embracing the amateur (thoughts on art)
Note: This post is inspired by ava's art feelings and Vaudeville Ghosts make bad art, found on the discovery feed.
Around two years ago, I found a funny radio play called "Professor van Dusen" in the audio library of the German public broadcaster DLF. It's ... I don't want to say "a ripoff", but ... a "heavily inspired" by Sherlock Holmes"-kind of thing, focusing on the titular professor and his assistant. They go around the world solving crimes, in a very late-1800s-early-1900s-whimsy fashion (think Around the World in Eighty Days). The main difference to Sherlock Holmes is that the main character isn't actually a detective. He's a professor, and he does the crime solving as a side thing. Whenever it comes up, he's very adamant about being called an "amateur criminologist." He says this partly because it's the truth, and as a learned and rigorous old-timey gentleman, he's concerned with keeping the facts straight. But there's also this sense of pride to it, like he'd rather be an amateur.
This kind of attitude - embracing the amateurish, and being proud of it - has stuck with me. When I read ava's post, I thought about it again in connection with art.
My relationship with art (especially art creation) has been a tangled one. Art has been a constant throughout my life, but I've never 100% committed to it. If I hadn't taken the path that has brought me to Japan, I think I probably would've gone to art school or study some other art- or design-related thing. But I didn't, so art has always been "just a hobby" for me.
I think the field of tension between feeling the artistic urge to express your inner vision and the technical limitations (the tools, the skills) is something that everyone who has even just done so much as dabble in the art space is familiar with. You have an idea, but you can't feel express it appropriately. There's a rift between the image inside of your head and what gets put on the page. I have dealt with it over and over again. It's super frustrating.
To solve this issue, there are two main approaches:
- Accept that you lack what it takes and practice / study to improve your skills
- Say "fuck it", accept the limitations and and work with them
The first option is considered the "proper" way of doing things. Want to paint landscapes? You first have to master perspective. Portraits? Study the anatomy of the human skull until you can draw it perfectly from memory. Fantasy worlds? Do live drawing and study the real world to give your creations a solid foundation.
The second approach is often seen as childish and immature. In my teens, when deviantart was the place to be for young artists on the internet, people who countered every criticism with "it's just my style" would get mocked to hell and back. Occasionally I'd participate too, because I agreed with the ones doing the mocking. Of course you have to learn the fundamentals first. If you don't, you're just being lazy and want the payoff without putting in the effort.
Until some time around my late 20s, I kept that "just keep practicing"-mindset. But at the same time, I grew frustrated with it. Especially after graduating from university, now with a full-time job, I was only able put so much time into art. Of course, it's always a matter of finding that time. Even now, if I really wanted, I could spend every minute of my life that I don't spend on working, eating, or sleeping on art practice. But, you know ... there are also other things that I want to do. Other hobbies, spending time with friends, just relaxing every now and then.
So if I can't or don't want to put in the practice time, it is just a foregone conclusion that I can never "become good at art", then? For a while, this thought was really vexing me.
After moving to Tokyo, I started going to a lot of museums and art galleries, book shops, and also events like COMITIA or Tokyo Zine Fest.1 Even though I'd always been aware of different types of art through the internet before, the amount of different styles I was exposed to went up significantly. And I noticed one thing: Not every artist that I liked stood out because of their technical skill. Some artwork even looked crude or "badly drawn" at first, but there was still something about it that reached me. And when I tried to replicate this kind of art myself, I realized that it wasn't easy to do. In my replication attempt, there somehow was a lack of refinement.
In Japanese, there's a word for this: heta-uma (ヘタウマ). It means "bad, but good." Wikipedia defines it as (paraphrasing slightly) "poorly drawn, but with an aesthetically conscious quality, opposed to a polished look."2 Recently, one of my favourite artists using this kind of style has been Ryo Shibata (Instagram Link). Another example (in the realm of calligraphy) is Yuichi Inoue.
These kind of works might not have the qualities that are typically considered to be markers of "good" or "professional" art: Correct proportions, elaborate detail, etc. But they are still considered and refined in their own way - the overall composition, the placement of the brushstrokes, the selection of the motif. These artists told me that you can make "effective" art, even if the style is amateurish, and even an amateurish style can be refined and polished.3
Now, my approach to art has changed considerably. I will never be able to put in the necessary time and effort to reach "old masters"-level of technical skill. And to be frank, I'm not all that interested in hyper-realism anyway. Instead, I'd rather lean towards accepting my limitations, and work with them instead of against them to find a way to express what I want to express. Just like Professor van Dusen puffing his chest and explaining that he's an amateur criminologist, I want to proudly proclaim that I'm an amateur artist. I'm not trying to get into art school or participate in some kind of competition, so why worry about it? Part of this requires the courage to, like Vaudeville Ghost put it in their post, to "make bad art."4
Needless to say, I still want to improve. I'll still practice proportions and perspective, try to improve my use of values, become better at using colors or the medium I'm using. But now, these things feel less like a hurdle that I have to clear before I can do actual art. They're just optional things I can choose to do if I want to. But regardless if I'm "successful" or not, I'm still making art, as long as I'm earnestly trying to express something. And that thought is very freeing.
Footnotes
Both of these events are strong personal recommendations, definitely check them out if they happen to fall into the time frame of your Japan trip. They don't require reservation, you can just get tickets at the entrance. COMITITA is like the more famous Comiket, but focused on original artwork instead of doujinshi / fan art (and considerably less crowded). Tokyo Zine Fest is, well ... all about zines, but even if you can't read Japanese, there's still a lot to explore.↩
The English article defines heta-uma as a "Japanese underground manga movement [that] started in the 1970s", but the Japanese article puts it a bit better: While a concrete name was first put on it in the 1970s, the general concept (or maybe sensibility) existed way before that time (one of the examples of the style is a drawing of a rabbit by 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu).↩
These are, of course, no ground-breaking discoveries. A cursory glance at a book on art history tells you that artists started rejecting academic art as early as the mid-19th century. They developed their own movements and styles, which have become valued for their own merits even in academic circles. I knew about these things (we learned about them in school), but they were never all that relevant to me until the circumstances made me think about my outlook on art.↩
A common defense of LLM-based image generation (that Vaudeville Ghost also mentions) is that "you're just not good at art", that "you can't put in the time" and the LLM helps you to "express what you wouldn't be able to express otherwise." However, this perspective is overly concerned with the superficial (art is only art if it "looks good") and tends to overly flatten down art into a product, removing the interesting edges and details caused by the artist's limitations and their way of dealing with them.↩