Stephen King’s Pencil (or Why You Might be Asking the Wrong Questions)
This week, I've been thinking about the most common questions I get asked. It turns out that they are usually just not very helpful. But there are a couple of questions that really will help you learn from any artist whose work you admire...
VIDEO TEXT
Stephen King is often asked what kind of pencil he uses to write with. Likewise, the most common questions I am asked are "what type of brushes do you use?" or "what brand of acrylic paint do you buy?"
These questions are easy to answer: I use all brands of acrylic paint and my brushes come from the hardware store (and are never looked after properly).
The truth is that the tools have almost nothing to do with how a painting turns out.
Better questions to ask are "why you you paint the way you do?" and "what skills or knowledge are you employing when you paint?"
This is because you can take the same tools or replicate my process and you won’t get the same results. But if you understand how I got those results, you can do more than replicate what I’m doing. You make your own powerful, authentic work and pretty soon, people will be asking you “what brushes do you use?”
So let's look at those two questions:
1) Why do I paint the way I do?
This gets to the question of inspiration. I believe you have to know what you care about. You have to have a point of view. You wouldn’t write a novel that didn’t have a plot. And you shouldn’t paint a picture that doesn’t have something to say. That can be: ‘look how beautiful the colour red can look.’ It can be: ‘I saw these flowers and they were stunning.’ It can be: ‘I love the landscape around my home.’ Or it might be something profound about life and death. The ‘why’ is different for all of us.
The more specific you can get about the why, the better.
So to take the flower example … you thought the flowers were stunning. Why? What specifically appealed to you? Was it the colour of the flowers against the background? Was it the shape of the flowers? Was it the way they looked in that vase? Was it the fact that they were brightly coloured? Knowing what you love about them means you will make different decisions about how you paint them.
So this is the difference between an artist who has dug deep into why she paints, and one who hasn’t.
An artist who hasn’t thought about this question will just copy what he or she sees. The one who has explored his or her reasons for painting will paint their viewpoint on what they saw, making editing decisions as they go.
2) What skills or knowledge have I gained that help me do what I want to do?
Ask an artist this question and you can start to understand their thought process. If I want to create a sense of space and wild landscape and storms and drama, I think about composition and colour and value contrasts and textures. My decisions about those things will be completely different from the decisions made by an artist who wants to paint a calm, peaceful landscape, or one who wants to create the atmosphere of a frantic urban environment.
So if someone did ask ‘why do you paint the way you do?’ my answer would be that I paint my emotional response to the North Yorkshire landscape. I work abstractly because I cannot capture the sense of a place by painting what it looks like. My work is not about this place – it’s about my response to this place. It’s about joyful childhood memories and the deep connection I formed with this place, over-layered with a lifetime of living away and the resonance of returning home in middle age. It’s about the way the wind feels in my hair and the space up on the moors layered over with the way I feel about the place.
So that’s my inspiration. I am still learning how to express all that (I expect I always will be)
And if they asked ‘how do you achieve that?’ I would say that I constantly work to improve my use of design and value contrast and colour in order to say what I want to say. I also try to balance intuitive painting with the control needed to keep things in check. I move between intuition and thought – sometimes I get the balance wrong and go too far towards one or the other and then I pull myself back.
In short, my work looks the way it looks because I have an idea and I am always developing my understanding of core art principles in order to express that idea (meaning design and colour and value contrasts).
The brushes and the paint brands couldn’t be any less important.
I’d love to know why you paint and what you’d like your work to say. Drop a comment below this video and let me know!
If you’d like to learn more about how to express your ideas in paint, check out the amazing free Art2Life online workshop by clicking HERE. It only runs once a year and it’s coming soon! You can find the link wherever you are watching this video.