Old Masters and Young Geniuses
on March 17th, 2009Our culture celebrates young, brash geniuses, and can’t get enough of innovators who create something spectacular before age 30, even if they never do another thing their entire lives.
When I first published A Distant Soil, I remember having a very revealing conversation with Dave Sim who urged me to make absolutely certain that I finished up my series before I turned 30 because creativity dies by then and my work wouldn’t be any good after I hit middle age. I don’t know that he still holds this view, but many people seem to think innovation dies as we mature, even when there are creators like Will Eisner as our examples. He was vital and interesting and working in comics until the day he died at a ripe old age.
A late-blooming economist named David Galenson has spent years studying the nature of creativity and genius, and has determined that the creative life isn’t limited to teen wonders. He postulates that there are two types of innovators – of a tortoise and hare duality – and that the continuum of creativity peaks early for conceptualists who usually do their most important work by age 30, and experimentalists, who often peak quite late into middle age, such as Frank Lloyd Wright (who created his architectual masterpiece Fallingwater when he was 70) or Mark Twain (who didn’t find his unique writer’s voice until well into adulthood).
There’s a lot of interesting food for thought in this article from Wired magazine.
I have spoken with a number of aspiring creators about how hard it is to become a comics pro after a certain age. It’s possible this doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the artist, but with the realities of the economics of starting a difficult art career without a steady paycheck, health benefits, or disability benefits. To many young people, these are not major considerations. After a certain age they are necessities.
When you are a kid, you live at home with your folks and can tolerate a period of economic disadvantage while you endure years of career apprenticeship. You do not have to support yourself or a family. Adults do not have this advantage, nor do they usually have the advantage to take time to conceptualize and take personal risks.
I credit most of my career success to the advantage of this early start (I began sending out samples when I was 12 and nailed my first paying job at 15). It took me about three years of slogging about before I made any decent money. Then early publishers walked off with about $250,000 of my royalties. It was a good decade before I began to get some sound financial footing, and that was after a couple of lawsuits, too! (EDIT: I was looking at my old sales figures, and think the $250,000 is a high estimate. I think this is the number my lawyer came up with, and may be a combination of unpaid royalties and damages. It’s so long ago, I can no longer confirm this.)
How many 30 year-olds are going to have the ability to lose a couple hundred thousand dollars in income and recover? Especially if they have acquired families and mortgages along the way. How do you find the time to draw and paint when you have a day job and family obligations?
Anyway, when I was a kid, I admired a lot of folks like Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Jeff Jones, etc, and kept their book The Studio close at hand. I wanted to be just like these guys, and when I was still sleeping on a couch in my parent’s house at the ripe old age of 19, I thought I was a loser. Didn’t all the cool artists have great work under their belts by then and studios in New York?
I later realized that The Studio and the works in it were created by men who were in their 30′s and 40′s, they had each spent nearly two decades in the trenches, slogging away until they developed their own visual sense. Jeff Jones’ earliest drawings and paintings were full of swipes and Frazetta riffs, and he did a lot of fanzine work before he was ever taken seriously.
So, delays are not denials. If you’re not a conceptualist, maybe you’re an experimenter, and your best work is in your future.
c
“How do you find the time to draw and paint when you have a day job and family obligations?”
My solution was to get divorced, but I don’t recommend it.
This has been on my mind recently, so I have a lot to say; please forgive the long comment.
I wish I’d not abandoned art for so many years. I don’t regret learning to write, or becoming a designer, or an art director — those experiences gave me depth, smacked the arrogance out of me, and made me much more disciplined. It’s hard, though, to not feel like I should be a better artist by now, especially when I compare myself to the other people at the studio, or old friends who have devoted themselves to art.
Here’s an example: one of my best friends in high school and I both lived and breathed art. For three years, we got busted for drawing in our math classes, using each other as models, and painting dragons instead of cowboys. He went to art school when he graduated; I went to college on a scholarship and majored in writing. He’s had the support of his family when he was younger, and then his wife, who carried him until his career took off — and now he’s a successful concept artist in the game industry, and I’m… an art director.
Or another example: there’s a kid at the studio whose parents are underwriting him while he takes art classes full-time. He’s made phenomenal progress in just three years, because he has literally nothing else to worry about (except, of course, finding work when he’s done). This is the seventh year I’ve been going to class part-time, and only now is my work looking anywhere near what I’d call good enough. (Or at least, I don’t want to light all my canvases on fire anymore.)
