How to be a Great Artist

Adobe partnered General Assembly and Uptut hosted me for a design workshop where I shared my design philosophy. Below is the piece that I shared

Welcome to Sunday Letters, where I share updates on my design studio and work. I am posting this update after almost a month and this one is a bit unusual. Normally I would post about the work I am doing, on growing the business and related stuff but this one is about the ideas that I presented recently at a workshop.

(Regular updates and behind the scenes of building a design studio will resume from next week.)

• Introduction: Teaching vs. doing; perspective on learning and experience

• Creativity can't be taught still how to learn to be creative

• Autodidact vs. institutional learning

• Example of notable autodidacts that are artists & Designers

• Ingredients for creating great work

• Concept of creation through rigour and exposure to reorganise information

• Art & Design mirrors nature: Golden Ratio examples

• Process steps: Exposure, hardship, synthesis

• Polishing through practice or apprenticeship

• Be a self curiosity driven student of your field
  

Adobe partnered General Assembly and Uptut hosted me for a design workshop where I shared my work philosophy. Here is the complete piece

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Let me start by saying that I absolutely do not believe in teaching

By the end of this you will either hate what I have to say or love it. There is no in between.

In about 80% of the cases a professional only becomes a teacher if they are not good at doing the actual thing

You must have heard the saying- those who cannot go to the sea, make fishnets.

It basically means that if you are not a good enough sailor to go into the sea but you want to be in the profession, you start making fishnets or start teaching about sailing.

Its the same thing- If you were actually any good you would be doing it not teaching.

I take most of my heuristic from ancients. If you were a great warrior you would be fighting the war, not teaching about the war. Granted that warriors do retire and train the next generation in apprenticeship model of learning not institutional

When it comes to things that are created, when you are required to connect dots. Nobody can teach you those things, they can only come by doing.

But lucky for you I will give you all the ingredients of the recipe of making something great but you will have to figure out the recipe yourself.

There are two ways of learning anything either you are like being taught-in a university or an institution and can only learn when someone else is teaching you or you are an autodidact where you like learning things yourself, driven by things that you are interested in and your curiosity.

Now if you are someone who is constantly need to be taught then you are not creative.

All the creative professions need you to be an autodidact and all the greats and legends that have been here on this earth were autodidacts- do you think Beethoven created symphony because his teacher told him how to do it?

Do you think Ramanujan wrote those formulas of mathematics because G.H. Hardy told him how to do it? NO!

Now by this time some of you might have lost me and some of you must have related so hard with this.

Now how can you be Ramanujan of your creative field, how can you be great at your thing?

As I told you earlier I cannot give you the recipe I can only give you the ingredients and here are ingredients of making great art- and by art I mean everything that is creative from painting to mathematics.

You are just a vessel- for the information that you have consumed.

You consume things- in the form of visuals, hearing, emotions and feelings and then you organize them in some or the other way in your brain and when they are organized or even disorganized you spit them out the other side in your preferred format and that is art.

And now the more cracked your brain chemistry is, the better you will organize that data in your mind, the better it will align with things that god and nature has already created- like emotions, natural patterns and better your art will be.

Any design or art- is just trying to replicate what nature has already done for years and any great piece of art is great because it resembles the design of nature.

Let me give you some examples- The Mona Lisa- Do you know why it is so famous, apple logo, Parthenon in Greece and your crush, or the person you like. It is because of the golden ratio. Anyone's face is more attractive because it closely assembles.

Now, you brain chemistry can only be altered to produce great work by a selected few things- Pain, Misery, Hunger, Loss and trauma. I am sorry but I only spit facts.

So the process is this- Expose yourself to wide and different types of information- through all senses- this could mean travel, books, fiction, architecture, music and then if you are lucky your destiny will give you pain, misery, hunger and trauma and when you will sit to combine both what will come out from the other side will be what you call a piece of art.

Last thought- then if you want to polish your art, you will need to do it enough times and be the student of the field and like everything about it.