Counterpoint

 What do the melodies of "Three Blind Mice" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" have in common?  Answer:  they can be sung in a round.  Two distinct tunes can work together at the same time without conflicting with each other.   (Don't we wish our Congress could learn to do that!)  The method of juxtaposing two or more voices in music is called counterpoint.

We use counterpoint in painting, too, but it works differently than in music.  Instead of each part moving parallel and independent of the other, in painting elements move in opposing directions, each balancing the other. A vertical will counter a horizontal and vice versa; a diagonal will counter another diagonal moving in an opposite direction.

 John Singer Sargent was a master of counterpoint.  In his painting A Hotel Room, the verticals in the background are counter balanced by the horizontals on the floor.

Richard Schmid is another painter who often uses counterpoint.  Whereas Sargent has applied a horizontal to counter verticals, Schmid, in Wildflowers, uses opposing diagonals:  the tilt of the large flower on the left is countered by the tilt of the smaller one on the right.

Counterpoint in painting works to give visual stability.  Georges Braque, who with Picasso invented the Cubist movement in painting, depended upon counterpoint as a major composing strategy.  Without it his geometric breakdown of images would have had no grounding.

Georges Braque    "Bottle and Fishes"    1910
Uses primarily horizontal/vertical counterpoint

Georges Braque  "Still Life with Mandola and Metronome: "  1909
Uses primarily diagonal counterpoint

Georges Braque   "Pedestal Table"  1909
Uses horizontal/vertical and multple diagonals in counterpoint

Counterpoint as an organizing strategy has been used for as long as artists have been composing.  Very simply stated, a  horizontal calls for a vertical, a vertical calls for a horizontal, and a diagonal calls for a another one in the opposite direction.  The abstractionists knew this.  Many times it was the primary principle holding their pieces together.

I sometimes wonder whether today's artists should learn to paint abstractly as a prerequisite to learning realistic painting.  Take away the image and one gains an appreciation for composition because that's all we have left to work with.  Add the image to a well composed piece and chances are you've got a strong painting.

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A Gentle Transition

To be suddenly awakened out of a sound sleep is unsettling.   In the same way, a painting that contains too many contrasting elements can feel like an assault on our senses.  But a painting can translate vibrant life in all of it’s diversity without visually invading the viewer.  One method for achieving this is gradation.

Arguably the most familiar of all the principles, gradation is a gradual transition between opposites.  Light changes slowly to dark, large continuously becomes small, one color gently unfolds into another. Any visual element—whether size, shape, direction, line, value, hue, intensity, temperature or texture—can be gradated just as it can be contrasted.

Most of us probably learned in our first drawing class that we use value gradation to make an image appear three-dimensional, but this principle is also a useful tool for unifying a painting.  An underlying value gradation ties together things that would otherwise compete.

In his painting, "Growing Tall," Colin Page has used this strategy, unifying an otherwise unwieldy subject.

Colin Page      Oil on Canvas     "Growing Tall"

There’s a lot of activity here-- titillating flecks of light, rapid directional contrasts, quick gestures—but if you squint your eyes at Page’s painting and concentrate on the darks and lights, you’ll discover an underlying gradation in value.

Page's painting in grays and blurred.

And he's used gradation in at least two other ways: look at the colors as they appear from the bottom to the top—blue-green, green, yellow green, yellow, orange—they all transition in the same order as the colors on the color wheel.

Now shift your attention to the texture of the grasses. Larger, rather specific strokes appear at the bottom, and then strokes become progressively smaller and less defined as they move toward the top.

A portion of Page's painting in grays

Value, hue and texture all have been gradated, letting us be captivated by the diversity of contrasts rather than confused.

Gradation occurs naturally within the mechanics of our eyes.  Our visual perception interprets things as if they gradually change as they recede from where we are.  Things become smaller in size, lighter in value, weaker in intensity, and less distinct in texture and detail.  John Burton's painting, "Festival at La Tirana," adroitly illustrates this by exaggerating the principle.

