Why Innate Talent is Overrated

When you think of "talent," what do you think of? Perhaps some sports great, like Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, or perhaps some sort of big thinker, like Einstein or Da Vinci. What about someone more contemporary - a technological innovator like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe some of your heroes in your field, people who do things that you wish you could do, or could do things you do faster or better. But when it comes down to it, we often think of talent as some inherent factor that these fortunate people were born with. It is comforting to think of talent as something that is some ethereal, almost magical thing that is mysterious and wonderful and is something that we are either born with or without.

Bull poo-poo, we say. "But Monkey + Seal," you might ask, "what about that one gal who did XYZ and she is just so amazingly talented at XYZ and we have very similar backgrounds, and she's just so much better than I am." What you're really trying to ask is "why are they successful and I'm not?"

We try to think of talent as inherent, or something we're born with, because that way it explains the deciding factor, that one single thing that sets the successful apart from us. It is comforting to think of talent this way because if we don't, then suddenly our own flaws are exposed and we are now short of one less excuse of why we aren't where they are.

It is not easy to fess up and take ownership of the fact that there are people who are much more successful (whatever that means to you). But it happens. While admitting that talent is not some inherent ability you have to admit that maybe they worked harder/smarter/longer than you, and that's the painful part. But the great part about that is this: if talent is not some inherent ability that means that YOU are just as talented as they are.

If talent is something else, something not ingrained in us at birth, that means that everyone can get access to that something else and we can all be successful. So what you're probably wondering by now is that if talent is not some inherent trait, then what is it?

Enter Dr. Anders Ericsson. A professor at Florida State University, in the 90's, Dr. Ericsson studies students at the Berlin Academy of Music. He found that all the elite students had practiced, on average, for around 10,000 hours. The good students had practiced for about 8,000 hours, and the average students had practices for around 4000 hours. Thus, the 10,000 hour rule was born.

In nearly every discipline, people who are really outstanding have put in that 10,000 hours. So what does that mean for you? For one, if you want to start something, you might as well get cracking now. Secondly, if you're already on your way, all you need to do is keep doing what you want to do. If you want to be an amazing painter, you gotta keep painting. If you want to be a writer, keep on writing.

To make 10,000 hours a bit more tangible, Monkey did the math, and if you devote 40 hours a week to it (all of these assume you're not taking weeks off and are going at it 52 weeks out of the year), it'll take you about 4 years and 10 months. If you spend 30 hours a week, it'll take you 6 years and 5 months. If you spend 20 hours a week, it'll take you a little over 9 years and 7 months. These numbers are all assuming that you're working constant weeks as well, and doesn't really take into account things like school (we probably worked on art around 55 hours a week for three years), but you get the picture.

The fastest way to your goal is practice. Plain and simple. And if you've already hit that 10,000 mark? Keep on going, since there are always others out there with more hours. And if you're at the very top? Keep on going, since there are always people right behind you working their little butts off to get where you are. Besides, if you're doing what you love, you'll be having too much fun to watch the clock. Go get 'em.

How to Solve the Problem of "The Starving Artist"

"Is it a guarantee?" people have asked me, "if I work hard and become an artist, is it a guarantee that I'll make it?" Most people want to hear the answer "Yes, just stick to your studies and you'll be okay. You'll graduate school and find a good job and they'll take care of you for a long time." This is the old way of thinking. The answer is: Only you will know. Only you can determine that answer. Nothing is ever a guarantee (Not even for the lawyers). So is it still worth it for you to pursue it even if you can't predict the outcome? I hope so. It is for both Monkey and Seal.

Often as artists we grapple with a lack of abundance. We think, "jobs are limited and we are beaten by artists younger than us." What is hard to understand is that we become the very image of the "starving artist" NOT because it is the "ultimate truth" or "expected result" of being an artist, but because there is still yet not enough institutional, community support, and resources for the artist. AND we haven't switched our minds from being reactive to society to that of self-determined action. We hope things will fall in our laps, rather than taking action and going for them.

