Am I built like Jason Statham? Hell no! But a parallel approach to art
practice has helped me when I make pictures of guys who are. |
I find it useful to phrase the ongoing practice of painting and drawing in exercise metaphors. Whatever your daily practice (life-study drawings, still life painting, color studies, multi-hour drawings, short croakies), you can think of these exercises as your training. The more ambitious free-standing art that you make to express an inspiration, to show to others—that's like the public athletic events that your training prepares you for.
Metaphors are useful to the extent that insights into one side of the metaphor provide insights into the other. Let's consider actor Jason Statham, who was not once cast as a character named Handsome Rob by accident.
Jason Statham, a former Olympic diver, is a famously hard-exercising man. But he does not have "gym body"—that kind of smooth, perfected physique that comes from obsessive workouts. Rather, he has a functional anatomy: strong, irregular, and clearly useful rather than decorative. How does he do it?
Here's part of an interview from a 2007 article in Men's Health:
"I haven't had one single day in 6 weeks that has been a repeat. Every single day has had a different combination of exercises. Obviously, you repeat exercises over the course of 6 weeks, but you'll never do that workout you did on Thursday, the 23rd of August, again. It always changes, and that's what keeps it so interesting."
That kind of variation shocks the muscles. It prevents them from settling into a routine. It keeps the workout hard. And it is a useful principle for us as artists as well. How do we bring inspiration and variation to our everyday art exercises? How do we shock our system to maximize the rewards of our art exercises?
Repetition is important, terribly important, to practicing art, just as one practices the same piece again and again on piano. But variation is important too. Over the next few posts, I'll describe a few of the strategies I've used lately to shock my system. Feel free at any time to share your own experiences with repetition, variation, and the rewards of practice.
Daniel