John Burton    OIl    "Festival at La Tirana"

Notice how within each subsequent figure these four elements--size, value, intensity and texture--gradually change so that the most distant figure is barely defined.

Carolyn Anderson uses the gradation principle in a similar way, but more strategically.

Rather than follow the gradation of subjects as we would normally perceive them, Anderson has guided our attention to where she wants us to look by more clearly defining the children on the right and the second horse from the left and gradating away from the discernible characteristics of these images so that, by power of suggestion, we can identify images in the distance even though their shapes are hardly identifiable.

Upper right section of Anderson's painting

As you can see, unlimited creative possibilities abound for using gradation as a tool in painting.  Whether the artist's goal is realism or something else, exciting and intriguing possibilities abound and more unified paintings will most likely be the results.

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Note:  This tutorial is a revision of one I wrote for Empty Easel, September 9, 2008.

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Say It With Strategy

What composing strategy do these four paintings follow?

Carolyn Anderson     Untitled

Qiang Huang    Demo at Sacramento

Joe Paquet     "Green Sea"

Jennifer McChristian     "Smoking Sugar"

Every genre has a host of methods for dealing with space. Individual artists seem to gravitate towards using particular strategies that fit their personal sensibilities.  Some poets, for example,  find their most authentic expression through the sonnet while others are more at home with haiku:  a simple three part poem of seventeen sound units can be every bit as powerful as fourteen lines in iambic pentameter.  Painters, too, select divisions of space that best communicate their ideas.   

All four of the paintings above use the same kind of spatial division--in each of them, areas occupied by the most activity make up one major shape while the background for that activity occupies the other. I find it intriguing that in two of these paintings, even though their subject matter is entirely different, there is an almost identical spatial division.

I have abstracted from these two paintings that spatial division and put it into Diagram A below.  The dark area represents main activity and the light shape represents background.

Diagram A

Can you find the two paintings from which I abstracted these patterns?   

The two remaining paintings share the same principle in a reverse pattern.  They, too, employ totally different subjects.  Here are abstract diagrams for these two works:

Diagram B

If you chose Anderson and McChristain for Diagram A, you are correct, leaving Diagram B as abstractions from Paquet and Huang.

All four of these paintings follow the L-shape composing strategy, meaning the artists have arranged the activity so that our eyes are guided through an L or reverse L directional path.

Subjects we consider for painting have a multitude of inherent qualities, giving us abundant choices of how we will compose them into our paintings.  We artists select what we will include and choose how we arrange and interpret what we see to express our response to the subjects.  The beauty of this is its power for giving artists so many options for manifesting their individual differences.

Rule Breakers

    Artists by nature tend to be rebels, especially against rules. Some have even created art movements by defying conventional rules. We need only glance back to the mid-19th century to find in the Impressionists the most scandalous rule-breakers in art history. They radically disobeyed the conventional rules of their time and eventually became the heroes of our day. But it was conventions they rebelled against, not composition principles.

Claude Monet   "Woman with a Parasol"  1875
Member of Impressionist Movement

There is a difference between conventional rules and principles of composition.  A conventional rule is an accepted guideline set forth by agreement among artists, but a principle of composition is a functioning law of physics that gives an art work order so that it can be read without confusion.  

One of these conventions that is not itself a principle tells us never to place an area of interest in the center of a painting.  This convention can be successfully defied by an artist who understands the principle of balance. Balance is a law of the physics with respect to equilibrium:  elements visually heavier on one side will overpower lighter weighted elements on the other.  

One way to defy the "never center" convention is to use symmetrical balance which makes one side of an art work a mirror image of the other.  Painter Georgia O'Keefe employed this principle in her painting, "Cow's Skull:  Red, White and Blue" and Leonardo da Vinci used in in his "The Last Supper."

