Something that inspired me to write my last post was this video, by the newly-started and completely fantastic project Made By Hand. It’s really worthwhile viewing, and I recommend doing so before you read the rest of this. There is one thing he said in particular, though, that struck a chord with me:
It just takes buckets of blood and sweat and fucking work to get there. That’s it. To get good. To get competent. And then once you become competent, maybe you have it in you to become an artist. Maybe you don’t. Before you can actually get to a place where you can actually make art with the skills that you’ve learned, you have to master these basics. Mastering the basics takes, they say, 10,000 hours - that’s five years of forty hour weeks. I’d say it’s more like 15,000 hours. It takes a lot of work to get there, and then when you get there, that’s day one. Then you can start making something you can call art.
The “they” that Bukiewicz refers to is K. Anders Ericcson, a psychologist and leading expert on the subject of expertise, whose study that the 10,000 hour figure comes from is mentioned repeatedly in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. There are a lot of parallels between the process described in the quote above and the process I’m going through now. Like Bukiewicz, I really do derive a lot of comfort from the fact that while I’m working my ass off mastering the basics, I’m still providing something that people derive some basic, elemental benefit from. The customers I’m making food for are eating a great meal. Bukiewicz’ customers had solid, functional knives that would last them a lifetime, even before he had the skillset to open a workshop and make knives he felt had artistic, as well as practical, merit.
There’s another aspect to this way of thinking that’s admirable to me. If you believe that you need to put in five years of work into a craft before you can make art with it, then what you really care about must be the work. He talks about using up all his spare time and “pushing” to put out as many knives as he could because he was obsessed. It’s only later, when he starts to formulate a brand and open a storefront - “Cut Brooklyn” - that he starts to define his artistic vision to distinguish his products. I can see why Bukiewicz feels that this leads to a quality of life he can feel good about. We spend much of our lives working. If you do it because you’re obsessed with it, because it’s something you love doing, the external validation of whether it’s considered to be art is unimportant. He didn’t even have any idea that his product would ever see the demand it has today.
Making something worthwhile is hard. Doing it for a living is even harder. But it’s a wonderful way to figure out what’s important in life. Blood, sweat, and fucking work.
