There’s a very simple way you can differentiate between somebody who has only hammered a few nails in their life and somebody who has hammered thousands (and it’s not mashed fingers).

An indication somebody knows what the hell they’re doing with a hammer, is they know when to stop hammering. Once the nail has completely penetrated the wood and it is flush with the wood’s surface, they holster their hammer and move on to the next nail that requires hammering.

Now, if you were to give me a hammer and a handful of nails and tell me to start hammering, I’d get the job done. But, not well.

If you were to look closely around each nail’s buried head, you’d notice an indention in the wood in the precise shape of the hammer’s face… where I had hammered one too many times.

I find this to be an appropriate metaphor for art. Great artists know when to stop hammering.

Pablo Picasso once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I personally think Picasso was full of shit. I can’t imagine that an artist even as talented as he could paint like Raphael in the time it takes an 18-year-old to drink, smoke, party and fuck his way to a diploma.

But, I appreciate the sentiment anyway. Picasso was commenting on simplicity and its relationship to mastery.

To look at an art form far “simpler” than cubism, we must crack open a newspaper and thumb to the comicstrip section.

Scott Adams is famous for being the creator of Dilbert where he’s made a small fortune through simplicity. In his own words…

“

I am a professional simplifier… Making comics is a process by which you strip out the unnecessary noise from a situation until all that is left is the absurd-yet-true core. A cartoonist has to accomplish that feat with as few as four short sentences. I’ve performed that trick nearly nine thousand times, sometimes successfully.

”

We should create art in much the same way that a master handyman drives home a nail.

Once we’ve hammered in the nail, we should stop hammering as not to bruise the wood. Once we’ve created whatever it is we originally sought out to create, we should lift the pen from the paper, the brush from the canvas or the fingers from the strings and and have the courage to say, “I’m done”.

By Cole Schafer.

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