Georgia O'Keefe    "Cow's Skull:  Red, White & Blue"    1931

Leonardo da Vinci    "The Last Supper"  Circa 1495

Another method for defying the convention of "never center" is to use radial balance where elements circle around a central area.  Henri Matisse used this principle in his painting, "Dance I" and Albrecht Durer used it in his etching, "The Lamentation"

Henri Matisse     "Dance I"    1909

Albrecht Durer  "The Lamentation"  1513

But the convention of "avoiding placement in the center" presumes assymetrical balance where elements on either side of an art work's center are of different sizes, colors, textures, shapes and values.  Nevertheless, an artist who has a working knowledge of the balance principle can find a way to place an area of interest in the center of the work, offsetting it with active elements around it.


Winslow Homer uses this tactic in his painting, “The Herring Net.”  Even though the event is right in the middle of the canvas, our eyes are drawn away from the center by the fish in the net on the lower right, the light reflecting on the water on the right side, angles of the oars, and the weight of the fellow hanging onto the front left of the boat.  And boats in the distance as well as the floating barrel in front help distribute the visual weight away from the center of the format.  

Winslow Homer    "The Herring Net:    1885

Mary Whyte did a similar thing in her painting, "Red."  The face of the woman is located dead center, but the bright colors of the hat and dress, the textures and movement of feathers in the hat, the weight of the dark background shape and the chair in the opposing corner, all carry a visual weight that balances the painting, enabling a visual flow throughout.

Mary Whyte   "Red"   2008

"Rules of thumb" do work to prevent troublesome confusions from spoiling an otherwise well done painting, but artists need not be bound by them if a clever use of a principle can override the rule.  In fact, the more thoroughly we artists are able to understand how principles work, the more options we give ourselves for not only defying convention, but for finding creative ways to make our works more compelling.

Shadows Speak

If on a dark night the lights go out, there we are in total darkness unable to see a thing.  But can you imagine the dark going out? The impact would be the same--without dark, we can see no more than without light. To see we have to have both light and dark working in concert.  (Now, there's a metaphor!)

Light comes from a source, but its absence is the origin of darkness.  Without light darkness floods in from every direction, but darkness is given form called shadow when a light source is cast upon an object. Not only does shadow help define the object's shape, but it extends beyond that shape continuing in the direction of the light beams to create a cast shadow.  Even when light is diffused the location of shadows tell us the direction of the light's source.  In the photo below, faint shadows beneath the bird inform us that there is some light above it.

But when light is not diffused, we see two distinct images for each shape in it's path:  the object itself and its cast shadow. Direct light beams cause the cast shadow to bend and travel along the contours of anything in its path.  That shadow tells us the angle of the light beams, the shape of the object casting the shadow, and the contours of the surface on which the shadow is cast.

"Samwise"   Terracotta sculpture   Howard G. Hanson

It's the cast shadow that tells the story of this snow covered landscape.

If we switch our attention from the fact of snow and images in the snow towards the shadows themselves, we realize that it's those shadows that tell us about a slight incline of the driveway,  a rise on the right side and a drop-off on the left, that somebody has been walking in the snow and that there are trees nearby.

In fact, often the cast shadows will tell us about their surroundings without their images being visible.  Look at Karin Jurick's painting of a bike rider.

Now look at it (forgive me Karin) without the biker.

If while constructing a painting we ignore the specifics of a cast shadow, whether caused by direct or diffused light, we lose an important essence of the story that those particulars tell and we cause the painting to communicate that something is missing.   Rather than being added as an afterthought, carefully crafted cast shadows integrated into the painting from the beginning become an essential part of the painting's story.

Mathematics and Art

I confess I surprised myself when I check out from our local library a video course on mathematics, but the title Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas caught my attention.  And I was totally intrigued with every lesson.  To my delight, the course explores how math can be used as a tool to explore aesthetics and the mysteries of nature.

