Max the Mutt Animation School Blog
This is the place to stay on top of what we are doing at Max The Mutt Animation School
Earlier in the summer I spent time with Roksolana Tchotchieva looking on line at a seemingly endless sampling of amazing student drawings done in Russia at one of the two major academies. The work bristled with energy. The difference between these drawings and what I usually see coming from the new “realist” academies here was the difference between surface realism, and work inhabited by conviction and life force. Sharing this with Roksolana, and then with Tina as well, I was overcome. I had a real art experience.
When you have a real experience in front of a work of art it isn’t detached or intellectual. It’s exciting, and it’s visceral and you never forget it. These experiences become part of the real moments that live on forever in your consciousness. They are what being a lover of fine art and/or a fine artist is all about.
Sometimes it seems to me that we’ve lost sight of the potential the arts hold to enrich our lives in positive ways. Are we still able to really inhabit the moment, to exclude everything but the experience we’re in, both as viewers and as creators? This is the very definition of transcendent experience, the required condition of all great art: presence. To find your self and your real potential as an artist, you must be entirely present and to do that you must learn to have and maintain focus. Focus is the ability to direct all of yourself into the moment, into what you are doing, with no distractions, no part of your consciousness engaged elsewhere. No matter how good you may think you are at something, you will have a more profound experience if you are able to entirely immerse yourself in your work than if part of you is distracted. This is the essence of profound experience, and this is what fewer and fewer people seem wiling to attempt in this age of multitasking and perpetual interruption.
Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velasquez, Goya, Degas, Turner, Sargent…one could go on. You feel them as they completely inhabit their work. Their work touches us now the way it touched the viewer in its own time, the way it will touch the viewer a hundred years from now. They inhabit their work. That is the real miracle.
Now I have to hope that all our faculty and students will continue to understand that the path is learning to focus, bringing your self entirely to whatever it is you’re doing, and patience, for the path is long and we will have to try and try again on the road to knowledge and skill.
This is why we ask for silence in classes. This is why we don’t permit head phones and cel phones. We are trying to create the conditions that will allow you to discover and actualize your own powers.
If silence frightens you, breathe deeply, close your eyes, see yourself working happily and well. I promise that you’ll learn to treasure silence as part of the pathway to your own magical, inner, creative world. In attempting to draw a jug, a cup, a nose with integrity (that is, with full attention), as Hawthorne says, you will find your self!
The greatest gift we can give to our students is the discovery, through the cultivation of discipline and focus, of their own innate powers. That’s something that once found will be yours forever, and is priceless.
