આર્ટવર્ક

What is it that makes good art? I don't know but I know that the art I like is simultaneously very realistic and very unrealistic - for example, the work of Claude Monet and Malcolm Liepke. 

in very early primary school - kindergarten, I think - my teacher told my parents that she thought I was artistically gifted

I've never been good though, at art in a conventional sense. I can't draw or paint things that look real. but then, what I've come to realise is that I don't want to draw or paint things that look real. 

I do want to have technical skills though, and I'm trying to develop them by practicing. 

I think art really has to be created in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls, 'flow'. It can't be done as a kind of chore, even though we call them art works. 

I've noticed that when art-tubers do a time-lapse of themselves creating an artwork with a voiceover where they talk about different subjects, artistic and not, when they tell you in the description box how long the work actually took, it's often something like 8 hours. 

I was kind of surprised when I first saw something like that because I've seen someone who had had a lot of practice using a tablet and software to draw and created her own OCs (original characters) and animations, etc, and it looked like one of those time lapses...she kept moving between layers and working on different parts, and images kept appearing and disappearing. It was all very fast /// so when I first saw one of these time lapses, I didn't realise it was a time lapse, but then I read underneath the video ￫ actual time to create artwork: 8 hours. 

I don't really get that. I get bored if something takes longer than 10 minutes to draw. But then, when I think about the idea of flow, it makes sense. In the state of flow, you lose all sense of time passing because you're fully engaged in what you are doing. 

Being in a state of flow is the only way to draw or paint anything intricate or technically challenging because the state of flow removes that sense of challenge...it's as if you're completely at peace || you're not stressing about how you're going to do the art work...you just systematically proceed with it, but not in a mechanical way // there's a sense of ease, comfort, joy, even if the drawing/ painting requires a lot of 'work' or is very detailed.