Some folks think it is not logical that artists could be fascinated by mathematics.  Somewhere in the mix of professional mandates, artists are told that logic and art don’t mix, to use logic is to stifle creativity.  Art is suppose to come altogether from the intuition, they say.  Leave logic to the mathematicians. As a result of this kind of thinking, art and math get pigeon-holed as poles apart when, in fact, there is a lot of intuition in mathematics, and artists and architects have been depending upon mathematical proportions for centuries.

One obvious way artists use mathematical proportion is when we locate a rectangle’s "sweet spots" (eyes of the rectangle) for placing our centers of interest.  We have discovered that those four areas midway a canvas' center and each of its corners are ideal spots for placing points of emphasis.

I've shown these with the green dots in the diagram below.

Qiang Huang has used the lower right "sweet spot" for placing the orange in his painting, "Out of Shadow."

Carolyn Anderson uses the same location for placing the hands in her painting, "Boy Reading."

I admit that if we artists had to do the math to come up with these "sweet spots," we'd refuse to deal with it, but the beauty of it is that hundred of years ago mathematicians figured out where these are: they discovered the Golden Rectangle on which the "sweet spots" are based.  

Fibonacci who lived in the 1200's AD discovered a sequence of numbers that show the logic of the Golden Rectangle.  It begins with 0  followed by 1 and here is where the sequence begins. The next number in the sequence, 1,  is the results of the first two added together (0 + 1).  That 1 is added to the first 1 to get 2, then the 2 is added to this 1 to get the next number 3. Then 3 is added back to the previous number (2) to equal 5, then 5+3=8, then 8+3=11 and on and on so that the sequence looks like this:  0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584 and on and on: there is no end to it.  This sequence is exciting because it represents a ratio pattern that is found throughout nature, whether spirals in seashells, leaf arrangement on plants, scales of a pineapple, or all living cells.  (For more on this, go HERE.)

Here's how it sets up the Golden Rectangle:

Slight disclaimer:  the squares here are not exact, but illustrate  the point.

The formation begins with 2 squares the same size (1 and 1 in the illustration above) .  Add another square (2) whose edges are the same length as the combination of the first two together. Add a third square whose edges are the length of 2 + 1, a fourth whose edges are the length of  3 + 2, another whose edges are the same as 3 + 5 and on and on.  This rectangle could continue until it circles the earth a zillion times.  When built on this sequence, it is an infinite rectangle, the Golden Rectangle. Perhaps its perfection is in its infinitude.

I often wonder whether there is a strong relationship between intuition and infinity.  Whether there is or not, it's all fun to think about.  Perhaps logic and intuition are two sides of the same coin. But that's a discussion for another day.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed this little mental exercise.

Ditching Perspective Rules

How much do you think about the rules of linear perspective when you draw or paint?

One-point, two-point, three-point—just establishing a horizon line and finding vanishing points can be such a chore that many artists find it too stifling to deal with. But there’s a way to find the correct angles of perspective for any object without having to memorize a single rule, and it’s something that artists have been using for centuries: the angle finder.

A brush handle, pencil, finger or even a stick can be turned into an angle finder. All it takes is holding your angle finder at arm’s length, closing one eye, and aligning it with the edge of the object you’re planning on drawing.

Locating the angle of the an oak tree trunk by using an brush handle as an angle finder.

Finding the angle is simple enough, but sometimes there’s a disconnect that occurs somewhere between reading the angle and translating it to a drawing or painting.  Years ago I recognized this problem among a number of my college students.  I discovered that when students were unsure about the tilt of an angle they were looking at, they could see it better if they could label it.  (An odd thing, labeling: something we humans seem to need.)  To enable an accurate labeling system, I came up with a method to teach angle finding by equating each angle to a number on a clock face.  

It works like this:  stand in front of a clock face holding your angle finder at arm’s length. Position it so that it becomes like another hand on the clock as if connected to the center. Looking with one eye closed,  align the angle finder toward a number on the clock by rotating it either clockwise or counter clockwise to find 7 o’clock, then 9,  12 and 2.  You have just read four perspective angles.

