pictorial efficiency -- life lessons

What makes good art? There can be several elements conjoined in pleasing proportions that make for a compelling piece of art. There’s pictorial efficiency. So what is this quality shared by dancers and athletes we call ‘grace’? It’s a lack of extraneous effort, every muscle responding to exactly the right command and all of them together accomplishing a common goal, a jump, a turn, a burst of speed. This quality of efficiency is admired in other arts as well. In ‘GF1’, Marlon Brando as the godfather looks down into the coffin of his suddenly deceased hothead son, and after a long neutral contemplation only moves an eyebrow a quarter of an inch. Monk seemed to play just the black keys, using the fewest notes absolutely necessary. Back in the day of silent movies, Lionel Barrymore transformed himself on camera from Jekyll into Hyde. 

Pictorial efficiency asks how much can you do with how little? Saw a Picasso of a grecian head at the Los Angeles County Museum on a big white panel. It was all done in a single line in thin brown ink, no mistakes, no do-overs. There couldn’t have been more than a thimble full of ink in the whole thing, yet it commanded its wall space with weight and dignity. Velasquez, from about four hundred years ago, might turn out to be the best there ever was when it comes to agile application. His portraits full of exotic fabrics, laces and translucent pearls upon close inspection are all constructed with broad swaths of loose color seemingly applied in slashes and dabs. He was an ‘action painter’ who made his canvases speak in long sentences.

Traditional training for artists these days has included day-to-day field work in basic efficiency, like trying to maintain a household and a studio on a meager tradesman’s pay. Without outside support every piece of paper, each square of cardboard, and all purchased art supplies don’t leave the studio until every inch has been used up, squeezed dry, covered on both sides. From grocery store to dry goods, this notion of efficiency, sometimes called bare-bones frugality, enters each decision made, but in the studio is where it gets gritty. When nobody’s buying, when it isn’t even being seen by anyone, there’s not much immediate hope of recouping even the cost of a role of tape so every resource is treated with respect. Independent artists don’t throw away uncovered dried-up paint, neglect their brushes, or give up on anything that can still be used for something.

This confrontation with the harsher end of reality informs their approach to their art as well, and big results are going to be attempted with whatever comes to hand, simple and cheap. When pictorial efficiency goes off the chart, when the transformation of humble to unique is so extraordinary it leaves other artists wondering how it was achieved, you’re in the vicinity of interesting art. Doing a lot with a little is one of the pillars, always has been, in art as in life -- or is it the other way, no matter.