Don’t Be Precious

Artists at their worst can be precocious, self-indulgent and precious. When it affects you it means you will likely be plagued by indecision, obsession over details and a lack of resolute definition or risk-taking. This is likely when you find yourself fussing over a single line too much, and not properly assessing its true importance (or lack of importance) relative to the image as a whole.

Imagine if you tried to cook a pasta one noodle at a time. That’s probably the extreme end result of the effect on your work. Imagine further still if you only ever cooked the one meal, or the one variant of one meal, and followed the recipe to the letter.

I was thankfully advised against preciousness early on. And later had it reinforced by a uni drawing instructor, who advised my to start again a few minutes into the still-life drawing I did in the first class and first session. It’s been on my mind again lately as I just finished reading a classic 90s pop-psychology book called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Douglas Gilette and Robert L Moore. This book is about four major male personas at their best and worst, and how to apply them personally to correct personal imbalances in your life. The book talks about what we now call " “hyper-fragility” (but the term was not invented yet when the book was written) and it’s opposite, which I suppose is what you could call complete insensitivity.

In making a painting or any other creative work you fight to balance these extremes constantly. The desire to get a highly refined and detailed result vs the need to economise and focus on “the bigger picture”.

In the movie, Seven Years in Tibet, there’s a scene where Buddhist Tibetan monks present the invading Chinese General with a sand mandala they have spent several days preparing, which symbolises eternal peace and enlightnement. The Chinese generals contemptuously trample right through it, as is their traditional custom.

Precious artistic intellectual peace-lover, meet uncultured savage all-conquering sino-brute.

Its disgustingly cruel but still instructive. The above-mentioned book relays another example: Ancient Egyptians, isolated by desert and unaccustomed to war, being conquered by an invading army who one-day broke through the natural barrier. The Egyptians, lacking an effective martial defence, fled South, and a generation later, hardened by exile, but tempering a vengeful fire to reclaim their lost land, rise up to kick the conquerors out and re-establish Egypt in the form of a new Kingdom.

This is a historical story that has happened a few times. It happened to Poland, and it’s about to happen to Australia.

I tell people that I hope they’ve given some thought as to how they will deal with it. If your army isn’t there then it simply isn’t there. But what will you do during exile and/or subjegation? And what is your pathway back? And have you got a good definition of what you are fighting to regain or keep alive?

Let’s flip back to the discussion artistic creativity, and fighting preciousness. I think a lot about the band Guns N Roses. GnR/Gunners, as they are known, released their first album Appetite For Destruction, in 1987, the year I was born. The cover art was initailly a work also called Appetite For Destruction, painted in 1978 by Robert WIlliams, featuring a robot and a violated bare-breasted woman. It was so scandalous that the record company ordered it moved to the inside sleeve of the original release, but now many years later the original is available , and I ended up with a copy on re-issue vinyl, to compliment the classic skulls-on-a-cross version that I have in CD form. I think both images work in tandem to express the raw energy and wild talent behind the music. As a band they were young, desperate, hungry and raced out of the blocks to chart-topping stardom. Pretty soon however they would get quagmired as baddies in the culture wars with the controversial song One In A Million, whose lyrics, in light of wokeism and mass migration from the third world, and the resultant backlash, seem to take on a strangely precient new light (and listening to it despite your inhibitions is an exercise in fighting pearl-clutching preciousness, if i’m being honest).

The conventional history of GnR among their most-scholarly fanbase goes like this: amazing first album, reasonable-enough follow-up EP (GnR Lies), self-indulgent and bloated second- (double CD) album (Use Your Illusion I and II), struggles to deal with Grunge and the sudden changing of cultural tastes, group infighting and combustion, sole-remaining original member obsesses creatively over a long-awaited 3rd album (which took about 15+ years), by which point middle-age has kicked in along with the “who-gives-shit-anymore” factor, wherupon new artistic output must contend against the nostalgia factor for prominence of place.

In writing this, I decided to finally give that third album, Chinese Democracy, a listen for the first time, probably further ahead in time than the amount of years it took to make, and really, it’s not that bad. Its probably better than its predecessor Use Your Illusion. And still we don’t see democracy in China, so at least we all got the better of the looming punchline joke that dangled over us. Was it a good use of 15 years of obsession and finetuning? One can argue no, though maybe Axl needed to wait for the pressure and expectation to die down enough.