The creative journey..You’re a budding artist: Is posting your art on social media a positive thing to do?

Mar 04, 2019 News

By Harold A. Bascom

Let’s see what happens when, you, a budding artist, upload photographs of your work—be it paintings, drawings, graphics, or sculpture—onto Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. The work will be viewed by multitudes of your peers, many of whom do not possess an understanding of what good or bad art is, of what are plagiarized creations, of what constitutes inept or skillful drawing, in short, of what constitutes having a rudimentary grounding in the mechanics of things like light and shade, perspective, composition, and painting techniques, etc. And sadly, this is the peer group that will be ‘liking’ and ‘cute-ing’ and ‘fantastic-ing’ and giving thumbs-ups to your artwork (which may not be your best). Conversely, you will feel obligated to reciprocate the ‘likes’—praising the inept work of someone who was nice enough to ‘like’ your work. And in a short time, you become part of a clique that, sadly, devotes more time on social media instead of in front of their easels or in their creating spaces. And soon, you begin to rush your ‘creations’ in order to keep up posting new stuff for more ‘likes.’
And what are the negative psychological effects on your mind after being exposed to a deluge of ‘likes’, one-word, and one-line accolades? You end up being in danger of believing you have arrived—that you are an accomplished artist when it is so far from the truth. When that happens to you, you can become artistically and creatively stagnated. Yes, it is ego-boosting for a budding artist to have their work praised; it can be unproductive, however, if the work is not the best they can put out.
I have no qualms about accomplished artists uploading their work on social media. It is a perfect platform to stage one’s professional portfolio. For budding artists, however, it stands to be a suppressor of artistic growth. Art students and budding artists should be advised to stay away from posting their work on social media and spend more of their time developing their artistic skill as well as their intellectual focus on what’s happening in their societies and in the world at large. When I was a budding teenage artist, I liked drawing a lot but knew it was only raw talent that needed to be refined. I also knew I was not yet an artist and had a lot to learn before I thought myself one.
There were no art schools in Guyana, South America, when I was a teenager, so, my entire course of study as an art student was through art-instruction books borrowed from a series of local libraries. I knew that first, I had to learn the basics of artistic expression—how to sketch, to shade objects for a 3-D effect; how to draw faces of different races and to render the human figure. And I struggled with human anatomy. (How many heads times itself made the human body? Seven and one-half? Eight?) After subsequent years of filling multiple sketchbooks with drawings from life, I became recognized as a capable sketcher, painter, and eventually, a composer of pictures. At that time, however, I knew I was not yet an artist deserving of accolades from the creative community and art critics.
I grew into my twenties, continued studying the paintings of major artists, continued visiting art exhibitions, began to grasp how art practitioners expressed themselves as artists. And through the observation of the society about me and through avid reading, I matured intellectually, became acutely aware of the vicissitudes of life, discovered that I had something to say, and used my ability as a draughtsman and painter to make statements. I became an artist.
On reflection, I thank my stars that there was no Facebook, no Pinterest, no Instagram. Had there been, the word ‘budding’ may still have been associated with my art.
(Harold Bascom is a novelist, prolific playwright (multiple Guyana Prize awardee in this category) artist and illustrator (the creator behind the book cover for the supernatural novel Kamarang) He resides in the USA)

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