āThe reason that great artists cluster together geographically is so that they can learn from each other. Jacques Lipchitz explains, āI remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he has seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.āā
ā Rod Judkins, The Art Of Creative Thinking
A few weeks ago, I used my pen plotter, āTrevorā, the A3/V3 AxiDraw, to scratch away at some scratch cards, revealing the multicoloured or shiny surface underneath.
After posting the photos, I received a flurry of messages, many of them in the vein of āI was just thinking about doing this, but youāve beaten me to it!ā
So, of course, I encouraged them to do it anyway.
āIt might have been done before, but it hasnāt been done by you!ā
ā Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
In her book Gilbert talks of ideas living in their own realm, looking for ways to break out, to find a āhostā to occupy and help them manifest. Alan Moore has a similar concept with Ideaspace, where locations spread apart in both distance and time can be closely connected by ideas.
The Magic and Magick of Gilbert and Moore has a dimension inhabited by idea Daemons, stalking and pacing, biding their time, looking for a weak spot in the walls that separate them from us, and when they find one, they burst through. Because the land of āIdeaspaceā is convoluted, joined by concepts rather than geography, London, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai are adjacent because we think of them together as major cities, itās possible for a Daemon, the idea, to step through at a single moment in time, but separated by a great distance.
When we, as artists, are struck with an idea, a pebble of thought rolling around in our head, we shouldnāt be surprised when we see someone else do just that very thing. And that doesnāt mean we should throw that idea away.
Juan copied the grapes from Picasso, who in return took the bowl and used it for something else.
āArt is theftā.
ā Pablo Picasso
When Iāve run small workshops in the past, teaching ācreative codingā, I tell students to look for an end result they see from someone else and then ācopyā it.
Of course, the process of copying it is to try and work out how a program may have been written to get those final results. Inevitably about halfway through, the student will swerve off in a different direction, theyāll have a bug that produces an unexpected result, or some setting that they discover they can crank up not just to 11 but to 111, and everything goes flying off in all directions.
If you get stuck, copy, copy, copy, try to work out how it was done, see if you can figure out the intent, dissect it and put it back together.
āThe only art Iāll ever study is stuff that I can steal fromā.
ā David Bowie
When I posted the scratch card photos to Instagram, Iād already seen it done over a year earlier.
I was thinking about getting a pen plotter but wasnāt sure yet. So I was looking around and found a person who made these beautiful plots. Stupidly I didnāt make a record of it at the time, so I canāt credit them because I was ājust passing throughā, but the idea stuck with me.
I think they had metal plates theyād covered in black ink and then used a scratching tool to carve the design into the plate with the pen plotter. Sweeping flow fields, like atoms smashed together, appeared, and it was beautiful. And then, they stopped, or I never found them again.
At the time, I thought, āwell, I canāt do that because theyāve done it.ā
Until an advert popped up from an art store, showing me scratch cards, daemons from the Ideaspace using Facebook Ads, in a way it makes sense, modern magick indeed.
In the pen plotting art space, certain concepts are so common and such basic building blocks of our art that if we rejected everything weād already seen, it would leave nothing else to create.
Which is how I decided to just get over myself and post the scratch card photos and encouraged everyone else to do so. To go back to the first quote, āThe reason that great artists cluster together geographically is so that they can learn from each otherā was perhaps true back in the olden days (although our Daemons would make sure the same idea popped up on different continents at the same time), but now our cluster is Instagram and Twitter.
āIdeas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.ā
ā Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Never not make the art.