Breaking the Rules

Posted on Sunday, Jul 14, 2024 | Mental Health, Art, Creativity, Mental Illness, Art Therapy
Alex challenges the notion that there is a ‘right way’ to do things, drawing on examples from mathematics to art. He debates the value of strict adherence to traditional methods in art, arguing for a more individualized approach that embraces personal style and innovation. The discussion covers misconpective rules in artistic practices, such as avoiding black paint, and the constraints of following perceived artistic conventions. Emphasizing neurodiversity and personal expression, the speaker advocates for breaking rules when they stifle creativity, ultimately suggesting that art should be a liberating and enjoyable pursuit that transcends rigid frameworks.

Show Notes

Summary

In this podcast episode, the speaker challenges the notion that there is a ‘right way’ to do things, drawing on examples from mathematics to art. They debate strict adherence to traditional methods in art, arguing for a more individualized approach that embraces personal style and innovation. The discussion covers misconpective rules in artistic practices, such as avoiding black paint, and the constraints of following perceived artistic conventions. Emphasizing neurodiversity and personal expression, the speaker advocates for breaking rules when they stifle creativity, ultimately suggesting that art should be a liberating and enjoyable pursuit that transcends rigid frameworks.

Notes

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Transcript

There is, according to some people, a right way of doing things. This is an assertion that I usually disagree with. I say usually, because in the most philosophical sense, any such sweeping assertions as “there is a right way of doing things” is dubious to the point of idiocy, but by that same yardstick so is saying “I always disagree with such assertions”. I think you can already get a flavour of how this is going to go. Strap in kiddies, this is going to get DEEP!

Take the seemingly obvious and self-evident mathematical axiom that 1+1=2. Philosophical legends Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead reputedly spent 360 pages of their epic treatise Principa Mathematica demonstrating that this is indeed the case. This suggests that there is more than one way to skin that particular numerical feline.

So the idea that there is, for example, only one way to approach creating an oil painting of an apple on a plate has the strong stench of nonsense. Yet classically inclined artists tell us that we should learn to do things in a certain way, which is, to them, the correct way. This especially true for those artists that went to some prestigious school to learn how to do things the supposed “right way”.

In reality, this is less of a thing these days, especially since most artists don’t go to art school any more, and those that do are just as likely to be encouraged to fill a building up with concrete as paint a nude.

However, even among those of us who are self-taught, the imprint of supposed rules, dos and don’ts, cardinal sins etc. echo from blog posts and YouTube videos and turn up to haunt us at the most inopportune moments.

Here’s one that you tend to hear a lot: when painting, don’t use black paint. This is, we are told, because the colour black really doesn’t actually show up much in the real world, and where it does, it’s not really actually black, but just dark “all the other colours”. This is, in fact, broadly true, although it applies to all the other colours too, and obviously, black holes. More importantly, blacks tend to be a little flat and lifeless, and are often used by novices to darken other colours, which depending on the colour and the type and amount of black you use, will often not lead to the colour that you want and will frequently lead to some sort of horrible off brown or grey. Ever tried darkening yellow? Darkening hues can almost always be achieved more effectively and to better effect using other colours, for example, you candidate colour’s compliment. A similar issue arises when trying to lighten a colour with white. Colour theory is for another day though. Anyway, “don’t use black” is not the worst advice. Good advice even. Some extremely able and important artists simply don’t have it in their palette at all. Good on them.

But here’s the thing. I like black. I use it ALL THE TIME. Use all sorts of shades of it. I particularly like to combine it with another supposedly rookie error that sets classical artist’s teeth on edge - putting lines around depictions of 3 dimensional things. Most children, when asked to draw a human, will draw his or her outline, first, then fill in the details and daub in glorious technicolour. But unless you happen to live in Springfield then you’ll note that humans don’t have black lines around them. It’s one of the first things you get beaten out of you if you start taking the visual arts at all seriously. However, one of my artistic heroes is Alphonse Mucha. Google his work. On his posters at least, he put dark lines around all his humans. And everyone else for that matter. And if Mucha does it, you can bet your last pair of clean knickers that I do too. And guess what my favourite colour to do this with is?

There are effects, particularly when looking to create brutal contrast, or the aforementioned non-existent lines, that simply can’t be achieved with out lifeless old black.

Maybe you think my art is no better than that of a playschool kid, but I think it looks great. And if it grates on some people, then those are just the sort of people I exist to be the metaphorical lemon juice in the eye of. Why? Because, that’s why. And more specifically, as we’ll see, I don’t like bing told what to do. Black stays.

