I recently got an email that originated from Trey Gunn via another musician friend of mine. The original context of the discussion has to do with approaches to playing guitar, and the insights are taken from a series of video interviews with David Fiuczynsji on guitarkadia.com. If you are interested in guitar playing, then you can look up the original video interviews, but i think they would just get in the way of what i want to present here for visual artists. The points that Trey brings up about how to approach fluid improvisation in a musical context also apply to the creation of visual art using a tool like Studio Artist.
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Here's what Trey has to say about the topic:
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David very clearly advocates something I am very much in line with and many of us have discussed: what I like to call your personal "toolbox." The little kit of very, very specific musical ideas that truly move us. We all need to have a way to:
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1. identify these elements
2. keep track of them
3. access them when we are looking to develop our ideas.
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Number 1 means looking inside yourself for your own genuine response. Not out into the world for what has moved other people or is (or has been) successful.
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Number 2 means have some kind of system in place to catalog these things. David advocates writing them all down on a big sheet in the categories of (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, stylistic, textual (he uses the word orchestration, which really just means the instruments used to voice the ideas.) Other ways could be writing in notation and keeping in a folder. Or recording them. But these ideas need to have some kind of container.
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Number 3 means checking in with this tool box on a regular basis, pulling an idea out, and then working with it and turning it into something.
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Replies
So what does all of this mean to further developing as a visual artist?
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1: Find your own unique approach to art. Then delve deep into it. Try not to be directly influenced by what other people are doing, but by what develops as a unique form of expression for you personally.
His point is that it's easy to get caught in the loop of trying to emulate someone else, and to be truly great, you need to figure out what really resonates for you personally. If you are focused on emulating someone else's style, that's just going to get in the way of uncovering true creativity.
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2: Build your own personal toolkit. For a visual artist, especially in the context of using a tool like Studio Artist, it's building up a set of artistic processes that you can reach for at any given moment while building up a piece of artwork. It could be as simple as running through factory presets and building custom favorites collections of things that resonate with you.
But to really develop this second idea properly, you need to figure out different stylistic processing techniques that resonate with you, and build them up into a library. that means figuring out effects that work for your personal artistic style. And then learning how to use them in an inter-related way to build up more sophisticated effects based on the inter-relationship of the individual processing elements and how they mesh (or contrast with one another).
That library could be purely mental. But since Studio Artist provides tools like presets, and paint action sequence presets for combining different processing steps together into single recallable preset, use those tools. Build your own personal preset libraries. And then learn how to be the master of using them.
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3: Use the elements in your personal toolbox when you are working. i mean really use them. Understand their strengths and weaknesses. And how they can work together to create more sophisticated effects.
The whole point to this is that when you are creatively working, in the flow so to speak, that you can just reach for personal tool elements and run with them. It's about having a library of personal tools to grab onto when working in a right brained creative mode.
I think there's one caveat to rule #1 as stated above i wanted to point out.
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That it's really important to expose yourself to a wide variety of artistic styles and technqiues.
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So don't view finding your own personal means of expression as an excuse to ignore the rest of the world, and what's come before you. Quite the opposite. Take the world of your particular art form in, in all it's amazing detail. Really dig into what other artists are doing, or have done in the past. Expose yourself to as much as possible, as many styles as possible, as many different ways of working as possible. Let all of that soak into your subconscious.
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So then it's all there to use as a resource (in the moment of fluid creativity). But without inhibiting your own personal expression. Which is the point dave makes in the original interview. Where he realized at some point he was just emulating other's people's styles, and that was actually inhibiting him from finding his own unique voice, from actually being creative.
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Everything in this discussion is focused on approach to improvisation. The original context of the discussion was the context of musical improvisation. But the same principals really apply to creating visual art as well. And about developing your own personal vision, finding your own approach to creativity.
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As Trey said in the original email that lead me to post this here:
I don't have answers but they seem to have a course, a directive, a plan. Enjoy!!
Very interesting.