Last night, I was asked “how does one become a better artist? can one only become better at using tools?” It got the mind a-spinning, and the short answer is that it cannot merely be about tools and technique.

These days, my life is almost entirely occupied by tech entrepreneurship and family, but 10 years ago I took some time away from tech to answer two questions: whether I could create artwork that I respected, and whether I wanted to pursue art as a career. I got close to “yes” on the first question, and a resounding “no” to the second. These personal thoughts are borne from that experience.

Technical proficiency is certainly important (this was a failure in my schooling by abstract expressionist teachers that I had to make up for later), but technique is not everything. Too much focus on technique leaves one with sterility.

So what else matters?

First, you must become self-aware of the topic you want to take on. You want to focus rather than visually wander around. You need a mission, although that mission can and should evolve. For some, like Duchamp, it was more about the statement than the art, while with others, like Lucien Freud, it is more grounded in the art itself. Experimentation and dabbling is a healthy way to prevent getting stale, but you want more focus than lack thereof until you are fully satiated. Then it is time for a new problem to chew on.

You must be rigorously self-critical, pushing yourself and demanding improvement. External opinion can be useful but it cannot be your compass. You must strive greatness in your art rather than popularity.

You must learn from your failures. In art, I think you learn more from your failures than successes. I refer not to failures in the eyes of other people, but in your eyes.

You must open your mind to the broader world around you, as well as your context within the history of art. You cannot hide in a closet in a vain attempt at sealed-off originality. History’s art giants all had their own stamp, but they did not worship the god of originality at the expense of everything else.

Finally, I would note that if the question was “how to become a financially successful artist” or a “remembered artist”, the answer would be different. While I believe you need all of the above, there is a whole additional list of things you would need to pursue, much of which is why I decided I preferred the business of tech to the business of art.

I cannot actually remember when constable.net first came into being. Maybe 1997 or 1998. This was my blog before anything was actually called a blog. Unfortunately, it has sat neglected since about 2000/2001, as I worked on other projects and other blogs.

I have finally ported it over to Wordpress. Apologies to those of you arriving via search engines and hitting broken links. The “artists on art” art history section has been preserved and can be browsed by clicking on the tab above. I have not yet figured out what I am going to do with the art history chronology tables, given the new layout.

• For first-person writings of artists, click here
• For essays on art, click here

In addition, on this site you will find old painting projects of mine and now some medium-old virtual world art projects.  My more recent form of creative expression has been cooking, and that can all be found over at The Constables’ Larder.

Now that this site is on a modern and flexible platform, I hope to be posting more here.  But really, all I can say right now is: “it’s about time!”

In 2007, I self-published a book focusing on self-expression through one’s avatar.  I took the photographs in the virtual world of Second Life. Below you can find a few pages from the book and a link to a low-resolution pdf of the entire thing.

Entire book: PDF format, 4.7MB download

When I first discovered Second Life in 2004, I was fascinated. Over the next several years, I got quite involved both artistically and professionally, the latter with a great team at The Electric Sheep Company. I had always been a painter, and thus focused on painting in art history, but Second Life inspired a much deeper appreciation of architecture.

My time in Second Life pretty much ceased in 2008, but I had some pretty cool experiences over the years in between. I really enjoyed engaging with the team at Linden Lab (creators of SL) and the many creative souls who flocked to Second Life to experiment with fashion (such as my friends behind Paper Couture), architecture and new forms of art.

Below are a few of my own “builds” from those years that I wanted to remember here.

Mexican-style church for one of our remakes of Tableau Island

The garden and platform I created in the clouds to display my photography book Avatar Expressions

I had the priviledge of designing and building a virtual museum for the New Media Consortium, one of ESC's early clients. It even had a faux-Calder hanging from the ceiling.

The interior of the museum had dual spiral ramps, and we got to open the museum with pieces from SF MOMA's collection. In full disclosure, it turned out that this design was a terrible way to view art in this virtual environment, but one learns by trying!

