Tag: Bobbi Heath

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What is talent?

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), oil on canvas 24X30, $3,478 includes shipping in continental US.

In response to Monday’s blog post about drawing, Byron Carr mused, “talent is when desire and determination collide.” I liked that comment and reposted it on my Facebook wall. That drew out the predictable argument that talent is innate. This was my second tangle with the idea and it was only Tuesday.

Byron Carr should know something about talent, as he has it in spades. I think I can legitimately claim to know something about teaching art. In fact, I seldom hear professional artists banging on about talent. We talk mostly about hard work.

There is a strong streak in the human psyche that likes to believe that your destiny is written before your birth. The Greeks had the Moirai, spinning their fates; the Romans had the Parcae; the Norse had the Norns. In Christianity, that comes down to us as predestination. That’s a riff on the philosophical idea of determinism, where everything that happens has already been ordained by prior events.

Scratch away our religious underpinnings, as we’re doing today, and suddenly everything is genetic: you’re a foul-mouthed, lazy b@#$d because it’s in your genes.

Best Buds, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

It’s all so tiresome. Even if you don’t believe in free will (as I emphatically do), determinism doesn’t leave room for the impoverished, uneducated child to grow up to be Charles Dickens, or the abused, neglected child to grow up to be Eminem.

Why do people say this stuff?

The ‘innate talent’ argument has three endpoints, none of which are particularly nice. The first is exclusionary. You can’t be an artist because your stars didn’t align right. The second is a justification for not doing something in the first place: “I’d love to, but I’m not talented.” The third denigrates the value of the work, because it denies the effort and time that went into it.

“It’s astonishing how someone who knows another person well, and believes that person is ‘talented,’ must have been asleep while that person was putting in their 10,000 hours toward mastery,” Bobbi Heath mused.

“Ravening Wolves,” oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

In my own case, those 10,000 hours go back to my childhood. I was a terrible student. My sister and brother died in two separate, horrific accidents when I was 9 and 14. John’s was not just a family trauma but a public one; his driver ed car was hit by a drunk driver and two of his classmates and another young person also died with him. I was traumatized by these events, but nobody talked about grief counseling or post-traumatic stress back then.

I couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit still. I could, however, be calmed with a pencil in my hand, so my teachers generally turned a blind eye to my doodling, as long as I was quiet. I drew through all my classes, drew at home. It wasn’t a response to innate talent; it was a coping mechanism. But before long, I was drawing better than my peers. From that time forward, I was called ‘talented.’

My younger brothers, equally stressed and with the same innate intellect, chose different ways to cope. My brother Robert, for example, obsessively took things apart and put them back together again. Today he can build or rebuild anything.

Conversely, I was told as a youth that I had ‘no talent’ for mathematics. When I finally rejected that, I went on to take math up to multivariable calculus.

Tilt-A-Whirl, oil on canvasboard, 9X12, $869 framed and shipped.

You don’t have to be the best at something to derive great satisfaction from doing it. Are there innate differences between ‘talented’ athlete Josh Allen and me? Of course, starting with age and sex. That doesn’t, however, stop me from pursuing my own athletic pursuits, which have managed to keep this 64-year-old body in good running order.

“Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn… Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants,” wrote Judith Land, and I couldn’t agree more.

My 2024 workshops:

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What everyone knows

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed.

At the end of her senior year in high school, my young painting student told me that she wanted to go to college. “But you apply to colleges at the end of your junior year,” I exclaimed. She didn’t know. Somehow, she missed “what everyone knows.”

I watched this play out again this week as my goddaughter’s family sold the restaurant they’ve owned and run for decades. They don’t speak much English, and they have no experience selling real estate. It’s been painful.

Santa Claus, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

Order of operations

In painting, these “everyone knows” assumptions most often appear in the way paint is applied. There are specific protocols for applying watercolor and oil that have remained unchanged for centuries. Yes, there are exceptions, and people who dabble with other techniques.

Most recently that’s been with alkyd media challenging the ‘fat over lean’ rule in oils. In general, those experiments haven’t gone well. Let the horrible condition of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock paintings be a cautionary lesson.