Some “rules”, however, transcend the more asinine “if you do this, then bad outcomes with ensue”. Some dictates fall into the more dangerous category of “you can’t do that, it’s cheating!” or the slightly less alarming but somehow more insidious “that’s just not how we do things darling”. The application of such techniques and approaches not only risk creating something less than perfect, or perhaps MORE than perfect, but to be discovered using them risks actual social ostracisation and or ridicule. At the very least side eye and muttered disdain. Some things that fall into this category:

  • Tracing and/or using grids to capture form and composition
  • Using AI for any creative process at all
  • Using an autotuner when performing live
  • Eschewing proper grammar and punctuation (ever tried to read Joyce? Or Woolf?)
  • Not taking yourself and/or your art VERY seriously. God forbid.
  • Probably lots more

For example, I use tracing for my drawings. Specifically I use tracedown or carbon paper - those black sheets that when you write on creates the equivalent black marks on the paper below. I’m very good at pencil drawing. My works are delicate and detailed. It took me a long time to get this good. A LOT of practise. So I CAN take and image and transfer it to another bit of paper freehand, I just choose not to. Why? Because it’s hard and tedious and always ends up looking a little off. So what? You might say. Do I not feel that you must suffer for my art? Do you now bang on about process all the time and how one should embrace the mundantiy?

And you would be correct. And I do occasionally do this stuff free-hand, just to prove to myself that I can. But really, I’m not doing that for myself at all. I’m doing it to get your voice out of my damn head!

You see, my process is filled up with the bits that are either necessary for the outcomes that I seek, or that I find pleasurable or relaxing to do. And since relaxation is the primary goal, I tend to prioritise the stuff that facilitates that. Which means less fiddling with the exact position of a nose, and more soothing, mindful shading. Remember geography class when you used to find trying to colour inside the country boundaries oddly relaxing? It’s like that.

But it does leave me with a nagging sense of imposter syndrome, which is the enemy of healing. Let me state this with absolute clarity - self-doubt, of which imposter syndrome is a form, and it’s ugly cousin low-self-esteem, are arguable the biggest enemies of good mental health. For a long time I wouldn’t talk about my techniques and approaches to art because I was afraid that someone would call me out, which is of course, completely irrational.

It’s worth noting that this is in part at least yet another neurodivergence thing. Us weirdos tend to have spent most of our existences being told by some person or another, in one way or another, that some thing or another that we were doing, or being was somehow wrong, and frequently finding ourselves ostracised or otherwise punished for doing/saying/drawing/thinking it. Most of the time it was not at all clear what we are doing that is so obnoxious to the delicate sensitivities of neurotypicals, or indeed why it was wrong at all. It leaves one a bit sensitive to criticism, and sometimes irrationally so.

What’s ironic, is that I’m a habitual breaker of rules. Especially if it is not absolutely clear why they exist. It’s an odd quirk of the autistic mind that we both feel compelled to follow rules, while being pathologically hostile to to rules that seem to us to be stupid. So we tend to be staunch, law abiding citizens, while aggressively shunning all the various unfathomable social conventions. At least where we think we can get away with doing so. And if you want to really entertain yourself by how warped my brain is, google Pathological Demand Avoidance aka PDA. Actually don’t, I’ll put a link in the show notes. Far be it for me to tell you what to do!

I digress, but suffice to say that if you tell me that I shouldn’t use black paint, you can bet your bottom dollar that I am going to do so, all the while feeling like a bit of a fraud for doing so. Go figure.

And here’s the rub - one of the things that attracts me to art, is the boundary pushing. Many people associate art with aesthetics.If things aren’t nice, they ain’t art. So Bob Ross and Coldplay are art, but Martin Creed and Napalm Death aren’t. Creed, won the Turner prize for turning a light off and on again. But in my mind, aesthetics is but a small feature of the artistic endeavours, and an extremely subjective one - I would much prefer to listen to Napalm Death than Coldplay, and musically Napalm were far more inventive and groundbreaking, despite all the shouting and sweating. Art, for me at least, is about creation, and therefore dull reproduction and repetition barely qualifies. If the machine at the Heinz factory can produce millions of something, then it’s not art, no matter how beautiful. This is, of course, a large part of what Warhol and the pop artists were alluding to.

So when Michael Craig-Martin put a glass of water on a shelf in a gallery and called in an oak tree, people quite reasonably said “if that’s art then ANYTHING can be art”, which is precisely right, and precisely wrong at the same time. It’s not a nuanced point either. If something is presented as art, then it is art. A can of soup on a supermarket shelf is not a work of art, but if you can convince someone to put it in a gallery, then it is. Whether that constitutes GOOD art IS a nuanced point. Let’s pretend that it is for the sake of this conversation. If someone buys the exact same brand of soup and puts it in the gallery next door, then that is art too. But that most likely IS bad art, by merit of being derivative alone. If every gallery in the world had the same tin, then there’s some theoretical point when that particular item stops being art and magically transforms back into a commodity and we start calling galleries supermarkets.