Five years ago, there were barely any books written about the career track of a successful modern-day artist (still very few now). Many older veterans will tell you they simply worked hard and were lucky to have "moved up the ladder." A lot of the Studio Gibli/ Miyazaki artists over 40-50 years old had little or no prior background in animation, they were simply taken under the wings of older mentors. Most have had to carve their own path and learn through others. Many alumni networks exists for ivy-league schools and academia studies for lawyers and doctors, yet only recently are art schools reproducing that format. So although there are internships out there, career help from art schools, this is still an old way of thinking - this is only ONE OF MANY PATHS to become a successful artist.

There is no clear blueprint. No ten-year "proven" track of academia, residency, and practice. Most artist graduates will probably tell you, that their path afterward was wide and unpredictable. Both Monkey and Seal have worked at various jobs: retail, web designer, graphic designer, t-shirt printing, tutor, UI icon artist, logo designer, marketing agent, illustrator, fine arts painter, concept artist, animator, fashion designer, etc.

It is part of the frustration and simultaneous beauty of being an artist: it is a flexible field and having learned the basics, you can do cross-jobs and apply your foundations in any related field.

Enjoy the times when you are struggling. Because this is the time for your to experiment and find your voice. Which field calls out to you more? What should you specialize in, if any? What style and mediums best suit the stories you would like to tell most?

"But I'm sick of being poor," cries the fledgling artist, "give me stardom, give me riches." No one denies that it would be nice not to worry about income and to continually have clients bid for your art. Yet at the same time, shouldn't we enjoy our creativity, our time, and our lives as it currently is? With all its thorns and roses? And shouldn't we walk the path in our own pace and find the beauty of our art through self-discovery? And reach stardom and riches when our artist identities are solidified that it can take on the masses? (Is stardom and riches your ultimate goal? Or is it creative freedom, financial rewards, and being respected by your peers?)

The great composer Stravinsky complained, "I cannot compose what they want from me, which would be to repeat myself. That is the way people write themselves out."

I am not an advocate of masochism. I do NOT believe that "you have to suffer first as a starving artist before you make your big break." I do believe that you can be successful AT ANY TIME YOU CHOOSE. But before you choose stardom, make sure your heart is at ease, then you will be able to continue to create art however you please, without giving in to the pressures of your future fans. Do not choose wealth and fame as an artist out of desperation (I'll make anything you ask of me, just give me money or I'll trade this life of an artist, for anything, anything at all) or avoidance of your responsibility as an artist (Now that I have money, I don't have to make art anymore! or Now that I have fame, it doesn't matter what I paint, people will pay me for it anyways). But choose wealth and fame to further your art, you voice, and your experiences in life.

So in the meantime, enjoy it now. Enjoy the time you are able to experiment, when you live and create and amuse yourself only and not the mass. Enjoy not having the track record to live up to, but to toot and play your own horn, while walking through life to your own drumbeats. And when the time comes, enjoy that too!

And remember, the quickest path directly to your dreams is to do more of what you love.

Good News, Bad News, All Around News Worth Day

A HUGE thank you to everyone who came out to support Monkey's first feature show on Friday! The opening showcased mythical beasts discovered by Rick Kitagawa (aka Monkey) and Grant Gilliland. It was fun catching up with new and old friends alike, we even met some of our blog readers in person! If you missed the showing, “Bestiarum Vocabulum” will still be on display at Big Umbrella Studios until the end of this month.

Monkey was busy painting and preparing right up until the moment it opened. This was a good lesson as it was his first feature and would like to plan more in advance for his split collaboration with Seal for the June OZ Gallery. At the same time, Seal was preparing her work portfolio and for her upcoming show this Thursday: “Warhol Reimagined: The New Factory.”

So after a lot of internal deliberations at the Monkey + Seal cave, we realize that we bit off a bit more than we could chew with a M-W-F blog format. After a few successive weeks of missing posts here and there, we regretfully realized that we're a bit overloaded. Now that Monkey is helping run Big Umbrella Studios, Seal is working full time on her portfolio and getting into gallery shows, and we'll both be painting for our upcoming feature show at Oz Gallery in June, we realized that for the time being, we are unable to deliver the blog posts in a quality and consistent manner. We were rather disappointed with ourselves over the last couple of weeks.

