I feel that for the majority of artists – and perhaps this is more
true for younger rather than older artists, or more accurately for
inexperienced versus experienced artists – the medium comes first. There
are many reasons for this. Most people enter the art world because they
fall in love with a medium. If we go to school we’re (nearly always)
forced to choose a medium to major in. After all, it’s easier to learn
and teach a medium than a message – that has to come from deep within
yourself. This leads us to become very proficient and comfortable with a
specific medium, and often a specific way of working within in it.
Thus, the medium prevails.
Once we leave school, or simply the initial exploratory stage of art
making – the part where we learn our craft, the medium continues to lead
us. After all, we are painters, photographers, illustrators – our
medium becomes a part of our identity. But art is the realm of ideas,
and ideas have little concern for weather we wield a brush or a video
camera. We march out into the world looking for what we can explore with
our newly found skill. At first we come across ideas easily conveyed
through our, now long ago decided on, medium. We pick the low hanging
fruits of our minds, the things we wished we could have done when we had
neither skill nor experience. The reason we went out and painstakingly
learned our craft. But then we encounter, usually midway through a
project, an idea that is both more stubborn and more important than any
we’ve met before. All of a sudden, without a minute warning, the message
refuses to follow blindly in the shadow of our medium.
Our own realization of this might not be quite as fast. We begin to
feel friction – something is missing from our work. We look around and
realize the key idea doesn’t manifest itself quite as clearly as we’d
imagined. Perhaps it’s not there at all. We wonder how we can bring it
back into the centre of our work. Approaching it from various angles,
our medium in hand, we try to figure out a plan of attack. We’re blind
to the possibility that the issue is with our tool rather than the raw
material. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail.
In order for our work to flourish, we must step back and reassess our
tools. Our medium was once the guiding force, a safety line even, that
kept us on track and held back distractions that would have been
destructive in our period of early discovery and growth. But like an
overly protective parent that refuses to relinquish control of their
child, it has now become a crutch that holds us back from reaching our
full potential.
At this point we, as artists, must sacrifice our cherished medium so
that our message can thrive. Otherwise our work will continue to fall
flat – we will be disappointed and everyone else, simply indifferent.
From a practical view this means we must be aware of all the tools at
our disposal and have a rudimentary knowledge of how they work. When
working on project, we should, from the outset, approach problems by
first considering what tools will give us the results we desire,
aesthetically as well as intellectually. Perhaps even work with several
tools at once so that when writing the tale of our journey we can see,
rather than assume, which is best. Otherwise we’ll arrive at the end
only to realize that the message that drove us to work has been
smothered by an overly stubborn medium.
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Eugen Sakhnenko is a Toronto-based freelance photographer and the co-creator of the Knock Twice blog, which is where a version of this post originally appeared. It's is an online resource to assist and inform budding creative professionals. You can visit Knock Twice here.
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