught. They claim they didn't learn anything at art school. It's not that I don't believe them, but at least they got some semblance of direction, critique, and confirmation on some level, no? But maybe it's not all that its chalked up to be. It can really depend on the school, the teachers, and how a student does in that setting. I don't think I would have been able to deal with it. I signed up twice at the community college for drawing 101 and left during the first lesson because of social anxiety. I even bought everything they asked me to buy at the art supply store and couldn't handle being in the classroom. That was a blown opportunity on my part. That would have done me a world of good.

I've also heard great things about art school. Really wonderful and helpful things from friends that wouldn't have it any other way. Their professors opened their eyes to whole new worlds. They went in as undergrads and came out of their Masters a whole different and better artist. I've seen that butterfly thing happen. It mostly came from the Claremont colleges, and never from CalArts. Sometimes it came from UCLA. Long Beach State produces some amazing artists that do well in crafted work, especially 3D/ceramics stuff. That's a great school. I know artists that teach at all these schools. Otis, Art Center, LBSU, CSUN, CalArts, Claremont, and on and on, and know what school is good for which specialty. It all depends on what an artist is looking for I guess. There are benefits to it, but the degree is only useful if you want to teach.

 

[snoball]

I couldn't really say I am self taught because I read books and constantly looked at examples. Went through many of the old "Walter Foster" instructional books but have never had formal training of any sort. Our little school never (though it does now) had an art class/teacher. Our 6th grade teacher was an artist and let us "play" with painting and let us have little drawing competitions but didn't have an art class. Most of what I know, I just picked up along the way.

 

[Artyczar]

Maybe no one is self-taught. I went to museums and looked at art like I was studying it, going back again and again. I bought or rented books with big color pictures of artists I loved and just looked and looked. I had one simple book that I got at a library sale. I don't know the name of it, but everyone knows of it. It's like a big pamphlet, a bigger than 8 1/2 x 11, from the 1960s. And it said how to draw heads on it, or something. It was greenish. I know you probably know which book I'm talking about. It's a classic.

That was it. The rest was just trying and failing.

 

[snoball]

Yes, just trying and failing and trying again. I once heard a story about an artist who was asked how he learned to make wooden Indians and he said he just whittled away everything that didn't look like and Indian.