Photo: Felicity Tai

Why is making art difficult?

blogs.getty.edu - Yes, Art Really Is Hard Work | Getty Iris

Can you drink at 14 in Italy?

The legal drinking age in Italy is currently 18 years old. It is always prudent for young people (and people who look young:-) to carry a photo ID...

Last updated Mar 4, 2022

What is the spirit of love?

Spiritual love can refer to love rooted in a spiritual connection that helps us find meaning and purpose in our lives. These spiritual loves can...

Last updated Sep 13, 2020

Do you really know who the “One” is? Your true Soulmate?

Promotion

Creativity looks easy, but that’s a carefully staged illusion—artists invest more effort than we often give them credit for. Forget absinthe-drinking and angsting on a velvet chaise; artists have always faced hard labor, mental strain, and more than a few occupational hazards.

Hard Labor

Making art can require Olympian strength and endurance. Before the advent of power tools, weeks and even months of hard labor were required for sculptors to hammer, chisel, rasp, and hand-drill their way into stone. Potters, metalworkers, and glassblowers not only wield clay, ore, and silica, but wrestle flames. This Greek vase offers a particularly vivid depiction of the brute strength required for the blacksmith’s art (zoom image here). In ancient Greece and Rome artists didn’t merely toil like slaves; sometimes, they actually were. We know of at least one Greek vase-painter who signed his wares “the slave,” and the Roman silversmith carved above is identified by inscription as a freed slave—once of ancient Rome’s sizeable enslaved artisanal class. Though on a hopeful note, his tony finger ring and attire (a toga, the Roman equivalent of a tuxedo), suggest that, in his case at least, artistic skills could sometimes be a ticket to prosperity. Simply preparing the raw materials for art can be hard labor in itself. To make parchment for an illuminated manuscript, for example, involved gore, toxic brews, and lots of strenuous stirring: “After being flayed, the skin is soaked in water for about 1 day. This removes blood and grime from the skin and prepares it for a dehairing liquor. The dehairing liquor was originally made of rotted, or fermented, vegetable matter, like beer or other liquors, but by the Middle Ages an unhairing bath included lime…The liquor bath would have been in wooden or stone vats and the hides stirred with a long wooden pole to avoid human contact with the alkaline solution. Sometimes the skins would stay in the unhairing bath for 8 or more days depending how concentrated and how warm the solution was kept-unhairing could take up to twice as long in winter.”

Dehairing liquor? I rest my case.

What is soul according to Bible?

Relation to Greek "psyche" The only Hebrew word traditionally translated "soul" (nephesh) in English-language Bibles refers to a living, breathing...

Last updated Jun 8, 2020

How do I make her feel special?

How to Make a Girl Feel Special Be physically and emotionally present. ... Send unsolicited texts. ... Giving small, yet meaningful, gifts. ......

Last updated Oct 23, 2021

Promotion

Sisyphean Tasks

Artists don’t merely work hard; they also work long—in some cases years or even decades—to perfect their craft and see their work to completion. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise took 27 years; the Watts Towers, 33. Each hard-toiling weaver at the Gobelins factory in France, which produced luxurious tapestries to warm and adorn the homes of European nobility, was only able to weave two square inches per day. The panel above? It’s 29,054 square inches. Art history is filled with spectacular stories of years-long projects never completed. One such belongs to 18th-century curator Lambert Krahe, who set out to create an art catalogue larger than anything ever seen. He hired draftsmen to painstakingly render hundreds of paintings, which would then be transferred to copperplate to use for mass printings. Unfortunately, the process was so involved that he nearly bankrupted himself after making a grand total of…four. Two decades after Krahe’s death, an optimistic printmaker revived the project; he made it to 21 prints before he, too, sunk into bankruptcy. On the plus side, artists can resort to the relief we all share during times of trouble: bitter complaining. The struggles of manuscript-writing monks, for example, are well documented. Favorites include, “Oh, my hand,” and “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

But we’re not in the Middle Ages any more, and surely contemporary artists have things a bunch easier. Right? Hardly. Just last year LACMA and Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass proved it takes a village to move a…giant rock. A feat of engineering and a never-before-done-purposing of Los Angeles surface streets, this installation was conceived in 1969 and not completed until 40 years later. Artist Sandy Rodriguez, an education specialist at the Getty Museum, described to me the lengthy work involved in her performance piece “Ofrenda a Los Santos Inocentes,” which she is in the process of restating. It includes concepting, choreography, runway rental, elaborately hand-crafted costumes, and painstakingly created robot skeleton babies. Yes, I did just say “robot skeleton babies.” Do those look easy to make?

Toxic Beauty

How do you make a man fall deeply?

Try these simple ways to make him fall head over heels for you. ... Get familiar with some of these simple yet crazy ways. Dress up confidently....

Last updated Nov 22, 2022

Is PDA caused by trauma?

Some research suggests that PDA can be explained by interaction of various common co-occuring conditions, and the majority of these conditions are...

Last updated Jul 4, 2020

Promotion

For plenty of creative folks, “suffering for art” isn’t just a metaphor. William Morris, famed for his beautiful textile designs, is believed to have used arsenic in his green pigments. Morris turned a blind eye to the negative effects: he was on the board of a lucrative arsenic-mining company, after all. Unfortunately, it was those who bought his tapestries and wallpapers who really suffered—when left in damp areas of the house, fungi caused changed the arsenic into a highly toxic substance called trimethylarsine. While Morris went on to live a long life, some artists fared less well. Caravaggio, who was famously very messy with his (lead-based) paints, is thought to have died of lead poisoning. Other famous artists thought to have fallen victim to their materials include Goya and Van Gogh. Undaunted, today’s artists aren’t afraid to take on dangerous materials. MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary recently featured the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, whose work literally blew up outside of the museum. (On purpose, don’t worry!) Using gunpowder to make drawings, Cai works with sky-high temperatures and supernatural subjects. So artists really do work hard: whether chipping away at marble, getting physical with paint, or simply or doing the mental labor of imagining the new, art is a tough job…even if, when done skillfully, it often looks like the easiest thing in the world.

blogs.getty.edu - Yes, Art Really Is Hard Work | Getty Iris

How to attract your soulmate?

25 ways to attract your soulmate Figure out what you want. The first step to attracting my soulmate is to determine what it is you want. ......

Last updated Sep 18, 2021

Are good artists born or made?

Artists are both born and taught, says Nancy Locke, associate professor of art history at Penn State. "There is no question in my mind that artists...

Last updated Jun 23, 2019

Promotion

How do you test if a girl loves you?

She Prioritizes You. She Gets Jealous. She Always Tries to Be around You. She Listens to You. She Legitimately Cares about You. She Tries to...

Last updated Mar 7, 2020

Promotion

What is the best bio for love?

“You will always stay with me – and now you'll never be alone.” “I will never leave you even if you go crazy or die. I will hold you and care for...

Last updated Sep 8, 2019