The point is, repetition is the death of art. Any item reproduced in sufficient numbers degrades in value to the point it is worthless, and anything that has no intrinsic worth can not, by definition, be art. The contents of each of those tins of soup will vary slightly, they are at their very essence unique, but to all intents and purposes they are the same. At the macro level, they have very little intrinsic value outside of their utility and what that’s worth to any given shopper. We’ve strayed into economics here. It’s a subject for another day, but art and economics are bedfellows, as icky as that makes all us creatives feel.

Back to my core thesis. If repetition is the death of art, then uniqueness is it’s beating heart. Art thrives on novelty. Art REQUIRES novelty, just try and recording a Radiohead song without permission and see what happens, I dare you. And you know what stifles novelty? Rules. Bloody rules. In fact, it’s arguable that rules exist specifically to curb novelty. The game of chess wouldn’t be much fun for anyone if people only followed the rules that they liked.

There’s an obvious counter to this argument, which is that, even by sticking precisely to the rules, there are, to all intents and purposes, a near infinite number of possible chess games. Which is true, but most of those games are so pointless and silly that they can be ignored. What’s left is largely dictated by probability and the conventions of the chess community, and for the purposes of this argument, conventions are just pseudo-rules that can and should be broken. Deep Blue didn’t beat Kasparov by sticking to convention.

So if art is so conceptually broad that it strays into economics and soup then is it not the same as saying that there are no rules to be broken? And this brings us back to my beloved black paint. You see there is always good taste, historical context, personal reputation, broader societal dictates and taboos and a raft of other ambient conditions to consider - in short, context. Banksy would have been laughed out of the Royal Academy a hundred years ago, but there is nary a middle class abode that doesn’t bear his imprint somewhere, if only on the side of a coffee cup. We’ll side step that he would never have turned up at the RA since then everyone would know who he is, but you get my point. Miles Davis, arguably one of the most important and inventive musicians of all time would have been laughed out of every jazz club were he to have tried to play any of his seminal Some Kind of Blue 20 years earlier.

Art, or indeed any creation, that in retrospect can be tagged as “ahead if its time”, was, in its time, considered pointless drivel and subjected to ridicule, or more likely, completely ignored. There’s no point in staring at your 6 foot sculpture of Margaret Thatcher made entirely of Babybel wax feeling your genius is being shunned, since you don’t get to ascribe genius to yourself, only other people can do that. And those others are almost always the very gatekeepers of taste and decorum that gleefully create the rules to which you find yourself on the wrong side of. It’s a Catch-22.

SO where does this leave us? If shunning the rules is the equivalent of biting the hand that feeds you, then are we not all doomed to mindless reproduction? Well, the existence and popularity of Banksy should suggest otherwise. Acceptance by and to “The Establishment” is only important if you care about such things, and the vast majority of people outside the point one percent of the one percent don’t. But it’s worth observing the rules for a couple of reasons:

) Many of them exist for a reason. And although that doesn’t mean you can’t that reason, it’s worth at least understanding that reason before chucking it out. Pollock didn’t use a squeegee and a string because he didn’t know what paint brushes were for. 2) RULES ARE FUN TO BREAK, and you can only break them if you know they’re there

But from my perspective, learn the rules, don’t, it’s not important. Rules are only important if they get in the way of you enjoying yourself. There are plenty of rules that I happily follow, I’m hardly even aware that they’re there, because they suit me, but you can be sure if they started getting in my way I would drop without missing a beat. Does that mean that my art isn’t acceptable? I don’t think I’m particularly radical. To be honest, I suspect my art is pretty pedestrian. Some people like it, some don’t. Most are blissfully unaware that I exist at all.

So since I largely don’t care what the establishment would think of me if they even knew I exist and that I think that lots of the rules are stupid anyway, why would I feel imposter syndrome? Well, it’s been a choppy journey, and I wasn’t always this preternaturally self-assured. In fact, it’s quite likely that I’m trying to convince myself where as much as you. Bucking conventions is a risky business, even for an old-hand like me. That comes with its own anxiety, and we are always our own worst critics. And if breaking rules wasn’t a bit risky and uncomfortable, then it wouldn’t be fun, would it?

If breaking the rules isn’t your jam, don’t feel that you need to, but you’re always breaking some somebody’s rules, so you probably are anyway. For those of us who like to push at the edges, stand proud and stand your ground. This is not a rallying call. It’s simply a suggestion. Boat rocking can leave you a little queasy, and annoy the other passengers, but this shouldn’t put deter you. It certainly shouldn’t make you feel bad. If art is to be your release, then you need to feel unconstrained, and you need to value the work that you produce, regardless of what others may think. Otherwise the process is always going to feel unsatisfactory and confining and having some real fun will seem like a guilty pleasure rather than the blossoming it should be.

No homework this time. Just be yourself. Go revel in it.