Posts have gotten shorter, some without images, and this is definitely NOT what we want. We want to offer our readers constant quality posts with thought-provoking content that inspires you to reach for the stars and follow your dreams and become even more awesome than you already are. We get a pleasure of writing these posts and sharing with you our honest lives.

So after lot of careful considerations, in order to deliver consistently with high quality content and illustrations while practicing the sustainability that we often preach, we decided that it would be best for our readers and ourselves to blog our main posts only on Wednesdays. Our main posts will be our new posts about inspiration, meeting your goals, chasing your dreams, and will be accompanied by new high quality illustrations each week.

Because in the end, we want to spend the time and quality on making sure the Wednesday posts are excellent, we'll continue to have posts here and there of show information, reviews, and random goodness, but they will be unscheduled and flexible. So be sure to subscribe and/or check back so you won’t miss a beat.

We really appreciate everyone sticking with us thus far, and as our journey is far from over and is actually climbing much faster than we anticipated, we hope you'll continue on with us for years to come. We really couldn't have done it without you. Thanks so so so much for all the support and we'll see you on Wednesdays for now!

Bestiarum vocabulum: The Book of the Beasts

Hi Hi everyone! We're pleased to announce/remind you about Monkey's upcoming split-feature show with gentleman-artist and all-around nice guy, Grant Gilliland! It's all going down this Friday, March 4th, from 7-11pm at Big Umbrella Studios (906.5 Divisadero x McAllister). It should be a great show, as we'll be getting down with live screenprinting (buy a shirt and get it printed in front of your eyes!!!), maybe the best vegan cupcakes on the face of the earth from Black Orchid Bakery, and amazing vegan/vegetarian tacos courtesy of Local Flavor SF. So much awesomeness in one night!

Anyhoo, we would love to see you there, and we wanted to share with you some sneak preview images of Monkey's paintings. The little guy has been painting pretty much non-stop for the past week or so - we hope you enjoy! You should definitely stop by the show to see the images in person, where they look much better than via an old iPhone's lens with bad apartment lighting.

The photos:

The Succubus

The Basilisk

Local Flavor SF's taco..seasonal veggies and beans topped with pickled onions, sunflower seeds, and a cilantro-awesomeness sauce

The details:

Bestiarum vocabulum: The Book of the Beasts

Join us for the "Bestiarum vocabulum" Art Opening featuring the work of painters/illustrators Grant Gilliland and Rick Kitagawa.

From the elusive cyclops to the dangerous succubus, from trolls to water spirits, we often think of mythological beasts as simply mythological. Grant Gilliland and Rick Kitagawa beg to differ. Let this pair of monster hunters bring these creatures to life in a series of all new paintings featuring a stable of unearthly beasts and "mythological" creatures from around the world that are just waiting to follow you home.

"Bestiarum vocabulum"
featuring Grant Gilliland and Rick Kitagawa
w/works by the Big Umbrella Studio collective

Big Umbrella Studios
906.5 Divisadero St (x McAllister)
Friday, March 4, 2011
7-11pm

*Collaborative Grant n' Rick t-shirt design printed live*
*food by Black Orchid Bakery and Local Flavor SF*

www.bigumbrellastudios.com

www.seegrantdraw.com
www.rickkitagawa.com

Inspiration: Psuedopod

The Nightmare Planter

Monkey + Seal have recently taken to listening to podcasts, which seem to be the best thing since sliced bread. One of which, has been helpful to get Monkey in the creepy, haunting mood that is suitable for painting a crap-load (a scientific unit of measurement), of monster paintings for his upcoming show. That podcast is Pseudopod.


Pseudopod is a weekly horror podcast, and thus far it's been pretty damn good. You can download them via itunes, which Monkey then listens to while he paints, while he's on the bus, walking between the Monkey + Seal cave and Big Umbrella Studios.

