What You Don't Want To Do

As an illustration teacher, I have the opportunity to ask students what kinds of things they're interested in. The answers are usually about music, gaming, skateboarding, fashion, etc. Occasionally I get an answer like cyborgs or space travel, but that's rare. Most of them really have no idea who they are or what they want to do as artists when they first walk in my door. I mean, really; these students are only in their late teens, early 20s, and so their experience is understandably limited. So, I craft the class projects so that they get a feel for the obvious genres and markets out there. As they begin to gravitate towards that which they feel themselves most aligned, I drop more pertinent things (specific artists, movements, styles, content) into their individual laps. Each begins a gradual process of self-awareness and eventually discovers his or her most personal line of inquiry.

My own journey to discovering my interests within the F+SF genre began while attending and exhibiting conferences. The first one I'd walked into stunned me. I looked around at the work of the big name fantasy and SF genre illustration professionals and thought: "Holy crap, I don't like anything here. I don't want to make work that looks anything like what I'm seeing here."  Of course, that was my initial visual scan; I eventually did find a few artists whose works that I liked, but they were few and far between.

That first exposure really shook me. I thought: well,... maybe I don't really want to be working in this particular genre after all if I'm not so keen on most of it.

Later that evening, at the up-and-comers show for the newbies, I was asked by an art director --So, what do you want to do? I unthinkingly blurted -- "Well, I know what I *don't* want to do!" And then I proceeded to give him my opinion on what I observed was so overdone in the industry and stuff that bugged me: disproportionately large swords in the hands of figures who didn't look physically capable of wielding them; pointless armor on nearly-naked women (or just gratuitously nude women in general); emphasis ad nauseam on the obvious big battle scene, etc. There seemed to be a lot less innovation and a lot of incestuous borrowing (stealing?) going on between the big industry artists in terms of both style and content. I stated that I thought that there was much oddly missing from these worlds.  I asked the AD if he was tired and bored of seeing a seemingly unchanging parade of images after 20 years. He quietly admitted that he was.

 (I later learned that his initial question -- what do you want to do?-- meant that my portfolio didn't seem to be fully cohesive, so... portfolio fail.)

Of course, giving my 1-minute elevator shpiel  in the negative probably wasn't the greatest thing to do in front of the art director. That I had to answer the question in the negative because I didn't know how to answer it in the positive gave me much to mull about later: why was I rejecting so much of the images that I'd seen earlier in the day? What was I rejecting? Was it something in particular?

As I began to gradually zero in on what I did want to do, the stuff I knew I didn't want to do kept me on track. I began to figure out how to translate my values into the images I wanted to show and how I wanted to execute them. That "marriage" of ethics with aesthetics is the holy grail for artists and is probably the most elusive thing in our practice as artists and illustrators. The closer we can get to where these two -- ethics and aesthetics-- align, is when we begin to make the art that matters. Ask yourself not only what you do want to do, but also-- what don't you want to do? The answer may surprise you.