Fear of art

For the benefit of beginners, I thought I’d share some ideas about making art. Not because I’m the best artist around, but because I’ve been through the process myself.

The first problem is to produce any art at all.

Every human being can draw. As children, we can draw anything. We grab pencils and crayons and get straight to work. As adults, however, we have learnt a little about Leonardo and Rembrandt, about ‘great art’, about brilliant technique and profound ideas, and we no longer dare scribble a yellow circle and call it the sun. Intimidated by the grandeur of art and the ‘genius’ of its finest practitioners, most of us, self-disparaging, leave our pencils aside.

Even so, bored adults who claim they can’t draw a thing will sit in classes or meetings and scribble doodles with the unconscious freedom of a child.

For human beings, drawing is as natural as strolling or cooking. The act of making is partly what made us human beings in the first place – i.e. the production and use of tools, and the new possibilities they opened up for early human consciousness. Most art is not some semi-revered Old Master portrait in the Louvre, it was and is made by ordinary people who weave their creativity into everything they make. It is thousands of years of wall paintings, pottery, textiles, tables, shoes and other products that mostly weren’t considered to be ‘art’ at all. The mysterious ‘objet d’art’ made by a genius is historically a very recent conception.

Couldn’t draw like this at 13?
Then give up – you’re crap!

Some of us, dazzled by that persistent notion of the rare individual with barely comprehensible gifts, think that unless we were producing masterful drawings by the age of 13 like Albrecht Dürer, and can pluck truths from the ether like apples from a tree, we have no business claiming to be artists. But good art is made every day, all over the world. It is a surprisingly practical and workaday business of Facebook banners and book covers and pop albums and short stories and Bollywood movies and concept art and grandad’s photo of his favourite cat. Walk into a bookshop and look at the multitude of novels, or browse through a website like DeviantArt and its 250 million submissions, and ask yourself again whether making art is really so unattainable.

Of course, not all of this art is of lasting cultural significance. Most of it is let down by shortcomings of skill and judgement, and will be forgotten by future generations. But a beginner shouldn’t care about that. If you stare at that piece of paper worrying about whether the marks you make will be ‘great’, you are likely to push it away for another occasion that never comes. If you don’t draw, the thinking goes, you won’t make mistakes, you won’t be confronted by the grim reality of your weaknesses, and you won’t call an end to those pleasant daydreams you’ve always enjoyed about being the next Leonardo da Vinci. It’s certainly much easier to watch telly instead. But come along, that isn't really what you want.


Draw fast, drawn random, draw easy

When you’re learning to draw, it’s important to overcome the anxiety that hamstrings the (adult) beginner. If you have studied fiction you may have encountered the idea of ‘daily writing’: every day you scribble a page of anything you like, with little or no regard for quality, just to get you into the habit and discipline of writing regularly. I suggest a similar approach for drawing.

Take your sketchbook or a scrap of paper and fill the page to all four corners with anything that comes into your head. Whether you use pencil, pen, charcoal, paint, etc is unimportant. Don’t think you have to keep the drawings. In fact, assume before you start that you will throw them away. Draw as a child does, draw quickly and keep going. Draw whatever comes on TV, or open a book at random to seize an idea, or rummage through your imagination. Just enjoy yourself. Forget quality. Nobody will see the drawings. You must stop being precious about the marks you make. To be an excellent drawer (I insist on inventing this word – ‘draughtsperson’ is so unwieldy) you must make thousands of drawings. So start clocking up your total with abandon.

Here is a page from my sketchbook where I did it myself:

It won’t win me my Turner Prize, but I wasn’t worrying about that.

Of course, whenever you draw you will see mistakes and shortcomings in what you’ve done. You will also see things you have done well, but which you’d rather express differently. The more you draw, the more you will understand what satisfies you and what areas need improving. You will navigate a course through countless decisions on technique, materials, subject matter, and so on, and thereby edge closer to achieving on paper the glory of the images in your mind. But, as the cliché has it, every journey begins with a single step. Begin yours by overcoming the fear of art, with sheet after sheet of fast, random, easy drawings.