Envy Yourself! (to the extent that you can)

August 26, 2020

Although envy is incurable, today I’m proposing a cure for it.

Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Sneezy, Happy, Grumpy—wait, let’s start again. Envy is one of the seven capital sins, together with Washington, Moscow, Berlin—well, never mind.

Envy is a nasty little psychological habit that has the power to ruin your life. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of envy, then I envy you. So, let me explain: envy is a misdirection of wanting. Envy is “wanting gone bad.” Envy is resenting someone for having something that you don’t have. The something can be an object, a quality, a characteristic, a talent, an achievement. Or good looks, or lots of friends, or sweet-smelling armpits, for instance in babies after their bath.

Minestrone ingredients (as per Jamie Oliver): 1 clove of garlic, 1 red onion, 2 carrots, 2 sticks of celery, 1 courgette, 1 small leek, 1 large potato, 1 x 400 g tin of cannellini beans, 2 rashers of higher-welfare smoked streaky bacon, olive oil, ½ teaspoon dried oregano, 1 fresh bay leaf, 2 x 400 g tins of plum tomatoes, 1 liter organic vegetable stock, 1 large handful of seasonal greens, such as savoy cabbage, curly kale, or chard, 100 g whole-wheat pasta, ½ a bunch of fresh basil (optional), Parmesan cheese.

Envy ingredients (as per The Envy Recipe Book): resentment, ill will, malice, yellow bile, black bile, bitterness, frustration, obsession, daggers, rat poison, anonymous letters using cut-up headlines from a crumpled newspaper, rotten moldy Parmesan cheese years—years!—beyond the sell-by date.

From Catherine Willis’s prodigious creativity.

To explain the cure, I’ll describe a clinical case using myself as a hypothetical infected patient. I’m a devoted art lover, and have been for decades. Museums and galleries, visits to artists’ studios, pilgrimages to the birth places of great artists, books about the creative processes of painters and sculptors, I live for it all. I’m a fan of Klee, Mondrian, Cézanne, Albers; also of Fra Angelico and Caravaggio; also of Morandi, Brancusi, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Mary Frances Judge, Catherine Willis, and a hundred other marvelous inspired and inspiring human beings.

But let’s focus on Sean Scully for a moment. Let’s let Wikipedia introduce him (abridged):

Sean Scully (born 30 June 1945) is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Scully has also been a lecturer and professor at a number of universities and is highly regarded for his writing and teachings.

Among many other beautiful things (this is me talking now, thank you Wikipedia), among many other beautiful things Scully paints large canvasses of juxtaposed rectangles of varying sizes, creating vibrant territories of colors and shapes that are deeply meaningful to look at.

Recently I took this photo of Scully’s “Wall of Light” sculpture at Château La Coste, a stunning modern-art open-air collection (and winery) in the south of France.

Scully is very successful, you know? He’s, you know, accomplished and probably, almost certainly very well-off (“rich”), you know? His 2006 show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was, like, so amazing it made me feel like I was, like, a single hair on the skull of a bald gnat, you know? Scully can do a lot of things that I can’t do and will never be able to do, you know? The only way I could feel better about myself would be for Sean Scully to fail. Like, Scully = Skull; Scully is a bald gnat. I’ll never forget his 2006 Met show, or his 1996 show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Scully won’t let me forget Scully.

If I were to envy Scully, I’d wish him ill; I’d use my thoughts of him to diminish myself; I wouldn’t “see” his work, I’d only see the difference between the vast scale of his accomplishments and of his life, and the not-so-vast scale of my own life. I’d eat rotten moldy Parmesan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The cure for envy is to look away from someone’s success, accomplishments, fame, and riches, and instead to look at his or her human qualities and artistic processes; to look away from externals and toward internals; to look away from “where someone else is” and instead to ponder “where you are yourself, and where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there.” Then Sean Scully becomes a source not of envy but of motivation; he becomes your guide, teacher, and friend.

I’m using the words “Sean Scully” to mean anyone who’s accomplished and successful, right? A symbol of a phenomenon, so to speak. I’ve never met Scully and I don’t know how the flesh-and-bones guy really thinks. But it doesn’t change the gist of my argument.