Probably the most special part was a secret room we made with interactive references to artists such as Mondrian, Haring, Demuth and others.

At ESC, we worked on some pseudo-replica pieces for some very big brands in retail, media and travel. In the earliest days of the company, I got to roll up my sleeves and help with our virtual creations. This project, a virtual replica of Laguna Beach, was the first thing I worked on with Electric Sheep.

I have to include a picture of Chester. This was a giant deep sea fish I made one night as a lark with Cory Edo, and then we made it "freeware" for anyone to grab. Amusingly enough, Chester became quite a hit, and we would find him all over SL, sometimes in the most unusual places.

Every year I tried to create something for both the Relay for Life fundraiser and the winter festival. This was my winter festival creation for 2006.

Like many others, during my Second Life days, I developed a side-fascination with SL’s many bridges. In the summer of 2007, I photographed 62 bridges around SL. For anyone interested, the gallery is on Flickr.

In March 2006, I photographed and compiled a virtual coffee table book on some of the best architectural builds in Second Life at the time. I would say that the sophistication and quality of creations in that virtual world increased quite a bit over the subsequent years, but this was an interesting marker and one of the first formal recordings of this new art form.

(photos were taken with an old digital camera, so some glare and color loss)

Oil on Canvas, 38"x28"

oil on canvas, 48"x24"

pencil on paper

acrylic on canvas

oil on canvas

acrylic on canvas

house paint on wood, 2001

house paint on canvas, 2001

Lizzie, pencil (guessing late 80's, early 90's)

John L, 1999

self-portrait, charcoal, 2001

oil on canvas

ballpoint on paper

The question was recently posed whether people should feel guilty for calling a piece of artwork “bad”, as if the notion of passing judgement on such an intangible and subjective item was not only impossible but wrong. Being the opinionated artist that I am, I could not resist a little commentary.

People have been defining art as bad and good since the first hand outline was sketched on a cave wall. In the very early days, when art was really about representation, rather than expression, it was a little easier to say, “5 fingers, yes, that’s right” or “arms don’t bend that way, do they?”. However, art is now an open field. Common opinions of bad and good often are directed by the fashions of the times, but art is now clearly a subjective thing. If the hand has 7 fingers, it can now mean whatever you want it to mean (what historians sometimes forget, however, is that often the artist just felt like doing seven damn fingers).

Within the world of art, there is a troubling trend. Many people have become scared to say, “I think that is good/bad.” Viewers go into galleries and say, “I don’t know what I like. Please tell me what is Good.” I ask myself how it is possible for people to abdicate their own opinions. These viewers are afraid of being wrong, and thus looking foolish. Some are intimidated by the over-intellectualization that has gone on among critics, to the point where the real art is the b.s. in reviewers’ essays instead of the particular piece they are reviewing. Other viewers are influenced by the pseudo-politically-correct “open-mindedness” attitude that scares them from passing judgement. Still others are extremely uncomfortable with the uncertainty in art. These people like their world clearly defined, so they prop up gurus to prioritize and categorize for them.

The truth is that good merely means “I like” and bad means “I dislike”. The art world requires the concepts of subjective good and bad, because that is what drives the desire for improvement and the hard work that goes with it. Without judgements, we would be surrounded by mediocrity. As I write this, I happen to be in my studio surrounded by quite a few pieces that I would loudly define as bad. Bad! Bad! Bad! That is what over-painting and the term “first draft” were invented for. I never mind when a critic praises or disparages artwork, but I would like more of the world to have the confidence to rate the commentary as just another opinion, rather than word-from-on-high.

We need to be comfortable with the terms good and bad, and also understand their meanings and limitations. We need to be accepting of others’ opinions, and be willing to listen and possibly change their own. Opinions, shared ideas, and discourse drive progress and keep great art flowing forth.

From Robert Henri in The Art Spirit, 1923
“The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order.”

January 26, 2001

These are a few old poems from back in 1999/2000.  The first poem came about one morning as I sat in the Panhandle in San Francisco sketching these homeless men who kept on flocking to a single bench, never seeming to speak to each other.

