Embrace the amateurism

No one born creative, no one born with great talents, even mozart learn to play piano before he made symphony no.40, so where’s the ego of “I am the the best of this” come from? when you “legally” set your bar and said that you are pro at things?

Okay, let’s do the study case, once you go to the modern art museum and walk passed an art piece of Tableau I, which is none other a piece of white color with some stripes, Piet Mondrian’s work or maybe Robert Ryman’s Bridge paintings, some people (or maybe yourself) might thinks “ I could do that” and asking “why his/her paintings hanged on the museum and mine not?”

The answer will be A. You couldn’t do that and B. You didn’t do that. That answer seems very obnoxious and lazy but the reality is that once art begins to live as much in the mind as it does in the eyes, you have to bring your ideas as well as your phisycal construction of work. Take some hard edged abstraction like Piet Mondrian, it may at first glance seem fairly easy to execute, some black stripes and fill it with blue and yellow colors, but if you’ve tried to use oil paints before, you’ll know that it can be very tricky to create such smooth lines at a consistent flat application of color. There’s also little details like a line that stops just shorts of the edge of the canvas that clues you in : NO AMATEUR DID THIS.

Even some intricate yet complicated process still be missunderstood or underestimated for some people, and they might think, one of the greates modern artist like Piet Mondrian is such an Amateur Artist to draw some meaningless lines one white canvas.

So, when you or how you know you are not an Amateur? from my personal view, YOU NEVER KNOW.

We do tend to focus about “what’s your ideas that could amaze people”. So the goals is not your self improvements, but how to be accepted by the audience or society, as you are the pro.

If Piet Mondrian or Robert Ryman think the same thoughts, their works won’t be hanged on the museum. They could just drew some high end detailed paintings, just like Monet, Edgar Degas or Van Gogh and be the same as other paiters. But they didn’t do that, their fresh ideas might cause some rejections, because modern of art movemet on that time was just started. The ideas of making something new isn’t always about the result, because no one know the result. IT IS F**KING NEW for god sake.

They knew they should start from the bottom, from being an amateur minimalist painters. Learning the best they could to draw a precise line or color consistency. They won’t give up a new ideas, break any rules or trends, explore something new and make the best of it.

Being an amateur will the best for who like to explore, they could do no wrong, everything is an experiments and takes responsibility wether it’s working or not. If you were a good amateur.

And being an amateur is great for me personally, I do love being an Amateur.

When I started my career as an Architect, I wouldn’t expect to be an “eco-friendly architect” (yes, I’m using quotes, because I still don’t know if I am one of them), because I didn’t learn that much eco-friendly building in the university and then I got a job as a bamboo architect, a very sustainable material on earth, the thing is, I never learn Bamboo Architecture and I never touch any bamboo for construction before.

Same thing happened when I turned my daily career from an architect to videographer/editor in media journalistic platform. It was a breakthrough for me, I do love making videos, and then another challenges come in : No background in journalistic nor video making educations, the tough process it’s not how hard the task because you are an amateur, but being underestimated and not having a room to grow, it was a tough one. So it will be a waste of effort (and time) if it’is not being supported by the environment or the society, it won’t be sustainable for me and my works. Solutions? find another environment.

I do believe, It was a hard work for Piet Mondrian and Robert Ryman just to develop a modern art piece, but to make their works sustainable it’s the tough one, many rejections, some insults, like even now, when you walk around in museum and find some of their works, there will be a jerks saying “ I could do that”, “This is meaningless”, or worse like “I could do better than that”.

It is very dismissive of things that were not immediately attracted to, so if you have a kind of negative gut reaction one of defensiveness or fear or anxiety, try to move past that and see what’s available afterwards and it doesn’t have to change your mind, (because again, it’s always be a personal taste) but it’s sometimes the process of working through that reaction that you learn the most both, about the work but also about yourself.

In the end, in every rejections and insults, Tableu I has home in Museum Ludwig, Germany. Being one of the masterpiece of modern art movement.

Hopefuly some of you could take notes, and some of you will say “but who are you?”

well, I’m just an amateur.

Cheers