Mastery
"Get so good they can't ignore you." - Steve Martin
This is a members-only article series. We are making today’s article available to all subscribers today via email, but please be aware it, and other articles in this series that it links to will be locked in a few days and available for paid subscribers only on our site. Get full access to all resources by becoming a paid subscriber. (If you are a FASO member all these paid posts are available in your control panel at https://marketing.faso.com)
Mastery
"[Artistic] mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status."
— Derek Sivers
Why Mastery? I talk a lot about "Mastery." and its importance, both in cultivating a joyful life, but also in developing a realistic and workable plan to make a living doing things that bring us a joyful life. What is Mastery? Why do I consider it to be such an important piece of this life's puzzle?
What I mean by mastery, in one sense, is classical mastery - learning one's craft under an accomplished master, practicing hard, and developing an impressive level of technical mastery. That is all well and good, it’s important, and it certainly might impress your friends, but it’s not an end unto itself.
Resonance
The real goal of mastery is wu-wei as the Chinese say - effortless action. The goal of mastery has never been to achieve impressive technical proficiency for the sake of impressiveness, though that is a laudable goal, and it certainly helps draw attention to your work. But the real goal is to achieve a level of technical proficiency that allows the artist to fully and effectively express, in his chosen medium, the inspired experience of The Mystery with resonance.
That means ultimately you decide, to some degree beyond the basics, what mastery means for you. To share that resonance, in your unique way, might involve breaking a lot of rules, it might involve redefining a category, it might involve creating a new medium. Mastery is an ongoing process of continually improving and refining your ability for the sake of being able to effortlessly channel The Mystery’s resonance and communicate the noncommunicable.
For most people, most of the time, however, one must master the rules of their chosen medium before being able to effectively transcend them. As you learn the rules, and practice, and expand your abilities, the process of Mastery contributes to the process of finding and expressing your true self. You want to be able to play with childhood abandon while you work and explore inspired ideas without having to stop and think about technique. Create like a child, but with mature and refined abilities.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
— Pablo Picasso
A guitar player can’t be bogged down with remembering chords while channeling the muse. Likewise, you must achieve mastery to be able to take the muse’s inspiration, enter flow with effortless action, and bring to fruition a work of art with deep resonance.
The whole point of Mastery is to get so good that the technical side of creating becomes such a part of you, that your main conscious focus is upon expressing your own uniqueness along with the resonance. You can be the most technically proficient artist that ever lived, but if you don’t share meaning, the work will be flat.
In other words, through his art, an average painter shows me what he painted, but a master artist shows me why.
The viewer needs your inspiration. The listener needs your attitude. The reader needs to feel your soul.
“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherf*ck!r who plays it is 80 percent.”
— Miles Davis
So, how do you achieve Mastery?
We’ll dive into that next time!
Sum Ergo Creo,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush Founder
FASO Loves Michael John Ashcroft’s oil paintings!
See More of Michael John Ashcroft’s art by clicking here.
Wouldn’t You Love to work with a website hosting company that actually promotes their artists?
As you can see, at FASO, we actually do, and,
we are the only website host we know of that does.
Click the button below to start working
with an art website host that actually cares about art.
Clint, this is the best description I have ever read about why an artist should master their chosen craft.
In school, fellow students and I were constantly being admonished that our craft had to be so good it became invisible – an invaluable lesson.
But as you say, mastery may be essential, but never the reason why a work should exist.
The comparison I use is the Italian pre-Renaissance word ‘sprezzatura,’ which loosely translates to a traveling courtier being able to write and perform ballads, paint, entertain in other ways, and hold a conversation on any subject with a certain studied nonchalance.
A word I would bet you are already familiar with.