In my house I have my favourite Picasso and Gabo sculptures.
Also my favourite Magritte and Ruscha paintings.
And my favourite Hausmann and Starn Brothers photography.
Except I don’t, it’s all fake.
When people come over, I love to talk about it.
But not about the art that’s been copied.
I love to talk about the way it’s been copied.
For me that’s more interesting.
How it all started was I was copying an old oil painting from a book.
I wanted it 6 feet long by 3 feet high, so I scaled it up onto a canvas and started painting it.
I wasn’t doing a very good job.
Then a friend of mine, a brilliant painter called Chris, said let him do it.
And in a week he’d copied it perfectly.
But his copy looked too new, the colours were too vibrant.
I asked him if he could make it look older.
So, first he covered it in a layer of oil-based varnish.
Then he covered that in a layer of water-based varnish.
Water and oil dry at different rates.
So in a couple of days the entire varnish had thousands of tiny cracks.
Chris rubbed burnt-umber paint over the entire surface.
Then he cleaned it all off with white spirit.
But the burnt umber stayed in all the tiny cracks.
So the entire painting now looked at least two hundred years old.
I began to wonder what else Chris could copy.
In Paris, I’d seen a Picasso sculpture made out of rusty mild steel.
Chris couldn’t work in steel, but he knew how to fake it.
He made the sculpture out of clay, then covered it in dark grey paint.
Then he got several pencils and took out the graphite cores.
He sanded the cores down until they were just piles of dust.
Then he rubbed the graphite dust all over the sculpture.
The semi-sheen made it look exactly like mild steel.
And he painted spots of orange onto that to make it appear rusty.
Chris did a great job on everything I asked him to do.
Of course everything I wanted copied started life as someone’s idea.
That’s the white-collar part.
That’s the part that’s just about thinking.
What Chris brought to the things he made was the blue-collar part.
The understanding of materials.
The creative possibilities that exist outside mere theory.
That’s the part that fascinates me more than the art that was copied.
The way it was copied.
The ingenuity.
That’s what we seem to have lost from creativity.
No one comes up through the ranks anymore, so no one knows the actual skills involved.
Gordon Smith does.
He started as a messenger, then worked in the studio, then assistant art director, then art director, then head of art.
When Gordon asks someone to do something he knows as much about doing it as the person he’s asked.
Nowadays everyone goes straight onto an advertising course.
Then straight into a job as a copywriter or art director.
When they have an idea they have to ask a specialist if it can be done.
They don’t know what can and can’t be done, so they can’t be creative in that area.
And they lose out on an awful lot of creative opportunities.
Years ago, we had the LWT account.
We wanted to run a 48-sheet poster every week, for about 70 weeks.
But it took several weeks to print a single full-colour poster, because each colour has its own plate.
And each plate was a separate print run.
Because Gordon had worked his way through every level of the job he knew this.
He said, let’s print the posters in black and white, then it’s only one plate, then it’s less than a week.
The client said no, he wanted his logo in full colour.
Gordon said okay, we’ll print off 70 weeks of posters with nothing but a full colour logo in the corner, and store them in a warehouse.
Then each week take some of those and print the black plate.
That way we get a full-colour poster, but it only takes a week to print.
And it worked.
Over several years we won several D&AD awards with that campaign.
Which wouldn’t even have happened if we’d relied on white-collar creativity.
Luckily we used blue-collar creativity.
Love it. Thank you.
Terry B Gardner - 22 July 2012 11:44 pm
Thanks, Dave. Always interested in how folks copied. Now I know.
Robin. - 23 July 2012 10:55 am
Precisely why I haven’t ditched my manual slr camera or my super 8mm or cassettes or vhs tapes etc etc. My daughter will know how we got to where we go to through practical application not just hearsay. I’m hoping something will rub off.
john p woods - 23 July 2012 11:35 am
“No one comes up through the ranks anymore.” So true. We have experts working in silos, specialists refusing to touch anything outside their ‘scope of work’, professionals being a little too professional. Assembly line creativity is endemic.
Whatever happened to the ones who liked to get their hands dirty, loved to experiment, and were hopelessly, infuriatingly difficult when it came to following ‘procedure’?
Oh, right, they were all fired for insubordination…
Omair - 24 July 2012 7:47 am
Absolutely Omair.
It’s the difference between officers and sergeants.
Officers go straight in out of cadet school and all they know is academic.
Sergeants have done every job on their way up.
That’s why Napoleon said “Officers don’t win wars, sergeants win wars.”
Dave Trott - 24 July 2012 9:02 am
The “The International Federation of Dog-collar Workers” are on the phone, Dave.
Message is: St Katherine’s Dock will be the focus of strike action in the form of a bolt of lightening from the heavens unless we get some fair representation – 1 strike + you’re out.
