Art Reboot

93 more efficient and fruitful to go into the studio every day and get on with it; you’ll be far more likely to succeed. Skill in expression is how vision becomes art. It is, perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the easier aspects of art to acquire. It is technique, and once you realise what you need to learn or hone as a skill in order to express what you want to express, its acquisition is simply a matter of time and commitment. For some people skill is far easier to acquire than for others, but even without inborn talent facilitating acquisition, skill can be learned. Again, it is largely a matter of perspiration: you just have to get on with it. There is a ladder of meaning in art, as there is in conscious- ness. On the bottom rung is someone who buys a piece of banal tourist art from a pavement vendor in Vietnam. The work may provide as much pleasure and inspiration to its owner as the experienced connoisseur gets from a Van Gogh. Each work matches the level of understanding and aesthetic sophistication of its owner. The owner of the tourist picture, living with it for a while, perhaps receiving the input of friends and visitors, some positive, some dismissive, will inevitably begin to realise its banality as embarrassment arrives in the form of teasing. ‘Ah, a Phan Gong, I see. Must be from Van Gogh’s dyslexic period.’ The realisation that it isn’t quite the work of art it seemed may lead to the next rung, and then the next, and so on. The owner of a Van Gogh may have gone through a similar process. It is the nature of the best of art, in any field, that as the audience becomes more sophisticated it discovers ever more profound depths of meaning in it, as long as they are there to be discovered