'Peasant of the Camargue'



Vincent van Gogh
Peasant of the Camargue, 1888
Brown ink over graphite on white wove paper, w38 cm x h49.4 cm (14.96” x 19.44”)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, USA

Link to zoom-able image: Google Cultural Institute

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Every once in a while, the mind goes completely kaput. We have various phrases for the phenomenon (mental block, dry spell, hitting the wall, etc.), but these usually make it sound a lot cuter than it actually is. As an artist, it eliminates new ideas, and makes the new ideas you do have seem too banal to pursue. As a person, it empties you out, making it feel like you've run out of things to say, think, or even care about.

So what happens when we come to a full stop? There are only about umpteen-billion approaches out there (all of them available at the click of a mouse, should you ever want to browse), but out of those, there are exactly two that have ever worked for me.

The one important for today1 is the concept of mark-making2: basically, the physical marks that you make to produce an artwork. It's the individual brushstroke, pencil line, or swipe of charcoal, put down with various media/pressures/patterns/widths to create an infinite variety of visual effects.

Mark-making samples with ink and brush.

What's more, a person's marks are also their visual 'fingerprints', made via their tool of choice. The marks create a sort of 'vocabulary' that goes a long way towards defining an artist's individual 'style' — and even if you don't consider yourself an artist, you also have a mark-making 'style', at least so long as you've ever doodled or written anything out by hand.

The piece by Van Gogh3 above is an excellent window into what mark-making can look when put into practice for a more finished piece (again, close-up available here). When people connect to Van Gogh, so much of that connection seems to come down to the way you can almost feel the movements that make up his work – he leaves his marks so raw that the texture, the sensation of making the mark, becomes overwhelming. Much like Jackson Pollock and others would do more than half a century later with their infamous 'action paintings'4, Van Gogh leaves a map of his physical actions in the paint (or the pencil and ink, as above), and it gives each piece a tangible energy that you don't need an art history degree to pick up on.

Beyond the effects mark-making can produce in any particular work, it's also true that there's just nothing like the mark-making process to find your way out of those dreaded dry spells. First off, making a mark is visceral experience that can prompt an automatic physical/emotional response — so much so that when you see someone all a-glow about practicing art, you can usually assume it's this simple mark-making process giving them the feels, because it feels really good. (Think a kid with a crayon. Or a kid with anything that can be smeared around, really. There's something damn-near primal in how happy this activity can make us when we're not worried about making the 'right' mark.)

Second, mark-making ends in the creation of a physical thing. As with Van Gogh's piece above, this creation means that you end up with a map of your actions, and when you're running on empty, being able to see that your actions still translate into something real can be enormously soothing. The trick when using mark-making for therapeutic purposes is just to remember a simple balance: take an active interest in the marks you're making, but don't let them matter or 'mean' anything until you're already interested by what they're doing.

For such a simple concept, so easy to implement, the idea of mark-making is probably the single most important one in the visual arts. It's the basis of practice, the basis of style, and the way to find (and return) to yourself as an artist. 

And for those who don't consider themselves artists, mark-making (with anything, from pencil to sound to bread dough) is still an easy, concrete way to anchor yourself, calm your mind, and remind yourself of the link between action and effect. If you do nothing else 'artsy' with your life whatsoever, do make the effort to explore and enjoy how your actions leave impacts. Do connect yourself to your marks.

'Wheat Field with Cypresses', 1889


FOOTNOTES:

1. The other one, if you're curious, is just aimlessly taking in new influences — film, books, news, essays, pictures, artworks (ahem), any raw bits of the world or any interesting ways those bits have been processed by others. If you're a creative going for prolific output, it's important to remember Neil Gaiman's advice about giving yourself undirected time to be bored: for me, I have to do the above and then let myself be bored, so that there'll be random bits stewing around up there that can turn into something new during downtime.

2. For a good intro to more about how mark-making is used, see this cheat-sheet from the Tate.

3. This blog will certainly return to Van Gogh, as he was monstrously prolific and has a famously interesting biography. But I did want to throw out now that the thing he is perhaps best known for in his personal life, which is that he was a 'creative madman' whose mental illness inspired his art, is a dangerous misconception. I firmly believe that in his case, as in most, his art was his art — his mental illness appears to have been primarily an obstacle for him, not a founding feature of genius. (There's actually a great little movie about this sort of thing starring young Magneto and Ron's oldest brother from the "Harry Potter" movies, called Frank.)

4. It is also completely certain that I will be addressing modern and postmodern art here, likely multiple times. Yes your kid could have done that, but that's like saying your kid could be a doctor because they can pull the needle to make a stitch. 
ADDITIONAL FUN THINGS:

  • Though 'mark-making' is a well-known art term, I owe my understanding of it to my college drawing teacher Sue Coleman, who passed this concept along with a completely infectious joy (and is also just one of the kindest people I have ever met). Some of her work here.

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