Now try this:  Lay a book on a table, pick up a pencil to use as an angle finder,  stand back three or four feet, hold the pencil on the eraser end, straighten your arm so your elbow won't bend, close one eye, then rotate your pencil until it aligns with the edge of the book's cover.  Look at where the pencil is pointing, then name the angle according to its clock number.  Try this again along the front edge of the book cover.

Keep your attention on the pencil so that it doesn't flop forward or  point backwards.  It  must move only clockwise  or counter clockwise, else it will mislead you.

The photo on the left shows the pencil pointing to a 10 o'clock angle while the one on the right points between 2 and 3.   Labeling these angles according to where we find them on a clock can enable us to draw these angles, by-passing perspective rules .

Try doing a simple line drawing of the book, labeling the angle of each line like I've done in the drawing below.

Practicing the exercise several times can give you a idea of how the system works.  After feeling secure, try the same exercise using a building as your image.

Just like any skill, the more you practice this the more adroit you’ll become at using it. Eventually you will have the clock positions firmly engraved in your memory and you’ll no longer need the clock diagram to help you out.

You will also discover that you’re recognizing angles in many more places, and that it’s much easier to draw them accurately—without ever being concerned about the actual rules of perspective again.

(Disclosure:  this tutorial is an adaptation of a tutorial I wrote for Empty Easel in October, 2008.)

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See Dianne's latest work on One Artist's Journey

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Ten Thousand Hours

We listen to music, we look at paintings.  We play a musical instrument, we compose paintings.  But what's behind it all?

Referring to the Compose tutorials of the past two weeks,  Ann Feldman commented:  "Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers...hypothesizes that mastery can only be accomplished after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice in any field, including art, music, and sports."

Ann continued, "Makes me think that an artist can only relax and allow the painting to be discovered after that artist has spent many hours learning the underlying techniques of art. Until an artist feels comfortable in his or her understanding, that relaxation is elusive! Do you agree?"

Gesture drawings by Rodney Grainger
following the Nicolaides approach

I cut my teeth on The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. I did not realize as a young art student that Nicolaides' approach was the key that would unlocked my journey as an artist and as a teacher.  Nicolaides emphasizes process over product, a concept I believe underlies all artistic success.  So to answer Ann's question, I believe an emerging artist can become comfortable within every layer of the process.  In Gladwell's hypothesis, I believe "practice" is the emphasis.

There is always a degree of awkwardness with anything new. But that awkwardness dissipates as we  practice.  With practice the newness wears off and what was once new now is familiar. And the more familiar it becomes, the more comfortable we become until it what was once new is now second nature.

Thinking about Sharon Isbin's mastery of guitar playing, I think back to when I was age nine taking my first guitar lesson.  It was all new--how to hold the guitar, how to place my left fingers, how to use my right fingers, how to read the music score, and how to strike the strings. Add to this that those tiny young fingers were too tender and lacking in muscle dexterity to hold the strings tight to the guitar's neck.  A year later,  my fingertips were toughened, my finger muscles were toned, I held the guitar correctly without a thought, both right and left hands moved automatically and the score was like written words on a page. I could play "Danny Boy" without thinking.  I was ready for my first recital.

Learning to paint is exactly the same process, just different materials. Perhaps the most important similarity in the two is that neither can be done without practice.  But what does practice mean?  Doctors practice, but they already have their degrees. (Even so, we hope they don't stop learning.)

Practice means to exercise and perform repeatedly to improve and/or maintain what one has gained.  When we study techniques, we practice; when we're making a painting, we practice.  When we do exercises, we practice.  Practice is essential to the process no matter what we're doing.

