Imagine!

You’re an instrument (non musical), like a pen or a pencil, that can move at it’s own will. Being the pencil that you are, you love to write!

So you write and write and write all day long. Move around on the page.

But you’re constantly making boxes. Small boxes, big boxes. You find yourself moving around on the page in perpendicular lines. It’s not that you can’t make circles, you just find yourself making squares all the time.

One day the paper says hey, hey man! You know underneath me there’s this grid on the table. These grooves. I think that’s why you’ve been making squares. The Grid! The grid is the fundamental structure of this surface! Hey, I can’t do anything about it man, I’m just the paper. But hey, maybe you can use the grid to your advantage.

Most talented people, especially starting out rely heavily on their natural ability. They understand something, something their heart connects to about the medium, and they use their intuition to guide them through the art form. Sometimes, if people are really tapping into themselves, they’ll continue to grow as artists. Others who simply rely on their natural ability plataeu, becoming lazy, thinking their intuition and imagination is all they need. The latter can be very stagnating, even turn an incredibly talented artist, into a lazy untalented hack.

One key factor in this is obviously discipline. Someone pushing themselves to achieve their goals.

There’s a matrix, a fundamental structure to your art form. The structure isn’t absolute, and may never be, but indubitably exists.

Taking your work to the next level will require study of your particular matrix.

Natural ability will get you to the first level. Structure will get you to the second. But both of those combined will take you to infinity.

Meryl Streep. Enough said.

–TV, Bitch!