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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

I feel that technique and skill are secondary to passion though with the arts. Music or poetry, I don't want to subject myself to it if it lacks passion. Passionate musicians and poets just happen to frequently also have the technique and skill down as well, but that's not always the case. Some of the more interesting artists are often the ones that break the "rules" of their discipline.

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Alexander Pope disagreed:

"True ease of writing comes through art, not chance,

As he moves best who learns the steps of dance,

'Tis not enough no harshness cause offence,

The sound must seem an echo of the sense"

Learn the rules, then maybe break them.

Another famous example is Picasso. Sometimes considered the greatest painter to have ever lived, he was incredibly inventive and broke basically every "rule" in the book. However, if you look at his really early pieces -- he was a fantastic classical painter. He didn't start by breaking the rules, he started by mastering them.

The same can be said for many professions, certainly my own (programming) you should learn the basics and best practices before you can know when it is okay to break them. And like singing or painting it can come down to personal preference whether the rule breaking works or not.

Did I just equate my work to Picasso? . . . I think I did!

I don't think you need to master the rules before you can break them, you certainly need to be aware of the rules though! How else would you even know you are breaking them?

You don't need to be aware of the rules. You might not even care whether or not you're breaking them.

By "The Rules" I think we mean an accumulation of techniques and practices developed and refined by many people over time because they have proved useful. If one has any interest at all in the ones art one will surely be aware of its history and of what others have done. How else does one become interested in the first place? In this respect some awareness of this heritage seems to me to be unavoidable.

It doesn't necessarily have to go back centuries, though. If you're doing rock, you might be intimately familiar with the past 50 years of rock, punk, metal, post-punk, grunge, etc., without having a clue about opera.

I have always been fond of this description:

"Picasso didn't start with painting women with three eyes and square breasts. He knew how to paint a cow."

The things I write are always more interesting when I follow a simple structure (sometimes one I've used for a long time, sometimes one made for the occasion). The "creative" brain dump stuff is always wandering, unclear, and a couple thousand words longer.

Creativity always happens when I'm editing what filled the structure. The basic rules I lay down in advance make sure I get to that point.

And to bring this back to visual arts, it's rare to find a good artist who doesn't study references and do thumbnails.

You look at someone like Ozzy, compared to the others there. I say this as a Sabbath and Ozzy fan, he's got a rubbish voice. There's something there that makes him interesting -- his persona, songwriting and the other guys in the band carry his performance. It's not "breaking the rules" as such in terms of his vocals -- he simply can't sing. It's more like successful marketing.

Songwriting carries a band a long way. Ozzy is still coming out with well written, catchy metal songs, which is rarer today than it was 20 years ago.

One of my favorite bands is Maiden, mainly for the fact that their songs have the ability to capture the energy of their lyrics. Which is exactly what Ozzy has when singing Iron Man, Crazy Train, Bark at the Moon and even with his modern stuff.

Of modern bands I'm hard pressed to find bands that adequately capture the energy of their lyrics just right. I really only have Coheed and Cambria who can nail so many different musical styles with the right energy for their lyrics.

With no technique or skill, your passion means nothing. Passion is the content, and technique and skill is the delivery vector.

As for breaking the "rules", the theory goes you have to master the rules to break them. Expressed in a more technical way, once you know the rules, you know when and were it's ok to break them, and you can also adhere to most of the rules while only breaking one or two.

In music in particular, I often don't find this to be true, at least for my personal tastes. A good proportion of my favorite musicians are "outsiders" who went directly into doing unconventional things--- Roky Erikson, most punk bands, most grunge bands, etc. There are a handful of folks with formal music training (Bad Brains had jazz training, although it's only recently that's counted as "classical" training), but they're fairly uncommon.

I couldn't agree more - here's my take on technique vs. passion: http://www.claudiafriedlander.com/the-liberated-voice/2010/0... Thanks for all the comments on the IO post!

In arts like anything else, to paraphrase Edison, genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In fact the difference between a really great artistic genius and simple talent probably is the ability (physical and else) to work extremely long hours without too much strain.

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