Leonardo da Vinci practicing

Leonardo da Vinci practicing some more

Whether it's painting or guitar playing or figure skating, our practice undergirds the process that enables us to master new levels. Within each level once the awkwardness has given way to relaxation, we can discover.  I don't think we have to wait until we've put in those 10,000 hours; I think the painting can be discovered at any level of competence.  It's a matter of attending to the process rather than focusing on the end product, finding our comfort zone in each of those 10,000 hours, all along the way.  If we do this, mastery after 10,000 is virtually a guarantee.

Bring Life Into A Still Life

I've always thought the term "still life" a bit antithetical:  what life has ever been still?  But somewhere back in history, powers-that-be deemed still life a genre and left it up to future generations to define.  Still life painting has a long history, going back as far as the tombs of ancient Egypt, proliferated in the Middle Ages and holds strong today as a genre.  These days, any painting of a human-made arrangement of objects is called still life.

Left, Henri Masisse, 1912     Top right, Qiang Huang, 2010,
Bottom right, Roman wall painting, 70 a.d.

The question Judy Warner asked is how to add life into a still life composition. More specifically, Judy added "...how to add life so they don't look dead."   It is true that some still life paintings carry with them a ho-hum feeling, but so do some landscapes and even some figure paintings.  Is there something about the still life genre that puts it in danger of becoming a lifeless work?

I'm not convinced that any genre is more vulnerable than any other to resulting in a lifeless painting.  But sometimes while setting up a still life, the artist can get a bit fussy during the process of arranging objects and that disposition gets transferred into the work itself, defeating the success of the painting before picking up the first brush.

I think Charles Reid is a prime example of an artist who brings life into his still life paintings.

Photo by Sandi Hester                      Still life demo by Charles Reid
Click on the image for a larger view.

Those of us who have watched Charles set up a still life know how nonchalant he goes about putting an arrangement together. Often the objects he chooses are randomly selected.  But in the end, we see that he has placed a number of actors on a stage, an advantage given still life painting unique to its genre. No other genre offers the artist total control over the subject matter.

Charles then approaches the painting from a viewpoint of discovering and responding:  rather than trying to copy the setup, he begins with a contour drawing to discover what he is looking at.  Sometimes he will change the setup midstream--take something out, move something to a different place or add another piece.  

Here's where begins something important to bringing life into a still life painting:  the artist's attitude toward our process. When the intention is to discover what the eyes are looking at rather than that of trying to copy stuff, the artist stays alert during the process because we don't know what's going to happen.  If, on the other hand, our attitude is one of trying to get it right or trying to force some preconceived notion, we run the risk of suffocating the work.

Charles Reid preliminary drawing for a painting different from examples above.
Photo by Mick Carney
Click on image for a larger view

Once his drawing is done, Reid approaches the painting like a kid in a candy store.  He simply responds and keeps moving forward with confidence.   He doesn't labor the piece.  When asked whether he has a game plan, he always answers "No."  He says he likes to approach the painting as if he's never done it before.

(During one of Charles' workshops, Mick Carney recorded the progress of his demo.  Go HERE then cursor down a bit to see this progression.)

I think the difference between a tired-looking still life painting and one that's vibrant and full of life is a matter of the artist's attitude and confidence.  Any painting that is labored over will most likely look tired and lack vibrancy.  But when the artists moves forward, confident with a child-like approach of discovering what's there and responding with whatever degree of available skill, the end results has a better chance of having a life of its own. 

I take issue with those who approach painting from a formulaic attitude. Keeping a painting fresh and alive is not a matter of following a set of rules--including intentionally trying to loosen up--nor is it slinging paint willy-nilly.  Rather, bringing life into a painting comes from an inner attitude of wondering what one will discover next and allowing the painting to move forward within that intention.  It is in the laboring over a painting that we steal from ourselves and consequently, the painting itself,  freshness, spontaneity and wholeness that yield life.

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SHAMELESS PLUG

Check out Dianne's new book,  In Praise of Mountain Waters:  Paintings of Rivers, Waterfalls and Streams in Northeast Georgia.   Available at Amazon.com

What Makes a Masterful Painting?

