The problem with research and development

Journal Entry Monday, October 16, 2023

Most artists need to do a lot of research and development for the purpose of understanding the field, learning about artists of interest to you, studying the general history of art and specific periods of interest in order to understand what artists were doing in the past and how that might apply to your own work. It is good for figuring out techniques that you intend to use, studying your contemporaries, and preparing to participate in the conversation with your own work. Artists don’t work in isolation. An artist needs to be well rounded and well informed. With research you pick up and think about new ideas that are circulating in the arts community. This is time well spent but this does take a lot of time to become familiar with the multiple generations of the art community and to assimilate ideas until they become your own.

I spent my early years at libraries looking at art books and studying images. I didn’t find the writing particularly interesting because it said something very different from what you could read in the images. When I was working on ideas in my studio I would often run into a snag or a problem and then I would go back to the library and see how my predecessors solved those problems for themselves. I always found the answers I was looking for in several different artists’ approaches to this or that problem.

If you have enough curiosity, you will never run out of someone or something to study up on in the world of art. That’s the problem. It will take a lot of years to feel like you have a handle on things.

It is easy to feel like you are doing something if you spend all of your time researching but it can be a sign of procrastinating. A lot of the time you can fill your mind with so many ideas that you can’t decide what to do next, or after your studies, you might feel that you will never match up to those you have been studying. But rest assured, when most of the old masters were making their work, they were unsure of themselves, unknown beyond their friends and family, and not sure what would ever become of their work in the future. At the time most artists are working, they are just like the rest of us; no commercial support, no institutional support, no media support. But what they did do was just keep working along supporting themselves however they could even in the middle of personal tragedy, wars, economic depressions, or epidemics. You will discover all of that in your research.

The development part is how you apply all of this research to your own artistic activity and that can take a lot of years too, in order to master your emerging style that you will be honing and refining for the rest of your life.

All of this research and development is very important and you will, no doubt, never reach the end of your research. But you also will want to spend a lot of time actually making things. In college several of us were sitting around in the painting studio talking and gabbing about art theory, art history and philosophical and spiritual subjects until one of us said. “Ok, it is time to shut up and paint.  That became a new rule in the painting studio. At a certain point you have to follow Rule #23

Shut up and Paint (or whatever).   Post Dogmatist Group Rule #23 – from the 4,040 Rules of Art Conduct

---

Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber

Wait a moment, surely you want to say something or have a question…