Is it when you have been doing it for 10,000 hours? Or is it when you practice it for the love of it?
I saw the home of Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago that he designed when he was 21 years old, well he began designing that home at that age and then he kept adding areas and changing and improving things. The changes and additions reflect the refinement in his ideas, but the basic style is the same throughout. He listened to his instincts and responded to them as an artist would, and he couldn't have had too many hours of practice when he started.
All forms of art are like nature, they follow certain laws. The peace and calm of nature is the quiet confidence in its laws being perfect and there is a constant process of selection and elimination, that is what is reflected in great works of art as well. Nature is not the warm, fuzzy character of a nurturing mother, it is a system that reacts and reflects the changes in it. If we live in this system in harmony with it then it flourishes and so do we, but if we go against it, then it reacts by going against us. Some simple examples are: pollution=depletion of the ozone, chemicals in food=diseases like hormonal disorders, war=downfall of humanity, etc.
An artist works with everything around him/her, and not by going against it. What makes FLW's art so perfect is the fact that he incorporated inspiration from nature and human nature as well. Its not just the inspiration from the prairies in his buildings, its how he built it for the people who would be using them. He seems to be incorporating psychological effects of spaces instinctively in his interiors.
The two bedrooms of his children were quite small but didn't feel cramped. He eliminated the attic giving higher barn ceilings and did not raise the dividing wall of the children's rooms to the full height of the ceiling. These are very modern techniques for creating a feeling of a larger space.
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The hanging 'amphorae' feel like they are part of the painting.
Which child wouldn't love to have a theatre in their playroom? Everything in the children's playroom has child-sized proportions. The ceiling is so high you could toss a ball in there.
Why do some people hear, feel, see, and capture certain instinctive thoughts in a well defined concrete form? These are the few who have managed to break through the moulds that society set for them, they could not give themselves up to the expectations and the criticism of people around them like Rilke did. He was supposed to follow his family's tradition into military but he could not. His poetry feels like the more tactile forms of art do like paintings and sculptures.
Our times have been so influenced by the Renaissance, as Elizabeth Gilbert said in her TED talk, that we no longer consider these gifts of talent as endowed by the Divine. All inspiration is a gift, we cannot call upon it as we wish, it just burns in flashes and flames when He decides. It whispers to us to look in a certain direction when the light is perfect, it rains words and ideas in the middle of the night when He decides, and when we can't figure out why we're stuck we call it a 'block'. Rabindranath Tagore and Rilke reached the pinnacle of their art when their thoughts matured, and they expressed their gratitude for the ability to envision the world as they did. Tagore was a musician and so was Nietzsche and that influence can be heard in their work. FLW and each of his children played an instrument, and the presence of harmony in his work can be seen.
"God is dead" laments Nietzsche, today he would say that we have each become gods to ourselves, our culture of the social media has turned our thoughts inward, our Facebook pages are temples to us.
A lot of different thoughts on this page, some making sense some not, but before they disappear I had to write them down and I'll try to figure the rest out another time.
