WHAT CAN BEST-SELLING authors teach painters, that is, painters who want to become best-selling artists? Two case studies come to mind, though they are hardly exhaustive of the subject.
The novelist Lee Child, of Jack Reacher stories fame, once pointed out that university English department's that award the Masters of Fine Art (MFA) teach a particular doctrine. They tell budding writers to "show not tell." In other words, make the writing visual, not explanatory. Child calls this "MFA nonsense." He says, "You don't show a child a story, you tell a child a story."
Child's point is that some conventional wisdom in the arts has become doctrinaire without much second thought. Of course, good writing is built on description and atmosphere. But finally, in this view, it is the author's voice taking the reader on a journey.
The visual arts can fall into the same error of conventional doctrine, passed on unexamined. One of my favorite examples is this conundrum. One art doctrine says, "Paint what you see." It’s a call for close observation of what's really there. But hold on. Another doctrine, which I've heard taught, is, "Paint what you know."
When you paint an interior or landscape, the objects in a room or the receding hills look like they have the same saturation of color and value, close and far. So if you paint what you see, the distant hills will be as green as the close-up bushes. The curtains on a back wall look as sharp as the book on the table a foot away.
That's what you see. But what you "know" is that the painting won't have a sense of space if you paint it that way. Turning to the "what you know" doctrine, you know that you must make the mountains bluer and softer to create distance. In turn, the curtains must have fuzzy edges to seem far in the background of the hard-edged book.
This is a case of two doctrines in conflict. The solution, of course, is that it is “both and.” You have to see to capture reality. But you also have to "know" that you often can't present it literally. Painters shift around trees and mountains to make a painting better. Portrait artists accentuate characteristics that really are not “seen.”
Next, I'm reminded of a comment by the best-selling author Jack Higgins, who wrote a series of successful wartime and political intrigue novels, the best known being Eye of the Needle. He became rich and famous. Publishers bent over backwards to land his next manuscript. In an author interview, however, he said this: "Once you get to the top, there's nothing there."
In other words, the aura of success and excitement around his latest best-seller does nothing of the kind to the author's interior life. If that life is empty of other things, even at the top, there's nothing there. In a malign sort of way, unsuccessful authors might feel better about themselves after hearing Higgins' revelation.
And so it might be with the ordinary painter. In many ways, art has become a religion of choice for some people, an ultimate: a path to utter salvation. One thinks of the "art for art’s sake" aesthetic movement, all in for salvation by art. One also thinks of the French poet—of course he's French—who said "only poetry can save the world." Not so, if after you read the poem, you’re abandoned on the mountain top, and "nothing is there."
So the best-selling authors might be telling us, number one, that conventional doctrines in art always have their opposing corollary. It's wise to balance the two. Number two, no matter how exciting the art experience, it may ultimately be like a high on a drug—you always come down. Then it gets harder to go that high again.
Nothing in art is simple, but as these writers have testified, some kind of balance, and honest questioning, is a good way to go. Of course, it’s always nice to be a best-selling artist meanwhile—“That's for damn sure," as the character Jack Reacher often says.
larrywithamfineart@gmail.com