When you look at a piece of art by your favorite designer, what do you see? What is the first thing you think of?
I used to think and critique a piece a certain way until I started showing my girlfriend my art. That changed the way I looked at my own art and others forever.
When you look at my art, what do you see? Sure, the colors look nice, and the composition might be good. One thing isn’t in the right place, or maybe the whole piece has too much empty space? Put more into it, or maybe it should be a different color. Maybe you should work on your typography, or maybe the program you used to make it is too easy to learn. Ninety-five percent of the critiques I get these days are solely technical. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But…
Now unless all designers today are brain dead, then there is some thinking that goes behind every piece that they make. When you look at the Mona Lisa, I hope you don’t think that Leonardo painted it bad, or that it was missing something. The Mona Lisa’s concept made it a historic piece of art. Something I think that is missing from today’s critiques is that people do not take enough time to look at the piece and wonder what the artist was thinking, what were they going through at the time of creation, and what they message they were trying to portray when making it, or even let themselves get lost in the piece.
I made a piece for DeviantArt a few weeks ago, named “Unity”, it was a piece that had a series of three phrases and a picture I took of a war memorial. One person took the time to feel the message I was trying to send:
It’s strange… At first I thought this image was far from anything embodying ‘unity’, mainly due to the division of people due to war itself, it only reinforces our differences whether they be social class or politics. But for what ever nationality partaking in war, I suppose they would feel unified in their common goal to eliminate their ‘enemy’ by means of mass destruction and… well before I go ranting on more about anti-war stuff, I’ll just say that I like this image, it doesn’t condone or abolish war, instead, to me, it creates a sense of nostalgia for something that we should all learn from, move on from, but all never forget.
Well done.
He could have said the work sucked, but you know what, I would have thanked him anyway, because he took the time to look at the inner meaning of the piece, instead of saying, “i think the color sucks.” I did thank him, because out of all the comments I have gotten in a long time that one showed time and effort.
Use that as an example. Start with yourself, why do you create art? What is the meaning behind your art? Then look at others and find the meaning behind theirs, let their art take you to places that only exist in your dreams. It could be one blank piece of canvas, but they did it for a reason, everything is done for a reason. Find that reason in every piece you look at, and then you can say you’re a real critiquer of art.