'Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism... copying is about reverse-engineering. It's like taking apart a car to see how it works.... We learnt to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practising scales.... Remember: Even the Beatles started out as a cover band
First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.
The songwriter Nick Lowe says, 'You start out by rewriting your hero's catalogue. And you don't just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them.... If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from many, it's research.
What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds.
A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.'
I had no idea that this was how it worked. I knew I had to 'do something' with what I felt when I looked at these images, but I no idea how to start, or why. I knew I didn't want to just copy them, but I couldn't think how else to start.
So I started.
I was totally frustrated. What am I doing, just copying these images?
After a while, I started to notice something. As I was drawing I was asking myself, how do these bits of stone manage to feel so alive? The answer was the tribhanga; a principle of Indian aesthetics which is the three planes that make up a figure with its weight on one leg, the hip jutting out.
We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism... copying is about reverse-engineering. It's like taking apart a car to see how it works.... We learnt to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practising scales.... Remember: Even the Beatles started out as a cover band
First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.
The songwriter Nick Lowe says, 'You start out by rewriting your hero's catalogue. And you don't just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them.... If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from many, it's research.
What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds.
A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we're incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.'
I had no idea that this was how it worked. I knew I had to 'do something' with what I felt when I looked at these images, but I no idea how to start, or why. I knew I didn't want to just copy them, but I couldn't think how else to start.
So I started.
I was totally frustrated. What am I doing, just copying these images?
After a while, I started to notice something. As I was drawing I was asking myself, how do these bits of stone manage to feel so alive? The answer was the tribhanga; a principle of Indian aesthetics which is the three planes that make up a figure with its weight on one leg, the hip jutting out.
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