In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell reveals why some people are more successful than others. His argument is simple: if you want to get really good at something, you have to do the time. He challenges the myth of pure genius as an explanation for top performance in any endeavour where the separation between very good and outstanding seems to rest on innate talent alone.
If luck plays any part in the equation, it is not about being lucky enough to be born with the talent to be the best. Instead it is being lucky enough to be given the opportunity spend the right amount of time to get to greatness. By his estimation, the people who are the best in what ever it is they do have put in a staggering 10,000 hours to get there.
Whether you are referring to high performing athletes, top musicians, or hugely successful performers like The Beatles, there is a story behind their success that is about the application of time to really hone their skills through sustained repetition of effort. Gladwell is not saying that talent and a passion for the subject doesn’t play any part at all. He is simply saying that talent alone is not a sufficient explanation for outstanding performance.
For many artists, this is probably reassuring in some ways. How many of us could possibly be surprised to learn that if you want to make truly great drawings or paintings you need to put in the time that it takes to become excellent. The logic is simple: more time in = better art out.
To a point, this is true. To learn the skills necessary to make strong images, an artist needs to spend time in the studio making work. How to handle materials and develop sophisticated craftsmanship requires time behind the pencil or brush.
But when it comes to making art – especially really excellent art – time is not enough. There’s more to making great art than time. How you spend the time really matters.
Time is an issue for our society today. Ask almost any friend how they are, and many will reply simply, “busy”. This is because our lives today are a series of non-stop activity. Our time and attention is being relentlessly sought after by an ever-expanding network of family, friends, work colleagues, customers, advertisers, media producers and brands. Days are full of commitments and desires that seem to fight for a finite resource of hours. Many people feel they are under increasing pressure to squeeze as much as they can into their days. Technology seems to provide both the problem and the solution as we find ourselves simultaneously celebrating and cursing the existence of things like email, Facebook, and Twitter. Armed with our Blackberries, phones, tablets and laptops, we are able to fill even the tiniest fragment of our day with a moment of connection, productivity or entertainment. In a world where our time is increasingly managed, budgeted, apportioned, and scheduled in order to maximise how it is spent, time has become a precious commodity. To waste ones time is to commit a sort of crime against oneself.
Against this time-pressured backdrop, some of us want to be able to draw and paint better. We want to make images that aren’t simply nice or clever. We want to be more than facile generators of pleasing pictures. Instead we want to create experiences that touch the soul of the viewer; that capture the essence of the subject being represented; that mediate a connection from an idea to a feeling through the application of marks or colours. We want to create images that are somehow supercharged with a life that the lines on the paper can’t seem to explain.
To even have a shot at making drawings or paintings that achieve this we know we need to get into the studio and put in the hours. Time at the paper or canvas is a fundamental prerequisite to the creation of images that don’t just record, but resonate.
But as our hand reaches out, and our pencil or brush touches the paper, and the first mark or stroke of paint is applied to the surface, we face a nagging question: What if I make a bad drawing or paining; will my time have been wasted?
Although it may seem like a small question that can be pushed aside easily, it is a fundamental block to the creation of excellent work. This is the question that kills artistic discovery.
The reason this is a killer question starts with the fact that nobody sets out to make a bad drawing or painting. Getting good at something requires us to at least try to do great work all the time. Most artists approach their work knowing that every stroke, every mark, every line needs to contribute to the creation of something more than the sum of the parts. Striving for excellence is embedded in every moment of the creative act.
Although striving for excellence is clearly the right approach, it is also, weirdly, very dangerous to an artist looking to make work that transcends being a mere picture but instead reaches out and grabs people by the lapels and demands an emotional reaction.
It’s been said that perfect is the enemy of great. This may be because striving for excellence combined with the sense that time cannot be wasted on doing bad work creates the ideal conditions for mediocrity. The reason is simple: if time is precious and cannot be wasted, and making a bad drawing or painting is a waste of time, then we will do whatever it takes to make sure we don’t create bad art. Enter mediocrity.
For many people, drawing or painting is a scheduled activity fitting in around other commitments of family, work, etc. Studio time and class time is scheduled, set aside and protected. This time has to be almost fought for and defended from other demands that inevitably encroach upon it. But the trouble starts precisely because the time is so precious. Under this kind of pressure the desire to make a “good” piece of art overrides the ability to being open to the learning that comes from doing something that is not up to the grade.
Resisting the inevitable possibility of making a bad piece of art under these conditions is unbelievably difficult. So difficult in fact that many people don’t even subject themselves to the torture and never make it into the studio to make anything at all because the weight of wasting time is so immense.
The secret to making great art is making bad art. All artists need to get the bad work out of themselves to learn from both the process and the product. And to do this, one needs real courage. Courage to fight back the voices in ones head that ask the questions that kill creative growth such as: “What’s the purpose of this?”, “Who would want to buy this?”, “Shouldn’t I be doing something else with my time?”, “Am I any good at this?”, “How can I make sure this doesn’t turn out bad?” Etc.
Making great art requires an artist to make bad art – and lots of it. Making lots of bad art requires two things: time in the studio, and immense courage to fight against the feelings of inadequacy that inevitably rise up in moments of failure.
This is not to say that the aim of artists should be to make bad art. Quite the opposite! Making art is a process of discovery. Making really good art requires an artist to have made thousands of little discoveries of material, technique, form, composition, colour, representation, etc over thousands of hours of practice. The quickest way to make these discoveries is to make a lot of work that is free from inappropriate critique at the time of making. In the moment of making, artists need to be constantly striving for excellence, but also need to find a way to be unburdened from energy-sapping, corrosive questions of purpose or achievement.
All artists need strategies to be able to bring both the right amount of time and the right degree of freedom-to-fail to their practice. But the question isn’t do I have the skill to do great work; it is do I have the courage to do enough bad work?