It’s not a zero-sum game, where their success takes away from me — not at all. It’s hard to keep that in mind, though, when I’ve just come off a 60-hour week, and am at the studio, hearing kids complain about how they have no time to do their homework. Or when I hear a friend who’s got a supportive spouse complain about how they had to stop painting to cook dinner. I grit my teeth and mutter yes, that must be very annoying, to have to spend an hour a day dealing with your family. Over the last couple of years, dealing with that envy has been colossally difficult.
I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, and what he had to say about mastery of a skill requiring 10,000 hours struck me. What my high school friend and the kid at the studio have in common is the support from their families to devote their life to getting that 10,000 hours done early on in their lives. If you figure on working 40 hours a week at something, for 50 weeks a year, you’ll have hit 2000 hours in a year, and in five years, you’ll be done with your 10,000 hours. Using that as a standard, I’d attained mastery in writing by the time I was in grad school, and in design after the first five years. I have one more year before I’ll have mastered being an art director (though I never want to master paperwork, if I can help it). And how many hours have I clocked in fine art? Probably only 8000-8500, and easily half of that was from before I was 18. I’d love to see if Galenson’s research contained any data about when the different artists passed that 10,000-hour mark, because I suspect that’s a factor as well in creative success.
Some days, I wish I’d just sucked it up, taken out loans, and gone to Art Center, instead. I’d be so much further along in my artistic career if I had, instead of 15 years behind other people my age or younger. But you’ve got to play the ball where it lies, so it looks like it’ll be a few more years yet of trying to juggle the day job, school, freelance work, and my other obligations. And refraining from strangling the clueless.
While not an artist, I’m a “late bloomer”. I was 30 before I had landed a single job in my chosen career. I was 40 before I had accomplished anything of note in it. Now, halfway to 50 I am beginning to be recognized for my work. I would not have had that luxury had it not been for patient parents, a few lucky breaks and many false starts.
A very good friend of mine told me a story I like to relate: A farmer who had worked the land until he could no longer physically continue decided to sell his farm to a younger man who – while he had not been a farmer – was intelligent, eager to become a farmer, and who had the money to buy the entire farm.
The younger man asked “How do you grow corn?”
The older farmer told him “You buy the seed, you til the ground, you plant the seed, you water, fertilize, and the corn grows. once it is completely grown you harvest, keep what you need for the next crop and repeat.”
The young man proceeded to buy the seed, he planted it, he watered and fertilized it, and waited.
Three weeks later, there was no corn. Six weeks later there was no corn.
He asked everyone if he had done anything wrong, and they assured him that indeed, he had done it exactly right.
After seven and a half weeks he sold the farm back to the old farmer.
Four days later the corn sprouted. In his excitement and enthusiasm to become a farmer he had forgotten to ask how long it takes corn to grow.
The moral of the story is…unless you know how long it will take to become a success in your chosen career, you might not want to give up yet.
These are great posts.
I have read a good deal about the 10,000 hour theory, and I tend to agree with it to the extent that only people who already have ability – as well as support resources – will put in that 10,000 hours. I think natural ability encourages the investment, and there are plenty of people who have put in many hours of effort and still never get anywhere. They just can’t compete with the people who have both natural ability and the time investment.
I’d be interested to see a study of people who had put in the time and still hadn’t gotten the measure of success they had hoped for.
I think the message is, the time investment is no guarantee of success, but without the time investment there will be no success at all.
That said, people glom on the creators with early success, but they are so rare. People think it’s all about sudden achievement and natural gifts. But it’s USUALLY about a great deal of effort over a long period of time, and you almost never see a story about a teen wonder who hadn’t been working at it since the age of five.
For the entire first decade of my career, I never had more than $10,000 in annual take home pay, much of it due to some rather nasty publishers. But all people saw was my name in the press and my books on the stands. So, they assumed I was raking in the dough.
Very few people are going to labor for more than 10 years for $10,000 and stick with it.
And to this day, I take classes and keep trying to learn my craft.
BTW, VT.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the idea that marriage and family obligations kills many an artist’s aspirations.
I love families, I love kids, but life is a zero sum game. There are only so many hours in the day.