Attitude
Sean Scully is curious about the world, and also about art and human psychology, and also politics and history. To the extent that I can, I’m going to read, study, watch, study, read, and also watch and study. In my free time I’ll read, study, watch, pay attention, and absorb, digest, and integrate information. And I’ll do it not out of duty but out of curiosity, because life itself is endlessly fascinating.
Commitment
Sean Scully works hard and works well. To the extent that I can, I’m going to get out of bed committed to my work day, committed to tasks, committed to processes, committed to step-by-step procedures, committed to the enjoyment of handling my materials and playing with them. I think it was Somerset Maugham (another terribly prolific creative individual) who said that “a change of work is the best rest.” No, wait, it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said it. Maybe it was Plato. Or perhaps the Entity Preceding Plato.
Skill
Sean Scully is very skillful. To the extent that I can, day by day, moment by moment, I’m going to improve my skills through practice, repetition, trial-and-error, thinking and doing, feeling and doing, exploring and doing. And practicing, did I mention practicing?
Growth
Sean Scully learns and grows. Before he could paint, he couldn’t paint; before he could sculpt, he couldn’t sculpt; before he could make an omelet, he couldn’t make an omelet. I’ll start by making an omelet, and I’ll go from there. I probably have another thirty years left in this life to learn and grow, to the extent that I can. If I haven’t learned all I want to learn by the time I die, I’ll just reincarnate and start again. As long as I don’t reincarnate as a bald gnat, I’ll be okay.

Ah, I was forgetting: fame and riches. They don’t matter.

I visited Google Translate and I did a back-and-forth, translating a snippet from English to Latin, then the resulting snippet back to English, and so on for a few rounds until Google sent me a cease-and-desist order.

Open the door, and let me in!

July 30, 2016

Would you like to hang-glide over Mount Everest? It's a breeze . . . if you know how to do it.

Hang-gliding over Everest is exactly like making an omelet: until you know how to do it, you don't know how to do it. Speaking foreign languages, playing the violin, swimming, you name it: if it's a skill, you have to learn it in some way or another.

"I have no talent for languages." "Swimming doesn't come naturally to me." "I can't improvise at the cello. It's so difficult!" We all react in this way as regards any number of skills, which vary from person to person. And we feel certain that these skills are eternally out of reach for us. This tends to predetermine the outcome: No languages, no swimming, no improvising. The door is closed!

If you want to, you can open that door.

When it comes to learning skills, the skills themselves are secondary and peripheral. What's primary and central is the attitude that you bring to the job of learning the skills. As soon as you relegate skills to their proper, secondary place, everything becomes easier to learn.

Attitude is a predisposition. It requires no experience, no technique, no knowledge. It only requires the willingness to enter into something. It’s an acknowledgment of infinite possibilities further ahead, while skill means to inhabit one or more of those possibilities. The attitude is malleable, adaptable; specific technical skills are constructed, as it were: tangible realities, defined in gesture, sound, movement, or any other medium.

Children embody the attitude, which for them is as natural as breathing. It combines curiosity and playfulness, and it’s completely nonjudgmental. Is a baby afraid of looking ridiculous? Not for a second. Is a toddler afraid of looking ridiculous? It’s possible, but there are some who love to be funny and to trigger laughter, which is a way of being ridiculous--on purpose.

This baby boy doesn’t have the skill to do the hula hoop, but to him it doesn’t matter one iota. The attitude is everything.

Time passes, and the baby becomes a child. Among other things, “becoming” means developing skills, which is the same as giving individual shape to your underlying attitude.

Time passes some more, and the child becomes a young woman. Skills develop in increments, while the attitude remain constant—and totally independent of the pursuit of skill.

To my eyes, one wonderful thing about these young performers is the no-big-deal ease they display. The ease comes from internalizing instructions and gestures. “This is what I’m going to do. It requires this, this, and this. I’ll practice it all, and I’ll keep practicing forever. I love practicing.” True skill means the absence of struggle, although the learning of a skill may involve struggle—or at least the willingness to fail repeatedly in order to succeed.

Here’s another kid who redefines the pursuit of skill. His performance is perfect in itself, independent of high technical skills set to objective standards. It’s perfect because fully embodied, willed, and borne of love.

He’s responding to a great Brazilian musician, Luiz Gonzaga. Watch the master being perfect in himself, with skills developed over decades of playing, playing, and playing. Gonzaga is surrounded by accomplished pros, but you can be sure all of them were little kids once upon a time, with no skills but plenty of attitude.

Writing, cooking, performing brain surgery, running the country: they’re all the same, in that they require the steady, incremental acquisition of skills . . . plus the attitude without which the skills can’t exist.

Suppose you need to take ten steps to learn the skills you’re aiming for. It’ll go like this:

Attitude, plus step #1.
Attitude, plus steps #1 and 2.
Attitude, plus steps #1 and 2 and 3.

And on, and on.

It’s no use wanting to get to #10 while avoiding #9 or #6 or any intermediate step. And it’s no use wanting to acquire skills without embodying the attitude to begin with. However long it takes you to get there, you’ll do it step by step.