Learning these basic protocols makes painting faster, easier and less fraught, but too many students pick them up by osmosis. That’s why a short course in basic painting technique, such as that taught by my pal Bobbi Heath, is so helpful. The true beginner can’t muck around thinking about more complex questions of composition or color temperature when he can’t even get the paint down on the canvas without making mush.

Toy Monkey and Candy, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

Our own bad assumptions

It’s hunting season here. I wouldn’t stake my life on a hunter’s judgment, so I advertise my presence by wearing blaze orange when I’m in the woods. (If I’m shot, that hunter is also going to have to explain why he thought a deer was singing “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas.”)

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” H.L. Mencken may or may not have said. That’s rude, but substitute ‘attention’ for ‘intelligence’ and you get to the nub of the matter. We assume others know all about our art. That’s because we’re all far more important to ourselves than we are to the general public. Most of the time, other people are not thinking about us.

If you want people to see and interact with your ideas, you must model Thomas Edison and constantly, repeatedly, get your stuff out there for them to see. You must wear blaze orange in the public arena.

Most artists shy away from that, but what’s the point of communicating through painting if nobody is looking at what you’ve made?

Happy New Year, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

A reminder

I hope you are cheerfully plugging away with your holiday shopping. Here’s a reminder about my holiday gift guides:

Holiday Gifts for the Budding Artist (including kids)

Holiday Gifts for Serious Artists (including you)

Have yourself a merry little workshop—because selected workshops are on sale this month, and won’t be after January 1.

And, of course, paintings are a wonderful surprise for the special person on your list. Quality original art is one of the few gifts that doesn’t depreciate no matter how much you enjoy it.

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I don’t have time to do art!

I painted this when my kids had a snow day. Those are my son's toys, left outside in the weather, sigh.

I have two students of similar ability and background. They started taking my Zoom classes around the same time. One retired last year and can devote himself to painting. The other has a high-pressure job that eats up lots of his time.

Which do you think is making faster progress right now?

“I wish I could wave a magic wand and save you from 60-hour weeks,” I told the latter student. Then he did something that surprised me—he arranged a three-week block of vacation time to stay home and paint.

Over several decades, I’ve seen this pattern: young people paint until they acquire houses, careers and families. Then there’s a long gap when they never pick up a brush. It isn’t until middle-age that most of us pick up painting again.

That’s not simply because we have more time; it’s the realization that our time on earth is finite, and if we don’t start now, we’ll never do it.

The house across the street from my church, visible out the window.

Time management is a universal problem

I struggle for time to paint, too. That’s absurd, but there are lots of other demands on my time—lesson planning, writing this blog and marketing.

In fact, that’s a universal problem among artists. Many of my professional peers work second jobs to afford the time to paint. That can take the form of a day job, running their own gallery, or teaching.

I drew this fat dragon to entertain my grandkids. Then we went outside to look for his dragon lair.

Can you make time to draw?

I take my sketchbook to meetings, to doctors’ appointments, to church—anywhere I’m expected to sit quietly. If you’re sitting with kids, you can engage them in your drawing. Children love telling you what to draw and they don’t really care how badly you execute.

You can draw other people surreptitiously, on the subway, in waiting rooms, or in the airport. Start with a fast gesture drawing and fill in what details you can before they wander off. At first, you’ll feel self-conscious and a bit sneaky, but most people don’t notice and don’t care.

Any drawing, no matter how mundane, is better than wasting time playing on your phone.

Put away the cell phone

Recently, I’ve noticed my cell phone eating up time that I previously used to draw. I need to consciously put it away. That’s hard in a culture that encourages us to always feel ‘on demand.’

Make art a habit

I get up at 5 AM to write this blog, exercise, bathe, make breakfast, answer correspondence, and do a daily marketing meeting. I start projects in the early afternoon. If I maintain this routine, my brain settles into work with minimal hassle. Once the order is disturbed, I spend most of my energy getting back on track.

