The art gap
What is the gap.¿Artistic anxiety, are you unmotivated to make Art?
What is the gap?
When you create a drawing, an illustration, a painting or a text, you suddenly feel that it is a horror. This feeling may indicate that you are in (“The gap” in English). “The gap” is a horrible state, which we artists enter when our artistic abilities are below our taste or aspiration. When we develop our creative skills, we expose ourselves to a lot of excellent work and the works of great artists in our field. In doing so, we create a refined taste that grows much faster than our art skills. This neglect provokes anxiety, which is often related to the gap and even counted as a direct consequence of it. This situation puts us in a position where stress takes hold of us and leads us to ask ourselves: will I ever achieve this pro-level?
“The gap” is a concept conceived by the Artist Ira Glass. He is an award-winning radio host and public figure in the United States, where he produces and participates in various radio programs. +
Comparison
However, I believe that The Gap is in the comparison. The Gap is a state in which your refined taste is above your abilities. Comparison is a poison that causes many problems on many levels in our human societies in general, and Art is no exception.
These Hideous comparisons lead us to have a wildly inaccurate perception of ourselves, since as I stated in my YouTube video (Called Sketchbook Days 2. Draw like a professional), each Artist has a unique path and, each work of Art has to be valued according to its standards, not in comparison to other art pieces. And if, for example, you are 15, 20 or 25 years old, and you are comparing yourself with any other artist. An Artist, you do not know how many hours have spent or spent practising a day. An artist who could be older than you or have had access to better education; if that is the case, you will not be doing anything positive for your artistic abilities. Instead, you will be sabotaging yourself because that refined taste may not be as successful as it seems when evaluating the works by seeking why someone is better or worse than you, or more or less skilled, talented etc. To place yourself in a pyramid or a scale of value, you will only get a harmful perception of the value of your work and your skills, which will take you away from seeing what matters. : Your progress.
The scale of art values does not work, comparing some works with others. Art is a language, a process of self-discovery for the Artist and how we portray the time we belong. There is no such thing as true and false Art; there is no good or bad art. Some people express themselves through artistic languages, with more or less technical expertise, which is the only way of evaluating the Art they Do, or the piece of Art that is being analysed—success in delivering the author’s message, ability to achieve their expressive goal, communicative objective, etc.
Evaluating these qualities of the work through what the work intends is the only way to know if the Artist has achieved his objective, which is the domain of artistic expression within his discipline, subject to the discursive aim of the work in question, and comparison should only serve as a way of classification to extract valuable information about the art piece or art industry analysed throughout the piece or the Art of a time through the work to obtain information and knowledge that leads us to a better understanding of Art, Not to swing value critiques towards artist groups of people and movements.
This wrong conception of Art as an identity of a person, a culture, or race should end immediately because this is the worst misconception about Art we had inherited from Eurocentrism. So, Artist, you don’t need anyone to tell you are an artist.
If you find characteristics that you consider better or worse of your Art or someone else’s Art, reflect to obtain what you think you can learn from and discard what does not contribute to you; Do not use your skills, whether they are more or less developed; to self-sabotage yourself or to sabotage someone else’s self-esteem. Use that awareness that comparison with others gives you to refine your taste constructively and learn to put things in context to value them objectively.
Who is a better artist, Rembrandt or Goya? Who is a better artist, Caravaggio or Takeshi Obata? Most of the answers will be wrong. There is nothing to compare between these artists, The context in which their arts are defined differently, and their function in the history of Art and their media also differs.
Goya tries to work things differently from Rembrandt, even though they are both realistic painters. And Takeshi Obata does not need the technique that the great masters developed because his Art is sequential Art in which he tries to tell complex stories through images. This narrative quality of the comic image does not allow, as a matter of practicality, to narrate through a canvas, which takes 40 or 100 hours to paint. A comic panel should be solved in, at most, a couple or three hours if you want to deliver a story to your readers with a standard periodicity in the comic industry.
Imagine that to draw a comic, and The editor demands you the drawing quality of a baroque painting. It would be impossible to work with such quality and make a series. The same thing happens with the artists. Since age, predisposition, primary talent, and education are clear differentiators. However, they do not define the development possibilities that a person who decides to make Art his way of life or his field of study may have. So, there is nothing to compare between artistic disciplines, with objectives and standards of quality and adaptation to their environment because they are aimed for different purposes. However, if you try to acquire skills and characteristics of various artists and art styles and become aware of their results, try to find out how they achieve them and study what they do, you will be on the path to improvement and self-growth.
By studying disciplines, understanding the artistic media and industries and specific skills of the different disciplines, we will be able to grow and use comparison to turn it into analysis and learn to absorb the characteristics of the artists that are interesting for us our to our skills’ arsenal.
Yes, I know that I’m going around the bush.
What can we do with the anxiety of being in the hole? Simple:
Learn.
Force yourself to compare your progress with your progress and.
Look at the Art of others, whether they are the great masters of each artistic discipline or your fellow artists, alone and exclusively to “steal” methods and ways of thinking.
It is not a joke! Steal.
Absorb their souls, steal their essence, make it yours, cut it; And you will see how magic will happen. You will find very concrete things to improve on, short and direct paths to achievable goals. Do it with several artists simultaneously, and you will be on your way to becoming a professional. In this way, you will not only have a real opportunity to get out of the hole quickly, but you will also learn to observe the progress of your Art while speeding up your learning. “The gap” is something that will happen every time you explore new artistic abilities. Learning to deal with these periods, master new techniques, and deal with a certain level of anxiety is critical for your creative development to be as fluid as possible. But all of this only comes true by turning comparison and anxiety into your analytical power. An artist must not only know if a work has aesthetic value or technical quality, but he also has to know how to value other attributes through a less obvious analysis. He must analyse it according to its suitability to the environment, context, and discourse.
Quick advice, have a sketchbook. So, you can see the progress and collect the development of your pieces in the same place, where you can record your progress and the development of your skills. A Sketch Book is also the perfect place to develop ideas, make copies, and practice techniques to later include them in your finished work.Dec 11, 2021
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