Rules in Art (Revised) – Cut, cut, cut…
Almost all writer’s work can be strengthened by cutting bits out. Sometimes by hacking off massive pieces, some of which you desperately loved. And it’s hard, and it’s painful, but… as we’re repeatedly told… it’s necessary.
Now I was just re-reading a bit of my blog… a piece I did a while ago called “Rules in Art“, and I think the content is good, but several times toward the middle and end my eyes glazed over… because I was reading it like it was someone else’s garbage… and that, my friends, means I was off on some irrelevant tangent, or having “too much fun” as a writer, or really enjoying this fun angle I came up with, or just being stupid.
So my initial thought was “well, I need to revise this!” And then I realized! Wait! An opportunity to show the power of cutting. So what I have done here is to provide you with a new version of the article and use “Read More” tags so that I can show you what I originally had in place and how I revised it.
Note that this is still not perfect, and I did make a few small tweaks that I couldn’t resist- punctuation and the like- but for the most part this is entirely an exercise in cutting.
BTW, I should not that throughout I cut a few sentences and words purely because I was too lazy to go re-do the links. I didn’t call those here because they’re not substantive to the point.
Here we go…
Rules in Art, Cut to Ribbons
Yesterday I was serving as a mentor for a small group of Boy Scouts who were interested in learning about photography. During this “class”, one of the “students” started making assertions that his lack of understanding of the concepts of photography was irrelevant, because his choices were acceptable, because it is art, and I cannot tell him what his art can and cannot be.
I’ve been an artist throughout my life, and occasionally flipped my obsession between one artistic medium and another, and while I’ve always assumed that each art form would be completely different, I have been surprised to find that certain things are consistent between them. This philosophy of “There are no rules to art! It’s art!” turns out to be one of these.
And when you think about it, it makes sense. Art is not like math, or chemistry, or physics. I can’t simply solve the “art equation” and then plug the paint color back into the formula to make sure it works. I cannot simply combine blue and green with a spark and suddenly have water. I can’t throw a bucket of paint out an airplane window at five thousand feet at two hundred and twelve miles an hour and get a Picasso.
And because it is difficult to say that “this multiplied by this other thing equals art” and because it is quite possible to follow the rules of art and still have crappy art, people conclude that art must have no actual rules, and there’s some other dark magic happening. They further conclude that anyone who tells them there are rules is some sort of snake oil salesman, or some talentless hack who needs a crutch like rules to allow them to create. And, unfortunately, like any theory that dons the sheepskin of logical thought, there is some small amount of deceptive truth in that.
Let me give you an example. I don’t like most of Picasso’s more famous works. I think the images produced by Ansel Adams are mostly a yawn-fest. I summarily refuse to watch another Star Wars movie because I think anything beyond the original three are utter crap. And yes, that is including Force Awakens and Rogue One. And no, it’s not just because of freaking Jar-Jar.
But lots of other people love that stuff. Minus Jar-Jar. And here I sit, with a lot of experience in writing, and a good sense of what good writing in a movie is, but everyone looks at me like I’ve got six heads when I say I think Star Wars sucks, and even more so when I try to explain why.
So, there you go. And therein lies the sinister bit. People love the thing that I decry as garbage, and I decry it as garbage based upon some sort of structured set of rules that I feel has meaning, but people keep going to Star Wars movies” and enjoying them. (Picture me shaking my head here.)
You see, in developing art, we’re developing something to elicit some sort of reaction from the viewer, but unlike things with more hard-line rules, such as “I need fire”, we are ultimately looking for any reaction that sparks interest in the “consumer” enough that they will want to consume the art we have created. And human beings are, frankly, a lot more complex than a block of wood to which we apply spark.
There’s no possible way to articulate the lack of simplicity of the life of a human, or even some sort of average aggregate of them because they are, in almost every way, the polar opposite of trees. People are affected- even before they are conceived- by their parents, where they live, their culture, their relatives, their financial status, their schools, their heredity, world events, cosmic rays, and lots of other seemingly random elements of chance that happened before and during their entire lives. For example, did you all know that every human being alive since the first atom bomb was dropped all have a certain biological fingerprint that no human born before that time had? It’s there. All of these things contribute to who each of us are, how each of us think, and how each of us perceive the world around us.
And this is why we all perceive art a little differently, and this is exactly the basis by which people assume and conclude that art has no rules.
But let me ask you a question… do you like sugar? If I handed you a lump of sugar to suck on, would you consider that a relatively pleasant experience? What if I asked you to gnaw on a cube of salt instead? It looks an awful lot like sugar. Why are you making that face?