Our minds crave routine, so let’s give it to them. It’s easier to squeeze a half hour of drawing in after supper than to block out a week to paint, and you’ll improve more with brief, regular practice than with the occasional marathon.

If all else fails, draw your hand. It's right where you left it.

Stop beating yourself up

Our schedules, like our closets, are jammed full. We can’t add one more thing without taking something out. Years ago, Bobbi Heath taught me an organizational technique with post-it notes. When you’ve filled up your workweek, you
 just stop adding stuff.

“What activity is netting you the lowest return?” my daughter asks me. That’s not just a financial question. We collect obligations like boats collect barnacles. Some we can shed, some are ours just for a season, still others are lifelong and non-negotiable. Once you’ve eliminated what you can, take a clear-eyed look at what’s left. If that means you only have four hours a week to make art, stop beating yourself up about that. Four hours is still better than no hours at all.

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Is that painting finished?

Drying Sails, oil on canvas, 9x12, available on my website later this morning.
Drying Sails, oil on canvas, 9x12, available on my website later this morning.

When I’m wondering, “is this painting finished?” the answer is usually yes.

Camden Harbor before the day begins, 8x10, oil on canvasboard, available on my website later this morning.

I’ve been carrying a small 8x10 around in my backpack for a few weeks, hoping to run into Ken DeWaard so I could ask him if he had a reference photo from that day. It’s of the ketch Angelique, on the left, and Lazy Jack II. I’ve got a good visual memory, but that was last summer or perhaps the summer before. Not only has the detail faded in my mind, any sense of what I wanted to ‘finish’ has disappeared as well.

I caught up with him Tuesday, when our respective painting classes ended up on the same beach. (If you haven’t seen this story from Owl’s Head, it’ll encourage you to keep your footsies out of deep water this summer.) Ken shook his head and said, “I got nothin’,” and laughed. “If it was earlier this summer, maybe.” Such a day is indistinguishable from a thousand other painting days, unless it results in a painting one loves enough to keep. (We paint a lot of dreck along the way.)

I propped it up on a bench and pondered. Is it really not finished? There’s detail I’d love to add, and the masts look chunky. But they so often do on windjammers, which were originally built not as yachts but as working boats. The color is coherent and evocative, and the brushwork is unified and expressive. What’s really left to add?

Owl's Head, Early Morning, 8X16, available.

The painting of Owl’s Head lobster boats, above, is another example of one I toted around until I realized it was done. I recently popped it into a frame and now I love it just as it is.

I’m in a boat-painting tear, and it’s not always going well. “I’m channeling George Bellows,” I told Bobbi Heath as I hacked farther and farther into the weeds on a canvas that probably ought to go in the woodstove. As always, the problem started out compositionally, but the students in my Zoom critique class suggested that I get rid of a big green dumpster on the dock. That helped, but it’s still way too busy and way too bright—without Bellows’ incisive wit and commentary. No reference photo will save this canvas. It’s overbaked and underthought.

Meanwhile, I met Björn Runquist to practice our chip shots in advance of Camden on Canvas. “There’s a nice angle of Lazy Jack from that bench over there,” I told him. Had either of us been smarter, we might have asked why I wasn’t painting that schooner myself. The answer, riding in my subconscious, is that she’s a daytripper. You can’t trust her. You get her limned in, all beautiful, and she up and leaves you. Sure enough, that’s what happened to Björn. Oops.

Coming Around Owl's Head, 6x8, is available through Cape Ann Plein Air's online sale.

It had rained, so Lazy Jack was running her sails up and down to dry them off. This is a subject that fascinates Ken DeWaard, so I try to avoid it. Occasionally, however, it’s irresistible, because it adds another compositional dimension to boats in harbor. Having learned my lesson, I finished the painting, at top, quickly, before I forgot what I was doing.

I’m absolutely horrible at taking reference photos. I get caught up in the moment and the light. By the time I remember, it’s too late. Still, it’s something I’ve resolved to do better. But taking the painting back into the studio and adding details has the potential to stomp on its beauty. When I’m wondering, “is this painting finished?” the answer is usually yes.