I’ve been compiling info about women artists for many years, and the one constant is that most of them had servants, or some major support from family resources, i.e. the ability to afford servants. Many gave up on traditional family life.
What a women artist needs is a wife.
“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” (Cyril Connolly)
“…the time investment is no guarantee of success, but without the time investment there will be no success at all.”
Definitely. There’re many people in the studio who are far more talented than I am, but they don’t put in the hours, and it shows. And people do ignore the thousands of hours that go into great works and early careers, completely. It’s maddening.
I totally need a wife. Or a manwife. Or to clone Quiche.
Total agreement.
Honestly, some of the most naturally talented and smart people I have ever met are the laziest bums imaginable. They sit around and sneer at others while they work in record shops and deliver pizza.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But for God’s sake, if you’ve got a 160 IQ, and you spend your free time blathering about what bad books you’ve read and what rotten artists other people are, then get off your ass and produce something yourself.
Yes, I am thinking of specific people.
I’ve read a number of studies that show that people with natural ability often get a sense of superiority that tells them they don’t have to make the effort because they are part of the naturally gifted aristocracy.
The gift is nothing without the work. To fail to work is to betray the gift.
I know that although my writing skills have been good since college, and that some of the pieces I wrote in grad school were what I considered “master” level (I’m thinking of a long narrative poem I wrote, in particular), I don’t think I’d truly mastered my craft (of writing) until… well, in the last ten years. I’m very proud of the craftwork I put into *The Scribbler’s Guide* – but that was the result of a LOT of work before, and constant study and attention along the way.
Getting back into artwork has been a challenge. It’s something of a relief to me, to see that the talent has remained. But seriously! I need to put more hours of practice back into that activity. I’m not quite satisfied with the little bits I’ve done. In a good way, though – in the sense that I can look at pieces and know I can probably do better, even though what’s in front of me isn’t too bad.
Colleen, your comments remind me of another piece of wisdom: “Do. Or Do not. There is no ‘try’”
It is all about the doing. And while I image that there are many who put in the work and don’t make it big, I doubt seriously there are more than a handful who put in the work and got nothing. It is all in what you want. I define my success in terms of having a good life. I am respected and accomplished even if I am not renowned. And while in my field there are “Rock Star” programmers and recognizable names, I’m not one of them.
But the same can be said of artists too. I have several very nice pieces of art from artists I think are fantastic and I doubt that they’ll ever be the kind of pieces that would make people clamor to get. But I like them. They show skill and an aesthetic that appealed to me. And if somebody likes it, I’d call that a success, albeit on a small scale.
As for the position of “manwife”, I’m sorry I’m taken.
Great points, Mr. Dave.
If you just want to make art, make art. There’s no one stopping you but you.
Making a living at art is another matter entirely, and requires a different mindset and skillset. Not every artist can make money at art.
If you can, great. If you can’t, you’re not a failure as an artist.
As long as you (in general not you personally) remember that no one owes you a living because you want to make art, then you’ll be fine.
If someone wants to use your art, you have a right to be paid for that use. But if no one wants to use your art, you have to make arrangements to finance the making of that art on your own dime.
That doesn’t make you any less an artist.
And it doesn’t make you any less an artist if you make money at art.
Colleen also needs a manwife. Must do windows.
I wonder where one would place an ad for a manwife…
“…maybe… your best work is in your future…”
Those few words to me represent hope, and I can’t thank you enough for that. I’ve decided to take the advice of those closest to me and go back to school to study art. I haven’t chosen a school yet, and already I’m getting cold feet. Already I’m thinking, “I’m about to spend a shitload of time and money and fail spectacularly in the end.” I’ve spent too many years guided by fear rather than hope, though. With this post, you’ve added a couple of drops of hope to my little hope bucket. Every little bit helps.
(By the way, I understand that art isn’t like accounting. You don’t get a job in art because you earned a degree, you get a job if you work hard and your work is really, really, REALLY good. I also understand some art schools suck. But I have ADD and I’ve learned that I work best with a little structure, and I think art school might help provide me with that.)
Anyway, again, thanks for sharing your thoughts, Colleen. Thanks to everyone who has posted in this thread, for that matter.
Life isn’t easy but if you work at it, you may actually yield some positive results. However, too many want it “NOW!”