For the most part, people will have different visceral reactions to the various things they choose to eat, because our brains are wired to react to sense stimuli in a certain way. What’s more is that these reactions tend to be so baseline that they transcend the scope of particular individuals, localities, and even whole cultures. While there are variations in both execution and degree, every single human culture finds some pleasurable purpose in the use of sugar, or, putting a finer point on it, there’s a very good reason that Hershey chocolate is known throughout the world.
Sense of smell, touch, and hearing all exhibit these characteristics. Taylor Swift is ridiculously popular, even with people who desperately try not to get caught listening to her music. On the other end of the spectrum, even people who do not care for classical music will tend to tolerate Beethoven.
Sight is no different.
Our brains are wired to respond to certain visual stimuli in a way that is common to humans. Want to see an excellent example? Play peek-a-boo with a baby and watch their reaction. Now do it with one thousand babies. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Oh hey, you’re back. How did you do? Yeah, pretty much as I expected.
And yes, that baby reaction is very much a sight thing. What you’re playing with is something called object constancy. Basically, the brain’s ability to maintain an understanding that something is there even though you can’t see it. Babies don’t have it. Adults do. Want to see the difference? Go play peek-a-boo with your coworkers. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
And yes, I suppose you could argue that it’s a brain thing, but if you’re going to make that argument I suggest you remove your brain and continue reading and let me know how well that works out for you. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
At our very foundation, our bodies and brains are built from a recurring blueprint that responds to certain stimuli in certain ways. When we’re cold, we seek warmth. When we’re hungry, we seek food. When someone at work plays peek-a-boo with us, we seek the men with the strait jackets. We humans have a core rule set that we work from that doesn’t vary based upon location or culture or experience, because it transcends all of those. Put a baby on Mars and it’ll respond to peek-a-boo the same way one does on earth. It’s as simple as that.
The “Rule of Thirds” in photography is simply trying to understand our reactions to art, and how to structure the artwork in a way that naturally plays into those tendencies. It’s like understanding that you can, in some cases, replace a cube of sugar with honey (instead of a cube of salt)… because the desired reaction is one of response to sweetness… not to being white, granular or cubed.
The various “rules” that you encounter in art are no, not actually rules. “Aha!” You say! No no. Wait. The “rules” are, however, the closest thing we have found that allows us to predict and shape human perception in a manner that gives us the reaction that we desired when we set out to create the art in the first place. They are essentially theorems, that we have discovered along our path in trying to understand “how people work”.
My favorite example of this is the movie, Casablanca. It is one of the most beloved movies of all time. At the time of its creation, its success was as much a shock to the people who created it as it was to the people who watched it. They figured they had something good, wanted to understand what it was they had done, and so they sat down and tried desperately to understand the underlying formula that they had stumbled on. The result was what we now know as The Hollywood Formula, and they started creating movies with that as the basis and have been using it ever since. (There’s an amazing Writing Excuses pod cast on this topic that is well worth a listen and will explain the formula.) Once you understand this formula, watching other popular movies becomes a fascinating exercise. Top Gun, another beloved movie, filmed decades later, is almost exactly the same structure as Casablanca. Weird, but true.
The Hollywood formula, the rule of thirds, the golden mean, leading lines, compositional choices, color and exposure, and more… these are all examples of theorems like this… they represent our understanding and purposeful application of the knowledge of how we, as humans, react and respond to art. And many of these, such as the Golden Ratio, have been around and known since as far back as the ancient Greeks and possibly even the ancient Egyptians. These are the building blocks that we use to form and develop what we are trying to convey in art, upon which we unavoidably layer our own life experiences in a way that will also relate to our target audiences. But building our art upon a mismatched or absent understanding of those building blocks is akin to building a house atop a foundation of silly soap or playing peek-a-boo with our coworkers.
Can you break or bend these rules? Of course. But you must first understand the purpose of the rules that you are trying to break, so that you can understand how breaking them affects the overall execution of the work. Simply stated, you can’t replace sugar with salt in a cake recipe simply because both are white granules. In so doing, you are demonstrating your lack of understanding of the purpose of the sugar, and therefore have made a choice to replace it that will break the overall perception of your cake and give you an undesirable resultant reaction from any who might be so unfortunate as to eat it.
And this leads us back to our Boy Scout photography student, and any like him. He views art around him from a place of visceral interpretation without the understanding of how he has come to have that reaction. In the paraphrased words of Mary Robinette Kowal, he concludes that Harry Potter is a successful series of books because it is a story about a boy who lives under the stairs. And when he writes such a book, he is confused at the lack of success. He later grows up and chases coworkers around screaming peek-a-boo and throwing salt cakes at them.
Don’t be this boy. Learn the rules- theorems, if you will. Understand them. Utilize them as you would any tool handed to you. In time, you will understand how they work, where they do not, and one day you will realize the if you bend the rule just so that you’ll have this interesting effect that you purposefully wanted to create in your viewer. And your viewer will react that way. And then you shall know mastery of your craft.
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