Cartooning in Stages

I learned something in Art class that I've never forgotten - something that really changed me: the more I learned about Art, the less I liked my own work. But, after a few years away from all that - you know, when all that Art knowledge had found some hole in my brain and secreted itself away from my waking consciousness - I looked back on my work and liked what I saw.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of my early work is exactly that: amateurish and fraught with mistakes, but it has real power - what it lacks in acumen, it more than makes-up for in raw passion. And learning more about Art turned that on its head: I found myself churning-out work that was technically correct, but largely void of power. It still bears a certain passion, but the passion is more for Art and the technique itself than the subject matter.

I never liked Andy Warhol until I saw some of his movies. I really dig his movies - he knew from beauty and strove for symmetry, and it's amazing how much of it he found without manufacturing it (well, it may have been manufactured to some degree, I don't know much about Warhol) - but somewhere down the line, however it happened, it was learning about Warhol that made me appreciate Art in the technique. That is, the process itself as the Art, not the finished product.

Of course, cartooning is all about the product.

So, when I finally picked up a pencil years after I'd turned my back on my cartooning dreams to become a rock star, I was pleasantly shocked by how well I was still able to capture a moment. Don't get me wrong, the first few days and attempts were shit, but within a week or so, I was able to render the postures and emotions I saw on the TV screen before they left my mind (I have lived far away from civilization most of my life, but that's another post) - within another week or so, before they left the tube!

But I jammed it all up by going back to the books to learn more about Art.

The same is true with writing and I've discussed that before. My early writing efforts are bad - technically weak, ranting and all over the place - but they are also imminently readable. In fact,I screwed-up the best piece I ever wrote trying to "fix" it. But now I write gooder. I'm still working on cartooning. Here's my point:

The first stage is all about the passion. Once you learn more about your craft - whatever that may be (though I mean a real Art, not a science or trade) - you will see all the flaws in your early work and self-doubt sets-in. But you need to know those things! Then walk away. Leave the learning behind, because you'll never forget it; in a very real sense, you already knew a lot of it, you just didn't know the terms. Go back to whatever it is that excited you in the first place - those comics you loved as a kid, the museum you loved as a child, whatever it may be.

That latter stage is where you come back to it with all the vigor and passion you had at the start, but now with an arsenal of acumen, real knowledge, to boot. Certain things will come flooding back to you, but for the most part, that knowledge is little more than the terms; instead of wondering what that "something" is a piece is missing, you'll see that the composition is wrong or the perspective is missing, or whatever it is.

The final stage is death.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009