Trust Your Materials

CONSTRAINT IS THE KEY to a classical artistry, and some of the most basic and powerful constraints are those that limit our MATERIALS—the raw stuff that we manipulate to form a finished artwork. In some arts, materials are closely related to tools (which do the manipulating) and subject (the outcome of those manipulations), both of which may also constrain an artist.

You might recall yet another sort of constraint that About the Artist recently examined: periodic deadlines. By working within one or more of these limits over an extended length of time, you stand to gain the craftsmanship needed to master your artmaking process and thereby prime your muse for abundant creativity.

Photograph by Thegreenj. Wikimedia Commons.

All artists must use materials, in some way, and the best artists will always use them well. But throughout history, there have been a handful of artists who excelled by turning to the same materials over and over again. Such regularity forms the basis of a powerful external constraint, and as we look at some of those artists, you’ll see how you can do the same.

THE IDEA OF MATERIALS no doubt seems most at home in the visual arts, and it is there that we should begin. If you are a painter, sculptor, cartoonist, potter, architect, or other creator of visual artwork, consider limiting the range of materials that you use on a regular basis by deliberately simplifying your collection of paints, clays, pencils, stone, or what have you.

The watercolor painter Phillip Shaffer, for instance, uses at most seven different tubes of watercolor paint—the same seven for all of his work. He mixes them as necessary (after all, the possible combinations are infinite) to paint whatever subject he has chosen, and in many cases he only calls upon three or four tubes. Shaffer has even written a book, entitled Painting with Four Tubes of Paint, in which he describes how this constrained artistry “can stretch your imagination.”

In the book, Shaffer suggests that possessing a vast selection of paints can easily lead to maximalist results because “many people get into trouble right off the bat [when] their color mixtures get out of control.” He explains how artists who instead become familiar with only a handful of basic colors will naturally find classical results: “Your goal is to become so familiar with your colors that, even without thinking, when you look at a mountain, you’re able to say, ‘Such-and-such a color is the main color in this mixture with just a smidgeon of this and dash of that.’” When you no longer need to focus all of your energy on mixing colors, you’ll be surprised at how many creative ideas may pop into your head.

Once an artist masters her materials, in other words, it becomes easier for her to see their creative possibilities. “It is just as inappropriate to make a heavy-walled piece of porcelain as it is to make a delicate piece of soft earthenware,” observes the master potter Frederick Norton in his book Ceramics for the Artist Potter. He emphasizes the idea that artists should treat their materials with integrity:

We are all familiar with metal furniture that has been grained to look like wood, and with wooden furniture that is painted to look like metal…and we are familiar with birch and maple (themselves beautiful!), stained to look like mahogany. Nearly every material, if properly used, has a beauty of its own, and should not be hidden under a cloak of pretense.

Norton’s words hold true for all sorts of artists, and hint at the beauty to be found by mastering one material or another.

“Never strain your material, or you will get a forced drawing,” concludes Kay Marshall in The Complete Drawing Book (edited by Peter Probyn). Instead, when choosing between various crayons and pencils, Marshall advises us to “stick to one at a time, work within its limitations, and you will get a much more unified drawing.”

OF COURSE, THE BENEFITS of constrained materials extend far beyond the visual arts. In music, a composer’s materials are simply those things which make noise: INSTRUMENTS, including the voice, as well as the acoustics of the performance space (a topic that this short article shall not attempt to address). We often appreciate the composers who have been primarily constrained by their materials because of the beautiful way in which their music suits one particular instrument or ensemble.

Arcangelo Corelli, an Italian composer who lived from 1653 to 1713, drew upon his intimate knowledge of the violin to write music for string instruments. “As far as we know,” writes Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music, Corelli “never set a word of text to music. A virtuoso violinist, he was the first European composer who enjoyed international recognition as a ‘great’ exclusively on the strength of his finely wrought instrumental ensemble works.”

Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov found a similar strength in his materials, but not with regard to just one instrument. Instead, the composer made it his business to fully understand the expressive capabilities of the nineteenth-century orchestra as a whole. “Orches-tration was Rimsky-Korsakov’s great strength,” Wendy Thompson explains in the Illustrated Book of Great Composers, “and his talent for orchestral colour, combined with exotic, oriental-sounding harmonies, produced many rich and glowing works” such as the popular symphonic suite Sheherazade, the beginning of which is performed here by Arthur Arnold and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra:

Finally, consider the many pop artists for whom deep connections to a musical instrument have supported a profound classical artistry: Elton John, Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, and the list goes on! You can probably think of many good composers who are not so closely associated with one particular instrument or ensemble. But for those who are, the beauty of their music—the reason people listen—has much to do with the materials they know so well.

To work with constrained materials is not the only means of attaining a classical artistry. But in today’s maximalist world, when most artists are rarely guided by other constraints, you may find that limiting your materials is among the more straightforward measures that you can adopt and self-enforce.

TO ADDRESS A THIRD and final category of artmaking, we might consider what “materials” are involved in the literary arts. A potter works with clay, and a composer with instruments, so perhaps we can agree that a writer works with DESCRIPTIONS—the atmosphere of a story, encompassing its characters and dialects, places and vocabularies.

About the Artist has already praised Charles Dickens as an author whose lifelong encounters with the working poor allowed him to describe Victorian London to readers in vivid detail, no matter what his particular subject happened to be. The Irish author James Joyce paid a similar attention to materials in books such as Dubliners, a collection of short stories. Joyce gave every tale in Dubliners its own characters and plot, but imbued them all with the cultural atmosphere of his native city by carefully describing its places and inhabitants—a feat made even more remarkable when you learn that Joyce had immigrated to France before writing the collection.

As these examples suggest, an author usually gains this impressive command of materials after having experienced them first in real life. However, such a mastery of materials can even support writers who venture surprisingly far into the realm of the fantastic, as this concluding example will show.

A third author whose powerful and astute descriptions will readily captivate readers is Rudyard Kipling, the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. His materials came from not London, nor Dublin, but India. As Neil Gaiman has argued in the introduction to a recent Kipling anthology, The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales, “Kipling wrote about people, and his people feel very real. His tales of the fantastic are chilling, or illuminating or remarkable or sad, because his people breathe and dream.” Whether your writing is set in modern America in a parallel universe, it might be worthwhile to give your characters the conversations and behaviors of daily life that are inspired by the society you know best—your own.

You have just learned how artists such as painters, composers, and writers can develop a classical artistry via prolonged attention to their materials. Although many artists are able to find classicism in response to other kinds of constraint entirely, I hope to have convinced you that working with focused or limited materials can be a powerful first step on the path to creative artmaking.

_________________________

[[ Printer-Friendly Version. ]]