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musicians are trained in these areas.
The most creative recording group
of all time—The Beatles—learned
their craft by copying Buddy Holly,
Chuck Berry and Little Richard. They
learned a repertoire of “licks” to use
as springboards. Musicians call this
“having it in your ear.” Every rookie
guitar player in every garage band
is expected to improvise—to create
brand-new melodies on the spot.
Our creative lives should be no
different. I suggest that you copy
masterworks—or parts of them.
The goal isn’t to make a forgery;
rather, it’s to understand how the
master solved the visual problem.
This reverse engineering is one of the
fastest paths to mastery and creative
understanding. John Singer Sargent,
for example, carried his copies of
Diego Velásquez paintings with him
his entire life! After Fechin (opposite),
my pastel rendition of Portrait of
Eya, an oil painting by Nicolai Fechin
(Russian-American, 1881–1955),
taught me how to achieve Fechin’s
broken stroke effect using pastel.Exercise 2:
Series Exercise
In a recent workshop, I introduced
students to this exercise designed toget the creative juices flowing: I set up
a simple still life and encouraged them
to paint it as many ways as they can.
Initially, students said they were
only able to think of a few approaches,
but as soon as they started to paint,
the floodgates opened. I encouraged
them to ask
“what if?” ques-
tions: “What if
I made it high
key? What if I
painted just the
highlights and
shadows? What
if I only used
blues or reds?”
Here’s the
setup (at left)
and a few of myThis still life setup
served as the
foundation for nine
creative outcomes
(page 62).ArtistsNetwork.com 61