Grilla Login - 24 July 2012 11:44 am
Have to say, I’m puzzled that you find the way something is copied more interesting than the thing being copied. You urge creativity in every blog; surely what Picasso thought (‘white collar creativity’) was married to knowing how to make it (‘blue collar creativity’), and that’s the point and impact of great art, what differentiates it from copies. Mozart used the same notes as everyone else, but created something different. I know you could give me the old ‘great artists steal’ line, but it’s the unique end artifact that counts, surely? Knowing your craft isn’t the same as being a genius. Did you read the piece in today’s papers about the NYC mailman and his wife who built up an art collection worth millions, because they sought out the new and original, rather than a better-crafted version of Athena prints? Sorry, droning on…
Tom - 24 July 2012 7:57 pm
Tom,
Did that guy leave a lot of bread?
john p woods - 25 July 2012 7:30 am
Do visitors ever think they’re ‘real’, Dave? You must find out alot about people by the way they react.
rachel carroll - 25 July 2012 9:55 am
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/herb-and-dorothy/film.html A truly original couple…
Tom - 25 July 2012 10:23 am
Tom,
Don’t you find the different rates of varnish really creative?
How about using a pencil lead to simulate steel?
Most people would never have thought of those things.
They’d just spend a lot of money on CG.
That’s just chequebook creativity.
Dave Trott - 25 July 2012 7:44 pm
I once helped recreate a city scape for a reflection in a bmw bonnet whilst on a shoot by way of a bunch of old wood and camera props. I guess Adobe After Effects would be the order of the day now.
john p woods - 25 July 2012 9:27 pm
Once did a spread on the LWT campaign in a typography magazine I was the art director on.
We shot Gordon hanging on a billboard site in soho. (Don’t know if he remembers it.)
Faking the campaign.
I’ve tried to find the magazine. Wanted to send it to you and Gordon.
I remember Gordon mentioning that everybody in the agency was invited to contribute ideas. Not only the creative teams.
tore claesson - 26 July 2012 4:19 am
Hi Tore,
Well remembered
Gordon does remember that, we were talking about it recently.
And you’re right, everyone could have ideas but no one, even creatives, could work on it during agency time.
If anyone wanted to do an ad they had to do it on their own time.
Then we picked the best one every Monday morning, usually from 20 or so done over the weekend.
That was the only way to make it fair for everyone.
Dave Trott - 26 July 2012 7:07 am
Hi Dave, of course technique is interesting, watch someone cast a bronze, lay a brick wall, cast off type (that shows how old I am) and you see craft in the service of art. I just don’t find the faking of someone else’s ideas and technique as interesting as the original. But each to their own…
Tom - 26 July 2012 2:47 pm
Tom,
How about Robert Adams and Capability Brown and the golden age of trompe l’oeil?
Dave Trott - 26 July 2012 3:02 pm
Dave & Tom,
Surely the interesting thing is what 1+1 equals.
john p woods - 26 July 2012 4:22 pm
Dave – U celeb enough to have a look alike?
Grilla Login - 26 July 2012 5:01 pm
Grilla,
It’s Harry Rednapp’s new job.
Dave Trott - 27 July 2012 3:26 pm
Out of position is how he will play u.
Grilla Login - 27 July 2012 5:15 pm
Dave, did you ever see the documentary on the Greenhalgh family? A family of forgers, but the son Shaun was a really artist in terms of what he could recreate/create. A true craftsman and creative with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Greenhalgh
Will - 27 July 2012 10:44 pm
I didn’t Will, but I’ll check it out, it sounds good.
Dave Trott - 28 July 2012 2:20 pm
Dave,
Other than Simon Veskner,
Does anyone know how to use a Pentel and an A2 pad any more?
You can share an idea with pen and paper.
You can rip it up and rershape it.
With a pencil you can emphasise form and line.
We used to chisel our pentels.
Go to Paperchase and glue paper over paper.
We used to play!
You can’t do that with an email.
In Microsoft world everything is dehumanised into pixels.
It gets distributed
and then criticised and destroyed by opinion.
You remember guys like the illustrators and retouchers
Tommy Thompson and Brian Bull?
Advertising was an art then.
It had to be learnt by doing it.
It was Alchemy,
Just like Writing.
Just like Art Direction.
Just like Typography, Photography, Illustration.
Wonderful things happen when something is done by hand.
I believe David Abbot always wrote his copy in longhand
pen on paper.
There’s an expression in Russia my wife has.
“Zolotaya Rooka” it means “Golden Hands”
I love to make things,
create things,
invent things.
Nice things
daft things
silly things
meaningless things
Once I built a 1/35 scale Churchill Tank and the real kick
I got was making a plastic toy tank look like it’s made of metal.
People always lift it up with far too much force
surprised by its lightness.
Another thing I like to make is
making people happy.
I have a client with Down Syndrome.
If he needs cheering up I give him an electric handshake.
I pretend I get an electric shock off him when we shake hands.
I nicked that one from a joke shop in Holborn.
The owner had this funny buzzer in his hand that felt like you got an electric shock
every time he handed you your change.
He had some brilliant jokes in there too!
There was one guy in an agency I worked at that really used to piss everyone off.
so we put farting powder in his tea,
However, I wouldn’t recommend that
as it worked so well, we all had to leave the room!
Kev - 29 July 2012 11:25 pm