Listening to podcasts is great for us, as instead of listening to music on the way to work, or while painting, we can expose ourselves to new inspirations and ideas. Granted, we lose a bit in the transition back and forth when we're trying to paint and listen at the same time (see our post on the myths of multitasking to see what we mean), but overall it's really great.

So far most of the stories have been pretty awesome, and it's nice to be exposed to new writers of horror. The host's closing notes after the story are always interesting, tying in the theme of the story with real life and his own experiences. It's good storytelling and definitely worth a download or two or twenty.

So for all you fans of the creepy and dark, the supernatural and horrific, go check out the Pseudopod! You won't be disappointed.

Process: Painting "Alone in the Dark"

Monkey here today, for a quick run-down of my process while painting a very recent piece, which I call "Alone in the Dark." In the photo above, the weird blue light coming diagonally across the upper left is just a lens flare.

So for a figurative piece where I want to really convey a specific emotion, I shoot reference. While others might be masters of expressions without reference, I am not, so I got our digital camera, a little work lamp, a sheet of blue acetate, some masking tape, a black cloth, and asked for the assistance of an awesome model, Seal.

If you don't have someone else you can ask to model, you can always do it yourself. I must admit, it is much easier to work with someone else. If you can't afford to pay someone, ask other artists if they might need a model of their own, and do a trade-sie.


So the above photo is primarily the one I worked off of. I like the hand positions in this photo, but I wasn't completely sold on her head position. I skimmed through some other photos I had snapped in our little 10-minute photo shoot, and after doing some Photoshop work, adjusting the levels, adding a very transparent gradient of aqua, I ended up with this:

With this as my reference, I started to paint. I paint with acrylics, and I like using Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics. For this painting, I used my usual palette set-up, which consists of:

titanium white, unbleached titanium (lazy painter's warm white), mars black, yellow oxide, cadmium yellow light hue, burnt umber, cadmium red medium hue, alizarin crimson hue permanent, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue (green shade), veridian hue permanent, and dioxazine purple. I will sometimes add extra colors to the palette if I need a large quantity of a certain color that I don't want to mix (I also keep a tube of magenta and an aqua handy), but usually I just stick with these colors and mix everything.

I also got a tube of ivory black to warm up the black since I was doing a cool light, but you can just as well mix some alizarin into your black to warm it up a bit if you stick with mars black.

I did a direct drawing onto the canvas using watered-down burnt umber. I mainly went for general proportions and gesture at this point. So you can see, I didn't quite hit that target on my first go, but since acrylics dry fast and you can paint over stuff, I decided to fix it later and just start painting.

I laid in a dark black for the shadowy background and mixed up a nice green to really push the creepy atmosphere and emphasize the unearthly lighting situation (which is also coming from below, which you don't see very often and adds to the creep-factor).

I also laid in a green underpainting where the flesh would be. Why? Because I like the effect of laying down a blue-green in my portraits and then layering fleshtones on top, especially if you're putting them in green light.

I then blocked in the lights and darks of the shirt, using a thin black wash to fill in the shirt, as I didn't want to lose the form of the shirt too early, while I was still figuring out the folds and construction and form. If I was a crazier painter, I could probably have gone with some opaque black, but I didn't want to push it, so I took it easy. I hit the light parts with green, since that's the color of the light.

The next step was to paint over the green with some unbleached titanium mixed with a bit of cad red light and yellow oxide. I also added the shadows on the skin, and took a bit of time to carve out the shape of the hand.


So the above photo is taken after about 3 hours of work. I paint fairly fast, thanks to a Quick Studies class I took at Academy, but I had to slow down a bit since I hadn't attempted to do anything even remotely realistic in a while, and sort of forgot what I had learned.

Tthis next photo was taken after about another 3 hours of work. What did I do in these three hours to go from weird chalk-lady to a decent approximation of a scared Eve?


Well, I spent a good two hours or so really studying the folds and buttons on her shirt. For some reason, I get a kick out of painting collared shirts on people, so I ended up devoting a bit too much time to the clothing, but it turned out pretty swell.

