More on Influences: Joining the Conversation

There are five or six good reasons why you should think about influences but there's only one reason that really matters.  It's the necessity to see your effort not uniquely isolated, but part of a larger whole. 

When I graduated from the university art program there were perhaps twenty other students graduating with me.  They all had ambitions about their art careers, but over the years most if not all of them stopped painting.  They...just...stopped. 

I remember an English professor explaining the research process to her students who didn't know how they could come up with any original ideas.  She started by saying, "Think of yourself as entering a room.  There is a spirited conversation going on.  Other people enter, join in the conversation, and then leave.  But the conversation continues." 

As an artist, I've come to understand that I must join the conversation.

The image at the left is by Isaac Levitan, titled "By The Deep Waters."  Isaac Levitan (1860 - 1900) was a lyrical Russian landscape painter. Levitan found his initial inspiration in the Barbizon School of French painters, as do I, but what influences me the most with Levitan is the conversation that he's having with his viewers. I appreciate the technical "words" he uses, but discovering how he can awaken human emotion in a way that has been described as poetic, philosophical and psychological - this is my challenge.  My influence.  This is the conversation that I want to join.

You can think of artistic influences any way you want, but I've discovered there are levels of thinking more productive for me than others. And I have to wonder if the reason why my fellow students stopped painting was because they never thought about it - finding a conversation they could join.

"Autumn.  Road in a Village."  Isaac Levitan, 1877. 

Images courtesy of Olga's Gallery.

 

Comments

[Carole Buschmann]

I too like the manner in which you speak of "influences" as "joining the conversation". It gives me much to think about.

[Clint]

I like the pieces you've chosen to accompany this post - they capture the feeling of your words very well.

[Karen Atkinson]

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-atkinson/ask-gyst-aging-as-an-arti_b_759602.html for an article on aging as an artist with resources.

Also, http://www.gyst-ink.com for over 500 pages of FREE information on the business of art for artists of all ages.

[kaylyn]

This is an excellent observtion! I was relieved of the crippling notion of 'being creative and original' years ago when reading Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation. The central point of the rather long and dry book was simple. There is NO such thing as uniquely original, completely new ideas. All innovations, creative advances, and new perspectives are the result of taking two or more existing ideas or solutions and putting them together in a new way.

You give an interesting twist to this idea. The conversation. I have 'conversations' with Artists from all points in history as often across the table with artist friends. The idea that our work is notation of these conversations is a perspective that just may change my work!

[translation agency]

Some people are somehow scared of joining a conversation because they somehow feel they would be outsmarted by their conversation partners. But still joining one can be fun because you can gain knowledge and you will also learn so may new things that you do not know before.

[Maggie]

We're taught as modern day artists to be original, creative, and to stand alone. I think for many of us, there's a contradiction in being an artist who joins any conversation and being an artist who needs solitude and isolation to create. But perhaps we can find inspiration in that tension between conversation and solitude?