How to Win

I admit I am an enthusiastic sports fan. I get emotionally involved in wanting my favorites to win. But my team just got beat in the first round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Depressing. Last year, my major league baseball team lost the National League Championship Series and missed the World Series. Frustrating. My football team lost in the Super Bowl in a horrible display of weak execution. What happened? My favorite tennis player lost in the Wimbledon finals. And in the US Open finals. And in the championship match of the World Tour Finals. Drat.

Of course, this kind of crushing outcome always picks at my fragile basis for belief in my own ability to win. If professional athletes, or dedicated young amateurs who have committed hours and hours of training cannot win the Big One, the grand prize, how can I expect to win?

Now, I admit, I’m not trying to win the title at Wimbledon, or even the title at my local tennis club. I just want to win at the profession I have chosen in life, that of a fine artist. So, the bigger question is: how can you hope to win, especially when there is so much competition out there, in any profession you choose?

Barbara Corcoran, a “shark” on the TV show “Shark Tank,” and a successful multimillionaire who sold her New York real estate firm for a boat-load of money, once told an interviewer that the difference between an agent making $40K a year and a million dollars a year was one simple thing. The interviewer was even doubtful that she was serious and asked her to repeat her statement. The one difference, she said, was that the agent making over a million dollars a year keeps going even when they got knocked down and face repeated rejection. Life is full of rejections, Barbara testified, but if you want to succeed, you have to get up every time and keep going.

I am convinced that Barbara is on to something important here, a universal truth. If you want to win, you just have to keep going no matter how many times you stumble or get knocked down. No matter how many hours of painting it takes, no matter how many people walk by your latest piece and don’t buy, no matter how many galleries send you a form letter telling you that they are not adding any more artists at this time, no matter how many times you start a painting and toss it out because you are convinced it stinks, you keep going.

Yeah, you need to put “miles on your brush” as the saying goes. You need to put in those 10,000 hours to become as good as you can be. But the key to succeeding is not the talent. It’s not the education (you can get that on YouTube these days). It’s not even the opportunity, because that will come in many different forms as you apply this simple principle. It’s just to get up each day and keep going. 

So, how do you win? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. 

Sunset on Mary's Curtains

Sunset on Mary's Curtains - Egg Tempera on panel, 20.5 x 24 inches - $4600

Egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigments mixed with egg yolk and water. These paintings are very long lasting, and examples from the 1st centuries AD still exist. Egg tempera painting was the primary panel painting medium for nearly every painter in the European Medieval and Early renaissance period up to 1500. For example, every surviving panel painting by Michelangelo is egg tempera.

Available at Blowing Rock Frameworks & Gallery. Call for more information - (828) 295-0041.

Why We Paint

View fullsize

Buck Lake North Shore - oil on panel, 22 x 30"

The creation of beauty is a worthy goal of an artist, whether painter, sculptor, musician or performer. But inevitably the question comes up – "what is beauty?" Isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder and a subjective standard of measurement?

The depiction of beauty used to be the most common characteristic of representational art through each phase in modern history until the birth of impressionism. Is impressionistic art not beautiful? I am not suggesting that. But you can't examine art of the 19th century without examining the development of philosophy that was also engulfing the intellectual world at that time and which was a great influence on art. This change in philosophy, carried largely by existentialism, saw the world as fragmented, and man as a fragmented part of it. Impressionist art became a vehicle to express modern man's view of the fragmentation of truth and life.

Did I interject the word "truth" in this discussion? Can't there be a discussion about art without messing it up with a dissertation on the nature of truth? I don't believe you can. By the time Cezanne had painted "Poplars at Giverney, Sunrise" (1888) modern philosophy had deconstructed truth and so, the natural corollary was the deconstruction of reality. Impressionism was not just a new technique in painting. It expressed a world view. Nature was reduced to basic geometric forms, a fragmented and broken appearance. Certainly impressionistic paintings often depict a vitality and freshness that is appealing, but the fragmentation of reality brought fragmentation to the appearance of man himself.

I am not ready to denounce all impressionism as evil or deleterious to the quality of art. There are many artists who use impressionistic techniques that depict a realistic subject with broken color that, when viewed from any distance looks beautiful. But as the impressionistic movement showed man as a broken and fragmented object, it was soon replaced by the abstract movement that eventually honored anything as art without regard for beauty. The piece of art that was voted the most influential of the 20th century was "Fountain" by Duchamp (1917) where a common porcelain urinal was displayed as art. When you abandoned your belief as to what is beauty in art, and you are guided by an anti-rational, anti-art philosophy, you will accept anything as art.

Without the foundation of truth, art becomes an expression of philosophical abandon, where reality becomes so fragmented that it disappears.

Without the foundation of truth, art becomes an expression of philosophical abandon, where reality becomes so fragmented that it disappears. There is no mistake that the technique in art fits the world view being presented. Where the realism in art of the Renaissance depicted man's hope, the technique of modern art is to depict people who are made to be less than people, and as such, their humanity is lost.

Is art a reflection of the artist's worldview and thus his statement on the nature of truth? In his book Picasso's Picasso, David Duncan sums up Picasso's work this way. "Of course, not one of these pictures was actually a portrait but his prophecy of a ruined world."

So why do we paint? Is it to depict some philosophers statement and thus to infer hidden meaning in our subject?

With the resurgence of classical realism in the painting world, I welcome the exaltation of beauty and would consider it a worthy goal for any painter. And with the depiction of beauty comes a statement confirming the nature of truth – truth that is founded in a realistic worldview. I don't believe we are here by chance and therefore, my work does not depict a fragmented world but one bound together by reason and hope.