Incoming wall of text -- I tried shortening it down (and was close to just deleting it since it grew into it's own monster), but I'll just post it anyway. For prosperity.



As much as I agree with that approach (practicing one thing at a time), I do think it has an annoying disadvantage compared to say just painting a painting from scratch every day. I tend to spend 1 day coming up with an idea, then 2 days to paint it -- spending the rest of the week sketching/practicing some specific area.



I think a case could be made that getting good at painting, while clearly connected to the different aspects that make up it (anatomy, value, expression, composition, colour palette etc) in the end is more than the sum of it's parts. Harold Speed, whom I mentioned earlier, talks about this as the danger of academic learning -- it's easy to start mistaking the technical aspects that make up a good painting to be the only aspects worth exploring. Many of the chinese masters have the most absurd technical skills, but I only enjoy looking at maybe one out of a hundred of their works. So maybe practicing "painting" (i.e. practicing "all the things at once") has an intrinsic value to it, too?



But then again, on the other hand, I know a person who paints a painting every day, never taking time to focus on specific points, but due to his schedule he also never strays too far from what he is comfortable with and doesn't spend the time necessary to analyze what he is doing wrong, and thus keeps repeating the same mistake over and over, blind to his blunders. Too busy thinking about other things, I didn't focus on colours at all, and they suffered as a result. Guess like everything in life there is a balance, and like everything it seems impossible to find.



Either way it's annoying -- what should you practice anyway? Is it what would cause the biggest improvement, week for week? Or should one focus on what opens up the most amount of new possible compositions? Learning how to paint an open mouth, learning about 3 and 4 point perspective, or what different cloud types exist, what height they can be found at and what they mean for the weather? I think the answer might be closer to the second than the first.



The worst part though is that in my experience, when I try and focus on each part of a painting separately (gesture first, anatomy and expression second, adding the values in b&w to start with, tweaking the composition later) I end up with something that looks extremely overworked and stale. Maybe it could be compared to the dichotomy between k-pop artists (in general) and punk performers? But at the same time the great Richard Schmid talks about "loose styles" (Zorn, for example) as being the end result of all academic training that allows their light and initially haphazardly looking touch. Maybe there are two types of chaos -- one that is gained by mastery of fundamentals, and one that is chaos due to lack of fundamentals? If the first one would be a great punk song then the second one would be sticking your head outside the window during traffic, I guess. I wouldn't say that punk bands can perform in their loose way due to some mastery of fundamentals though, hah. Guess I've always been partial towards the more controlled and nuanced chaos you see in several of the off-shot genres that popped up after the initial punk explosion, just like I prefer the impressionists that work from a fundamentally solid background over the more abstract pieces.



So much to think about. I guess my final (for now) verdict is that fundamentals should probably always be subjugated to the original artistic impression, instead of being the guide from which impressions should then arise. So the fundamentals should be the tool you use to accomplish something, not what you use that by itself accomplishes something. If that makes any sense. It's starting to make sense in my head at least, which is a good start (5 paragraphs in...). This is all obviously incredibly subjective and not by any means the final say on any of these issues, and for all I know all this reasoning might very well be something I've come up with post-hoc to explain my already established preferences. Who knows. I have a cluttered mind. Either way I think the balance between painting a finished piece and how much one spends studying other areas, and how much time is spent analysing one's own work is something worthwhile to ponder about. Just not too much -- I was supposed to do colour studies but now I've spent almost an hour writing this comment instead. Shit.