There's an argument as old as painting itself, an argument I've heard hundreds of times defended from opposing points of view: What makes a masterful painting?

Ann Feldman, a portrait painter teaching at Mainstreet Art Centre near Chicago, asked me to talk about the subject.  When I began putting my thoughts together, I realized how far-reaching a topic it is.  This could go on for the length of a two-volume book.

As I write this, I'm listening to guitarist Sharon Isbin masterfully playing "Wild Mountain Thyme."  It's a haunting yet simple little tune.  I've heard it played so badly I wanted to scream, I've heard it rendered with such mediocrity I'd stop listening and I've heard it played with so much improvisation the tune itself became insignificant.  But Sharon Isbin plays it masterfully.

What Isbin does with "Wild Mountain Thyme" on guitar is no different than what a master painter does with a brush, paint and canvas.  My stance is that a masterful painting requires the same degree of skill, competence, authority and knowledge called for by an olympic figure skater, a concert violinist or a champion baseball player.   A painting by artist Clyde Aspevig reflects the same degree of competence as a performance by figure skater Brian Boitano, violinist Itzhak Perlman or baseball player Chipper Jones.

Clyde Aspevig

Brian Boitano                  Itzhak Perlman                 Chipper Jones

But I am convinced that thousands develop competence, but few among them become masters.  It's only when one can learn to relax within one's competence that real mastery emerges.  Look at this masterful painting by Clyde Aspevig, then if you have time, look at these videos showing Brian Boitana and Itzhak Perlman each giving a masterful performance.

Clyde Aspevig      OIl on canvas     "Prairie Shadows"

Brian Boitano performing "Music of the Night:

Itzhak Perlman performing "Ronde des Lutins" by Bazzini

A masterful performance in any genre happens when verse becomes poetry, when scores become music, when form becomes discovery.  It happens when the artist becomes so comfortable in the craft that he or she can move beyond technique into pure expression while fully utilizing the technique.  It happens when the craft becomes the means, not the goal.  Mastery can never come from an attitude of "look what I can do," rather from an intention of "where can I go next?"

Mastery is possible at any level during the process of developing one's craft.  It's not something that happens at the end of one's development:  one does not study for years, then become a master. That's not how it works.  Mozart was composing at age five.  Michelangelo created "Madonna of the Stairs" at age seventeen.

Michalangelo  "Madonna of the Stairs"   Marble Relief  Circa 1491

But neither Mozart nor Michelangelo stopped learning.  In fact, the more competent each became, the more each saw to be discovered within his chosen craft.  And even though Mozart died young and Michelangelo lived into old age, at the end of each of their lives, neither felt he had done much beyond scratch the surface.  That's the attitude of a master.   

One characteristic I've observed in a number of masters is playfulness and an openness to all possibilities.  Itzhak Perlman enjoys playing "Turkey In the Straw" with as much zest as he does a Chopin mazurka.   Charles Schulz scribbled on envelops.  Leonardo experimented with wax on "The Last Supper."  There is a childlike humility that can find expression and joy within the most simple of subjects and there's an innocence from awe of the most honored.

Ann asked me the question:  "What divides the truly great from the excellent?"  I think it's the degree to which the artist is willing to let go.  There's no question that mastery requires thousands of hours learning and developing the craft step-by-step, building one degree of skill on top of another,  processing what one discovers, experimenting with possibilities, internalizing the principles that make it work, discarding the superfluous, refining and building on what does work, revisiting what didn't work before--all this and more.  But I am convinced that within and during all these hours of involvement, it's the letting go that makes the difference.  It's when the potential master totally relaxes within and allows it all to work together that the truly great can become manifest.

Mastery can happen at any moment when the artist, the craft and the instrument become one. 

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Note:  For a real treat watch

Sharon Isbin - Waltz by Agustin Barrios Mangore

And HAPPY NEW YEAR!