How does an artist’s work develop over time?
We probably all start out wide eyed and with big dreams about taking on the world, inspired by the art we surround ourselves with. But once we start having the pieces we’ve created seen beyond the safe protected world of friends and family, the external critiques and criticism point out our obvious flaws.
We soon realise the process of making great art involves a thought process that goes much deeper than the final visual surface we eventually see. Back to the drawing board (so to speak) we go to rectify these newly enlightened gaps in our knowledge.
However, we find it’s a pattern that keep repeating. Each time we think we understand, we are enlightened to another level of knowledge we’d been oblivious to until pointed out.
This concept is described brilliantly in Chapter Seven (The Six Steps) of Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics”.
Scott believes that any artist creating any work in any medium will always follow a path of six steps whether they realize it or not, and an artist’s skill is fundamentally related to the depth of their understanding in relation to these layers.
The six steps outlined in detail throughout the chapter are:
- Idea/Purpose: The impulses, the ideas, the emotions, the philosophies, the purposes of the work… the work’s ‘content’.
- Form: The form it will take… will it be a book? A chalk drawing? A chair? A song? A sculpture? A comic book?
- Idiom: The ‘school’ of art, the vocabulary of styles or gestures or subject matter, the genre that the work belongs to… maybe a genre of its own.
- Structure: Putting it all together… what to include, what to leave out… how to arrange, how to compose the work
- Craft: Constructing the work, applying skills, practical knowledge, invention and problem-solving
- Surface: Production values, finishing… the aspects most apparent on the first superficial exposure to the work
Interestingly, the reality is that almost nobody starts with step 1 and proceeds to step 6.
In fact, it’s far more common to go backwards: to see just the surface gloss of something and try to mimic that, with no understanding at all the decisions that inform the rest of the work, and how they depend on each other.
We often begin by focussing on the outward ‘surface‘, but we’ll soon feel dissatisfied with our work and look to how we can improve. We work hard on our ‘craft’ (eg. improving skills), and then look to develop better ‘structure’ (eg. composition), we explore ‘idiom’ (eg. what makes our work unique), and eventually we get to the core issue that forever troubles us about creating art…
…why are we doing this?
At its core, the artist generally has something to say about either:
- life ‘through’ his art (idea / purpose) – where telling the story, or delivering the message takes priority over the form it takes, or
- he wants to say something about ‘art itself’ (form) – whereby art becomes his purpose and the ideas come in time to give the art substance
The last couple of pages from this chapter describe brilliantly how focussing on either one of these two final steps result in quite different outcomes.
I would highly recommend finding a copy of this book and reading through the chapter yourself – well, the entire book for that matter – and although it is a book framed with comics in mind, the content applies broadly to all forms of art and its creation.