While determination is admirable, there comes a time when priorities need to be re-evaluated and sometimes shift. If you have a family to help provide for and aren’t earning income on either your art and/or writing, then you need to make it secondary for awhile.
It’s not something most want to do, but I don’t see anything noble about being voluntarily impoverished, especially when others are feeling the effects.
That Dave Sim story is funny! I wonder if he has that opinion now. And I wonder what he would have said if you’d replied that Steve Ditko was 38 when he started drawing Spider-Man, and that Jack Kirby was FOURTY-FOUR when he started Fantastic Four!
That should be spelled ‘forty-four.’ I can spell good.
I think Sim is about a decade older than me, so I would have been pretty young when he said it. I haven’t been in regular communication with him in years and recall this being in the 1980′s. He may have been trying to jerk my chain.
Still, I think the cultural bias toward young creators is very real.
Oh, yeah, on the bias toward young creators. It’s particularly prevalent in Hollywood regarding writers. None of the other crafts, mind you, not really. But a writer with few credits, who admits to being more than mid-30-something…. starts getting the cold shoulder. I have no idea why execs think that younger writers are “better”.
But there’s a definite business reason why I don’t go around broadcasting my own age much. Bleh that it should be necessary!
Thanks for this great post, Colleen. I’ve been something of a late bloomer myself, having self-published in my late 20′s and then broken off due to financial difficulties. I’ve spent most of the last 8 years struggling against those difficulties to fight for the studio time to get back to my first love, comics, but all the while I can see the calendar creeping slowly towards my forties… and it’s hard NOT to think that if I don’t “make it,” or at least break back in before the 40 mark, that it has some kind of cosmic significance. So thoughts and comments like these are definitely a welcome thing to my ears.
Also, I recently went through serious dating and then breakup with a single mother, where chief factors in the breakup were my own finances and my obsessive need to make comics. It is a hard thing, to balance the economic pressures of family against the time constraints of creativity, and I have nothing but respect for those who can manage that balancing act and be successful at both. It’s still beyond my abilities. And it’s definitely a lot harder when you’re still in the “breaking in” stage at 37.
But determination doesn’t fade after 30. Or talent. Or faith (unless they break you!) Haven’t stopped writing or drawing yet. They’ll have to pry the pencil from my cold dead hands. ;D
I think this is a question that everybody from the comics scene of the 90′s with pretensions of staying in the industry in some kind of relevant way, is asking themselves now.
I think it has to do the with seasons of one’s life. –And not in the traditional sense of birth to death. Rather, every 12 years or so, a cycle seems to complete itself, with a Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. I’ve seen it in everybody I know.
“Thieves & Kings” represented that process for me, and when the Winter was bearing down on me, it was scary, but also emancipating. –The Winter is a time of sleep, dreaming the dream of Life. Returning to childhood. –At nearly 40 years of age, (I turn 39 this May), I have spent the last several years now focused on living and accumulating new knowledge and new experiences far, far from the world of comics. All of which leaves me stunned and happy and feeling as though I had been blind and sleeping until only recently. As a 20-something year-old kid, I thought I knew it all, had SO much to say. I am happy with the early stuff I wrote, as I am sure you must be with your amazing works, but now. . .
Life is like a lake, and unless we dare to swim in it, drink deeply as we once did naturally through the process of growing from babies to young adults. . , unless we do this, then as creators we have nothing to say.
A natural but rather tragic part of the process is that many comics creators experience nothing during their 20′s other than the act of drawing, writing and publishing. There is very little new experiencing going on while we danced madly on the shore for everybody to see. I think, in part, what Dave Sim was recognizing was that by the time we reach 30 or so, we have run out of early-life stories and insights to share. A barrel-scraping desperation slowly sets in. . .
I suspect that those of us who wish to continue, those who have had the foolishness and courage to go back into the lake of Life, to swim there openly and honestly and drink the waters again, then upon swimming back to shore today, we return with both the hard-won skills collected during youth as well as new mysteries and insights and loves to share with the world. Living is vital! Going “walkabout”.
–I don’t think financial concerns are terribly important. Web publishing is essentially free, and systems of self-support can be wrangled, especially today as old systems collapse and things become more chaotic. (Chaos means Opportunity up for grabs as the world re-writes its own rule systems. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!). Those who have something to say will be able to say it. I can feel the fires again. The Spring thaw is starting. . .
At least that’s how I see things. . .