Becoming an Artist

With a little luck and lots of nurture, most human babies grow up to be humans.  You’re an example of this amazing process.  Becoming an artist is different, says The Learning Connexion (TLC) managing director Jonathan Milne.

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1.  Choice.  Art is something you choose.  It doesn’t matter if your approach to art is different from everyone else. It doesn’t matter if you don’t quite know what art is or where it will lead.  What does matter is that you make the choice to dive in and find a way.

2.  Discover that art is an interesting conversation, usually without words.  You need to be interested in something and – perhaps more difficult – find out what interests someone else.

Andy Warhol, for example, was quite a boring person who was so obsessed with ordinary, boring things that he elevated them to art.  People gradually became captivated with soup cans and other mundane items that previously hadn’t been part of the conversation we call ‘art’.  Andy became rich and this in turn led to people being fascinated by his boring fame.  Like him or not, he changed the course of 20th century art.

3. Persist.  We live in an age of short attention span and if you don’t persist you’ll be lost in the twitters.  The secret of persistence is doing something which has meaning for you and one way or another is fun.  You see it with kids on skate boards.  They work at their moves day after day and gradually turn into four-wheeled ballet dancers.

4. Love your work.  It may catch you by surprise.  I accidentally discovered that I loved doing cartoons when TLC staff grumbled that our advertisements needed something visual.  The cartoons in turn led me to a whole different way of story-telling.

5.  Practice (get into the ‘skate board syndrome’).  The combination of love and persistence does something subversive.  It is a more or less painless recipe to sharpen your skills.  The more you practice, the better you get. 

6.  ‘Get it out there’.  TLC exhibitions are an opportunity for students to get into the art conversation in a more demanding way than sharing with friends and family.  For some students the most important thing is the discovery that visitors to the show are usually immensely supportive.  So far no exhibitor has died from embarrassment.

7.  Play.  On the other side of the fear barrier you reach a stage where it feels fine to play in public – or at least to let your playful work be seen in a show.  ‘Play’ of course may be serious – even Goya’s black paintings were fundamentally playful because he turned them into his own strange adventure. 

8.  Relate.  Art involves a community.  For professional artists there are relationships with gallery directors, publicists, materials experts and a whole host of others.  For me it has been fun to see my cartoons, hugely enlarged and re-packaged by our designer, dancing on the side of the TLC bus.  It took quite a team to make it happen.

The bottom line is that an art school is a team of people helping each other through the steps to becoming artists.  We love what we do.

Further information:

Jonathan Milne is Managing Director and founder of The Learning Connexion School of Art and Creativity and will be presenting some of his 'gently subversive' thoughts on creativity in a series of articles. Milne is equally interested in science and art and has always been captivated by the notion that life has meaning and heaven is within. He has led courses on art, business and creativity in businesses and universities.

In 2008 his book, 'GO! The Art of Change' , was published.   He is presently working on 'Art, Meaning and Myth'.  He says 'Creativity isn't a slogan - it's about real engagement with who we are.  I love to see people getting a bigger sense of what they can be, both individually and collectively.  It's like suddenly breaking out of a great spiderweb of entrenched expectations.'