In doing a little research for this post, the origin of the quote I wanted to start with is in question. It’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso but similar versions were apparently uttered by Igor Stravinsky and maybe even Steve Jobs. It goes like this and you’ve probably already heard a version of it:

Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.

I’m going to try and explain my interpretation because I think it’s worth sorting out. As a borrower of anything, there’s an implied return of the borrowed back to the owner and is never actually owned by the borrower. Stealing on the other hand, is the taking of something from someone else and claiming that it is now theirs.

How does one borrow or steal as an artist? I’ve spent my whole life creating in a number of disciplines and there’s a somewhat universal development to all of them. When I look back at my childhood and adolescence obsessing over comics I know I spent a great deal of time trying to draw like whatever artist I was fawning over at the time. Sometimes I’d come close to making a drawing that passed muster to my uneducated eye and I could convince myself that I came close. It’s really thrilling after lots of sketching, drawing, stumbling and falling on your face to hit gold and make something that validates your efforts and looks like your artistic heroes. To see what you admire and love in other artists reflected back to you in your own creation is a big moment in any artist’s development. You made it…but did you really make it? If your work immediately recalls another artists work, have you created an original of your own or have you borrowed the look of another?

Art is ultimately an intellectual endeavor even when it’s in a purely visual medium. The art that you create and proclaim a masteriece is the accumulation of a series of decisons/reactions to steps in its creation. If you leave a pencil line with the hope that after enough of them, you’ll have Conan, then it is in your mind where you decide whether or not that line fits in your plan. Do I keep it or do I erase? The drawing you end up with is the result of deciding there’s no more to be done. Eventually everybody consistently matches the look of another artist’s style and the blush of matching your master starts to wear thin. At least it should.

This is the crossroads. Are you going to be satisfied standing in the shadow of another artist? Does the work of the master validate the work of the junior artist, or pull attention away? In my history of drawing, I’ve gone through this dilemma many times. Probably any time you’re exposed to the work of an artist that changes your assumptions, it’s normal to grapple with it creatively. That’s the process of influence.

Eventually, however, paying attention to the decisions you make creating art over and over, will teach you about yourself. The decisions you make in your art reflect your unique perspective and experiences. Your job as an artist is to be true to that. The artists you emulate, you’ll soon realize, have undergone similar transformations of processing influence not into perfect recreations of past work but into something new. If they had emulated their creators, you’d not be mimicking them, you’d be drawing from the work of their original. So that’s the difficult responsibility of theft it’s that you have to take it and make it speak in your voice. Hide the theft of those older ideas by transforming them into something new!

It’s a responsibility of the artist to have the courage to stand on your own out from the shadow of another. If you’re repeating what’s already been said, you’re saying NOTHING.