Art making is so complex that I feel like I’m jumping from one thing to the next, as if I’m trying to keep several balls in the air at the same time. One day I will do short pose figure drawings, the next I paint a still life, then landscape, portrait, figure painting and so on. But then I ask myself, when am I going to create a finished piece?
A good question, and one that I have been thinking about for a long time now. Well, over three years, and in the big scheme of things this is a very short span of time but considering the pace at which society is running today, 3 years may seem like an eternity to most. But I digress, the answer is, I’m not rushing it. The most important thing for me now is to learn the skills I need so that when I decide on what subject matter I want to spend all my time on, that I’m not limited by my skills or lack there of.
So if 5 years from now if I haven’t completed a finished piece I hope to still be ok with that. I hope at that time my short works, painting sketches and drawings will be of a much higher quality than what I’m producing now.
I feel that at some point in my journey as an artist I have to choose something to focus on though. I don’t want to be good in all the aspects of art yet master none of them, and from what I’ve seen from history the greatest artists focus on something specific. Rembrandt and Sargent focused on portraits, Monet and Van Gogh focused on landscapes, and for some reason I can’t think of a great master that focused on still life… All the great masters painted still lives, but not many are known for them, and Van Gogh did some amazing portraits also, sorry, tangent.
Anyway, I need to, at some point, focus on something, I have no idea what that is currently and that’s ok, I’ll figure it out eventually.