I also slowly painted, and repainted, and repainted again Eve's face, working to smoothly blend and capture all the subtle colors that are in her face in the reference photo. I also had a bunch of facial proportions all wrong, so I repainted her nose about three times. The first time it was too small, then it was too low and big, and then it was too high, and then I figured it wasn't worth it to go for a perfect likeness and decided that the nose looked proportional and real to the painting and that was that.

I also took time to start painting the hands. I then realized, while painting, that something seemed funny, and somehow during the painting process I stopped using the photo reference, and fudged the hands quite a bit. After carving a bit away, repositioning some fingers, and generally undoing a lot of the preliminary mistakes I had made, I repainted the fingers.

And after another hour or two, I decided I was finished. During those last few hours, I pulled out some highlights on her hair, softened a lot of the cast shadows on her face, sculpted the eyes a bit more, rendered the lips, added a bit of detail to the hands, and repainted her neck so that the anatomy worked a bit better.



Ta-da! So after about 50 minutes of reference shooting and prep work, and about 9-11 hours of painting, the finished product is here. I saw the painting starting to take a pulp-horror paperback book look early on, and decided that I would try to keep it in that vein as opposed to going for ultra-realism (which I find I just don't have the patience for).

Oh yeah! By the way, I also use Golden brand Acrylic Glazing Liquid (Satin) to thin my paints if I want to sort of glaze over dried paint to smooth transitions or tint parts certain colors. I used a lot of medium while painting the hands and face, due to the high concentration of blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. Due to the green light literally going through the skin, hitting the red blood, and bouncing back, you get this weird mixture of cool pinks and warm greens, with strange transitions in-between.

I hope you learned something from this process post, and feel free to ask any specific questions in the comments. While this isn't the style I'm currently working in, it is nice to bust out a creepy painting that flexes some of my classical realism training that I got in school, and also balances my work so it's also more fun to bust out and do my regular sweaty monsters. Woo!

Why Logic Does Matter

If you missed the post on Monday about logic, please check it out here. After you've caught up, or if you simply are someone who like logic, please read on:

As an artist, we are often bombarded by the urges to do what is logical and obvious to people who are not artists. The world, as a whole, doesn't encourage artists, it doesn't (really) encourage following your dreams, and it sure as heck doesn't encourage artists following their dreams. By all "normal" standards, following your artist dreams isn't logical - it's pretty stupid, or at least that's how it used to be.

You see, it made "logical" sense to stay at some job you were probably lukewarm about (at best), for 30-40 years, because once you retire, your company will take care of you. It's easy street in retirement, with your pension taking care of you and your 401k making life fun. No longer. Large companies don't care about their employees and smaller companies might not last. Besides making yourself indispensable for your company's success, there is no such thing as job security.

Our economy is not what it was, and with a growing number of graduates with Bachelor's degrees, jobs are more and more competitive. There are no guarantees anymore, and it makes people crazy. Especially people who are from the time where life was a little bit simpler, and hardwork, determination, and drive were the only things that you needed to get by. Now, not only do you have to work hard, be determined, and feel that inner drive, you also need to be passionate, creative, and remarkable. Yet, people still think that the traditional way of doing things is what is logical. Ridiculous, we say.

If your parents want you to become a lawyer or a doctor because these professions were in high regard (ie they paid well), that's no longer the case, unfortunately. There are tons of lawyers and doctors who are finding it's suddenly hard to find employment. So then if there is no real security, if there is no real sure-fire way to make it, why not follow your dreams and pursue what you really love? In our mind, that's the only logical choice to make.

Now we're not saying that you should quit your day job tomorrow and go off and be an artist full-time. What we are saying is that you need to cherish your art. Cherish that inner drive and the burn to create. Make a plan to slowly create income from your art before you quit that job that drives you crazy. Do things logically - do research, create a plan, create a back-up plan, and then go follow your dream.

We tend to think that you have to either follow your head or your heart. We think that when you can strike that perfect balance between the two that the real magic begins. What wonders are you going to create today?