Operational Handbook on Making Art 01: Do It the Way You Can Do It

Regulation 01 / Entry requirement

Skill, rawness & unnecessary improvement

There is no artist gene.

Nobody gets stamped ARTIST at birth.

Nobody arrives knowing how to paint, write, photograph, print, cut, record, code, stitch, draw or make a convincing horse.

Some people start earlier. Some get taught. Some spend years practising.

Some learn three chords and make something better than the person who knows forty-seven.

This has always annoyed the professionals.

Anyone can do it.

That does not mean everybody will do it brilliantly.

It means brilliance was never the entry requirement.

Skill is useful. Learn things. Practise. Get frighteningly good at something if you want.

But technique has one job:

Technical purpose / singular

To help the work do what it needs to do.

A technically perfect drawing can be completely dead.

A crooked one can bite.

You can spend three months painting a photograph so perfectly that it looks exactly like a photograph.

Congratulations. You have invented a very slow camera.

Impressive is not the same as interesting.

A beautifully mixed record can have absolutely fuck all to say. Something recorded through a cheap microphone in a bedroom can stay in somebody’s head for forty years.

A professionally designed poster can vanish into the wall.

A filthy photocopy can stop somebody in the street and hit like a brick.

There is no reliable conversion rate between effort and impact.

Some of my work people have responded to most strongly took about fifteen minutes.

That does not mean work should take fifteen minutes.

It means time spent is a terrible measure of whether something works.

So ask the useful question:

Does it do the job?

Does it get across what you wanted?

Anger
Unease
Tenderness
Noise
A laugh
A warning
A strange feeling that follows somebody home
Maybe you just wanted it to look fucking good
A small shock
A bad memory
Relief
An argument
A door left open
Something impossible to ignore
A question with no useful answer
A reason to come closer
A reason to leave quickly
Proof you were here
A mark that refuses to behave
The urge to make something yourself

Does it?

Good. Stop there.

Employment condition / not aesthetic

Professional is an employment condition.

It is not an aesthetic.

Punk worked this out years ago.

Pick up the instrument and make the noise.

If you know three chords, use three chords. If you know one, make the bastard count.

Learn another when the song needs one.

The point is not to demonstrate mastery of the equipment.

The point is to make something with it.

Use the cheap camera if it gives you the picture.

Use cardboard if cardboard works.

Use the blunt brush.

Use the battered printer that leaves a filthy black stripe down every page.

Sometimes the limitation is doing half the work.

You cannot afford the material you imagined, so you substitute something else. The equipment misbehaves. The surface tears. The ink bleeds.

Then the wrong thing leaves the right mark.

Pay attention.

If the bodge works, it is no longer a bodge.

It is a method.

Ashmouth Assembly Notice 01/A

Professional finish is not compulsory.

Approved methods have no special status.

Visible mistakes may be retained.

If the accident is better than the plan:

The plan has been cancelled.

There is a strange belief that becoming better at art means slowly removing all the roughness from it.

The line straightens. The photograph sharpens. The recording cleans up.

Eventually everything looks expensive.

Perhaps this is progress.

Perhaps you have simply become very good at removing all evidence that anything actually happened.

Don’t clean the life out of it.

Sometimes the sketch is better than the finished painting.

Sometimes the demo is better than the album.

Sometimes the cheap print has something the expensive one lost.

Sometimes the first version worked, but you did not trust it.

So you fixed the strange bit. Smoothed the ugly edge. Removed the smear. Added another layer.

Then another.

Eventually you look back and realise the earlier version was better.

You improved it until you killed it.

Keep the body for comparison.

Getting better should give you more choices.

It should not force everything towards the same polished finish.

Raw is a finish.

Sometimes the work needs precision.

Sometimes it needs a boot through the door.

Learn the technique.

Then decide whether the work needs it.

If three marks will do, do not make thirty.

If one photograph works, stop taking fifty.

If one sentence lands, do not bury it beneath another paragraph proving you can write.

Know how to do it properly.

Keep the right not to.

Choose one thing you have wanted to make but keep postponing because you do not know how to do it properly.

That one.

You have twenty minutes.

For the duration of this operation, properly has been suspended.

Do not buy anything
Do not spend eighteen minutes watching somebody else make their version

Use what you know.
Use what you have.
Use the simplest method you can think of.
Make the version you can make now.

A bad version is permitted.

Do not deliberately make it bad. That misses the point.

There is the thing you can make now, and there is an imaginary superior version that has so far prevented either of them from existing.

Get that bastard out of the way.

When something appears, ask:

Does it do the job?

If yes: stop interfering.

If no: change what actually needs changing.

Do not straighten an edge, remove an accident or add another layer merely because it looks more respectable afterwards.

If the accident works, keep it.

If the rough version works, keep it.

If the bodge becomes the best bit, congratulations.

You have discovered something useful.

Operation complete when:

The thing you kept postponing exists
It does what you need it to do
You have stopped fucking with it
Evidence has been retained

Record of activity / evidence retained

Let it stand

Save it. Photograph it if necessary.

Post it if you want.

If you do, do not attach an apology.

No “just a quick thing”
No “not very good but…”
No “still learning”
No “I’ll probably delete this later”

You made it. There it is.

Let it stand.

Then watch what happens.

You may be surprised by what people respond to.

Quite often it will be the rough bit, the accidental bit, the thing you nearly fixed, or the thing you nearly did not post at all.

You are not always the best judge of what will stick in somebody else’s head.

Put it out there and let them decide.

Skill can make the work stronger.
So can rawness, limitation and an accident you were clever enough not to fix.

The method does not need to impress anybody.

It needs to work.

Do it the way you can do it.If it works, it works.

Skill, rawness & unnecessary improvement

Professional is an employment condition.

Make the version you can make

Let it stand