See you at the top of Mount Everest! And don't forget to bring your accordion.

The Task is You

June 30, 2016

What is craftsmanship?

Let's go visit Claude Monet, in his later years, painting in his garden in Giverny. To my way of thinking, he integrates five dimensions at the same time: the garden, to which he keeps turning his receptive gaze; the palette in left his hand, where he finds the colors he’ll employ stroke by stroke; the brush, which is amalgamated with his right hand; the canvas, where he imprints his decisions; and the totality of his self—that is, his presence, his back and shoulders and arms, his energies and desires. I don’t think he’s painting; I think he’s working on himself through the work on his materials, and one of the results of this work is “painting.”

This is unique film of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), painting outdoors, 'en plein air', in his garden at Giverny. The footage is in two segments. Firstly we see the artist outdoors talking to a gentleman. Then we see Monet painting a water lily-padded pond, a subject for which he is most famed.

It’s really tempting to see a separation between you and the world, or you and the object that you’re handling, or you and the thing that you’re making. But your thoughts and gestures make the sounds you make when you play the cello, your thoughts and gestures cause your relationships to go the way the go, your thoughts and gestures produce your email or blog post. The thing in the end is “you, in disguise.”

With a skill like pottery, you can see how the potter’s thoughts and gestures are in the process of disguising themselves as a material object.

The exhibit "Icheon: Reviving the Korean Ceramic Tradition" was on display at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, AMOCA from October 12th- December 29th, 2013.

So, you don’t make a clay pot; you work on your thoughts and gestures, and they become a pot. Or any other thing. Craftsmanship in this sense isn’t simply skill or technique; rather, it’s the meeting between the individual and his or her task; the melding between the two, where the individual “is” the task.

A commercial sign maker’s craftsmanship is essentially no different from Monet’s.

Trabalho de André Andrade - Cartazista do Carrefour de Recife Saiba mais em: http://www.ideafixa.com/a-tipografia-do-trabalhador-brasileiro/

To put simply, the medium of craftsmanship is immaterial. It doesn’t matter how you engage in craftsmanship: pen and paper, clay, chalk, wood, sound, or light are all the same, because it’s the engagement itself that counts.

Pardon My Dust, takes you into a world of art very much unexplored and discovers a unique sketch adventure that has become a very special art form. A canvas, many of us have seen, but never used, Peter Han has transformed into chalk art. Witness Peter's incredible talent as he discusses how he achieves his calculated art of illustrating, he calls "Dynamic Sketching." Directed by Adriel de la Torre Filmed with the Red Scarlet. Camera by Roman Arriola and Freddy Duarte Assistant Camera by Brandon Ruta Edited by Roman Arriola Executive Produced by Randy Martinez Music by Tim Garland "The Architects Eye" from audionetwork.com contact@snowglobestudios.net www.peterhanstyle.com

The smallest things in your life are the result of your craftsmanship: a peanut butter sandwich, for instance. The scope of your process as you make the sandwich may be narrower and shallower than Monet’s process as he paints, but the actual process is the same: your back and legs, your life story, your breathing habits; tools, a rhythm, a style; gestures, materials; the “product” is always a “by-product.”

Caleb and Annie teach Hayley to make a PB&J!

When we look at one of his finished paintings, we witness Monet’s processes—not just his hand-to-eye coordination, but his psychology, his life story, the way he moved and breathed. If a painting is great, it’s because the painter’s processes are somehow integrated: affirmative, directed, and connected. The painting makes an impact on the viewer in part because it’s a manifestation of coherence. By proxy, or indirectly, the manifestation of Monet’s coherence renders the viewer coherent as well—a little or a lot, depending; the viewer feels excited, elevated, and grateful.

We feel excited and elevated when we see a kid doing something simple but well—because in that moment the kid is coherent, and we love him or her for it. I mean, the kid isn’t just cute; she represents something bigger than herself; and we “become big with her, through her.”

Talent, concentration, dedication.

Ah, no, I don’t know how to define coherence any better than I know how to define craftsmanship. But I’ll put some words out there: organic logic, balance, purposefulness, the mind having become the body and the body having become the mind. And, even harder to explain: the dissolution of the ego, the individual’s becoming affirmed by disappearing into the task.

Amazing kid with excellent basketball skills!

You can craft a sentence; you can craft a relationship; you can craft a stratagem to undo conflict. The process is the same: your life story, your breathing habits; a rhythm, a style; choices and decisions, in space and time. And the end product is always the same: you, in disguise.

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