The Panhandle, 1999
What is it about that bench
a solid tree-green bench not unlike any other
that calls the old and weary to rest and lean and crouch around their cigarettes?
The bearded one only appears occasionally,
lingering in the background
a chameleon whose battered blue jeans and gray-green jacket
materializes when company arrives
and sits.
They don’t speak to each other
just mentally prop each other up
and watch the wind snatch away their smoke
and silently wonder if it is snatching away their breath, too.

Untitled
speak with your hands
with rhythms
the silk scrim before your eyes
filters through truth and forgiveness
for lost hours and miles apart
the yellowed gauze covering your senses
blocks words
but not hands
and rhythms
should you accept their graces
should you call out
should you call
should you call for tidal flows, squalls,
and the red beacon of shore-warning.

Conclusions, 2000
A conch shell’s ocean
plumbs deeper depths
than the folding of these words
but intent, dear friend –
that pale, delicate morality
so fragile in its astronomical positioning –
is my natural thread
bringing closure to the arrows of this night

Painting is no longer about representation, it is about inspiration. However, painting today is too focused on the creation of the “new” rather than the creation of the “true”. The 20th century was infatuated with new painting styles and materials, which has led to a focus on the mode and medium of expression rather than the message being expressed. After one-and-a-half centuries of innovation, with so many art taboos shattered, with so much of the field colonized and long-inhabited, the search for the new is becoming increasingly shallow and repetitive. Creating the new, purely for newness’ sake, can bring academic significance but offers little long-term weight. Truth and beauty, on the other hand, have longevity — they affect the viewer and the resonance of that experience lingers for a long time. All three need to be combined to create art that has impact as well as freshness.

What is truth? Like everything in art, the concept of truth is completely subjective. People define their own truth. A person might wax eloquent on the truth embedded in Mondrian’s simplicity. I, on the other hand, only see sterile intellectual concepts placed on canvas. We both believe that we are right.

I view truth not simply as honesty, but as emotion or expression that has a deeper, more powerful effect on the viewer. Satire and deconstruction are objects of fashion; this kind of art is easily forgotten. Comments on the human condition have the strongest impact. The viewer can relate to the canvas, both today and — since the human condition stays consistent through the centuries regardless of how our environment changes — in the future. Truth about humanity does not need to focus solely on subject matter. Cezanne’s and Basquiat’s truth can be found in their paint handling. Their uncompromising passion leaps out of the canvas. Cezanne is more popular because he balanced the trinity of truth, beauty and innovation.

This year’s Whitney Biennial, a survey of American art from the past two years, is largely flat. Coverage is limited, naturally, to those artists who have fallen within the limited spotlight of curators and dealers. Much of the work is attractive, but few pieces have an impact. Shirin Neshat’s short film is an exception, because it combines beauty with a powerful statement on the human condition. Others, like Vic Munoz’s copy of The Raft of the Medusa in syrup, have wonderful wit but do not stay with you long. Munoz’s images are striking because craft and technique seem so rare in today’s art world, but craft alone does not give a piece of art truth. So many works I see today are trying hard to be innovative. They are desperately fresh, and inescapably derivative. They are “neat” and “funky” rather than emotional and hard-hitting.

Why not live in the moment with disposable art to match our plastic wares and TV game shows? Certainly many artists in the latter 20th century pursued that theme. Sarcasm and kitsch are easier than emotional honesty. More difficult is the struggle to create something greater than ourselves, something that can outlast ourselves. Most human beings don’t want to be unexceptional. We want to be special, to have some nugget of brilliance in our own way. It might be fixing cars. It might be working a sable brush at 3am as lack of sleep wears on your eyes but the imperative of being better, making better, expressing better drives you on. And just as we hope for brilliance in ourselves, we like to touch it as well, whether in a conversation, reading a novel or staring at a canvas.

There are still more Cezannes, more Dostoevskys, to come. We will spot them more by their truth and their beauty than their hipness.

May 20, 2000