Blog Posts

An Artistic Eye

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Today I learn that it’s important to have an Artistic Eye when you are creating your visual media. Its not just enough to be a technical software wrangler (Although that is important). But we need to give something more than just another pretty picture. Technical skill is not enough.

This brings me to a quote I read from J.J. Abrams.

“It’s more important you learn what to make movies about than how to make movies.” – J.J. Abrams

 https://youtu.be/bN-On2CusDM?t=351
For J.J. Abram’s to him he needs to know what to speak to the audience through the medium of movies. What it means is there needs to be more than just technical skills and be able to Art Direct. What is the current ideas of this age that can be distilled into a 2hour movie life lesson and to make something visually appealing and resonate to an audience. And not just hitting the check marks of your software list.

Now with technology it is so easy to learn software quickly to get results. But how can it may you stand out and be better? Who knows what we will be using in the future to make digital media? Today it’s Maya, Houdini, or maybe occulus, Unity or something else? Technology is always improving.

It also means are we able to see something different and interesting enough so that when we share it with an audience it will resonate with them. It builds down to the creativity and ideas.

Lorne Lanning in an interview also received this from Jack Goldstein to have an Artistic Eye.

I was an illustration student at School of Visual Arts—I had seen his paintings at the Whitney Biennial, and at various museums, and I was just blown away. I showed him my work and I was making all these comments, you know, “I aim to improve this way and that way,” and he goes, “You paint just fine, you just have no ideas.” And that’s Jack in a nutshell.

Building up that Eye

It requires time and experience. I don’t think art school is enough. Many blogs from other artists and even entrepreneurs have said to get out of looking at your Phone or Laptop and go expereince life.

If you can’t there is reading widely such as literature you can live through other lives through books.

This is how we can gather new ideas and information to be reapplied to the medium we work with.

Applying an ‘Artistic Eye’ elsewhere

What is Your medium and who is your audience? You may be in a startup or health care or something else. But we can apply that artistic eye idea to see more than something purely technical. Yes we need to have the tech nailed down but that is just the interface to the needs and wants of others.
Using our artistic eye we can use the methods to one serve and make a painting to see new problems and creative solutions to be applied. Entrepreneurs are already doing this seeing gaps in a market and applying creative solutions.
So the bottoms line is to develop that artistic eye to see what the world needs and will resonate with them through the medium you are practicing.