A Master Piece with Paul Gaunt
Article Transcript
GET YOUR MENTAL GAME ON
In the world of sports much is made of a quality called mental toughness. Physical training develops a skill set, but managing the pressure of competition and performance requires a strategy of mind.
The art of live caricature is not a sport, but there is competition in it. You compete with yourself to stay focused on the right things, push through discomfort, counter bad habits, and ultimately try to draw better than you thought you could. All of this requires mental toughness. Dr. Jim Loer of the Human Performance Institute says that “mental toughness is all about improving your mind so that it’s always on your side; not sometimes helping you nor working against you as we all know it’s quite capable of doing.”
Capturing a likeness requires you to weigh incoming visual data against your vast memory of other data, and interpret it meaningfully in a thing we call art. This is all achieved without your awareness when systems are flowing, but distractions happen. Sometimes a mental game plan is necessary to get you flowing again. In this article I want to describe what I see as my mental game plan. I do not pretend to be mentally tough all the time, but having a plan helps.
Attitude is a tool. However cliché, it is absolutely true that a positive one can be employed for better performance. If I let peanut gallery offenders get under my skin, my attention is not in the right place. Mental discipline means finding a way to dissipate frustration. Practically no one intends to be offensive, and by understanding context, irritation can shift to empathy. One time I found myself distracted by the voice of a woman reading aloud every single word of my signage. At first flattered by the attention, I began to suffer a Chinese water torture effect. I looked over to discover she was reading to her friend who was blind. With a basic sense of compassion, attention can be redirected back to the drawing.
The first step in my mental process of a live caricature begins by being receptive to the subject. What is going on with the face? What are the interesting shapes that describe a theme? Like hearing a faint tune in the distance, if you listen, a melody emerges, and then becomes clear. The simpler the melody, the easier it is to hear. While holding this question in mind, I look at the subject in a way that avoids focus on any particular feature. Fixing on features will bias my impression. I want to take in the whole face at once, to look, but not too closely and look away. A series of quick glances works best for me. Looking away engages memory, so the question becomes, “What do I remember about what I just saw?” An overall impression emerges. Mental toughness is useful to reinforce the impression so it does not slip away. To this end I mentally verbalize the impression with a few key words and repeat them in my head like a mantra. This becomes like the simple melody around which I hope to compose a song.
Now I direct attention to that rectangular white paper on the easel. Here I try to look beyond the paper like I’m drawing on a wall across the room. I do this by squinting my eyes to filter the view. White paper becomes grey through a blur of eyelashes and only the black marker emerges in what seems like the distance. In this way I block in the main features as the mantra encourages me to push beyond my comfort zone in the key areas.
With the big decisions made and a likeness taking shape, it is time to focus on particular features and their nuances. Here is where the likeness tightens up and where I now let my view fix on this and that feature. I like the saying “Aim small, miss small,” which I picked up from the movie “The Patriot.” If I aim for a broad target, I might miss altogether. If I shoot for a bullseye and miss, I will still probably hit the target. Yet another effort of mental discipline as executed in my game plan is when the drawing is almost finished and mostly good. Anyone watching might think it is complete. I can walk across the finish line or kick it in for my personal best. Kicking it in means scouring the drawing and the subject one last time, and infusing one with the other just a little bit more.
One aspect of mental toughness for Olympic athletes is overcoming performance anxiety. The pressure is so acute that an athlete can be too nervous to perform well. In live caricature, with no end of opportunities to succeed, I find it is a lack of pressure, if anything, that handicaps my attention. A customer wants a drawing suitable for framing, so there is pressure to deliver that. If people are waiting in line, there is added urgency to be efficient, which heightens concentration for better drawing. If you work alongside other caricaturists, there is yet more incentive to bump up your game to a standard they can appreciate. However, sometimes the reality is that no one is watching, you are sleepy, and your customer is a bump on a log, indifferent to the notion of inspiring your better work. In moments like this I pull out my mental toughness playbook, and employ another trusty tool: using imagination to create pressure.
I imagine the ghost of Al Hirschfeld looking over my shoulder, and he is assigned to critique. One look at my subject and he can tell the odds are stacked against me. Embarassing myself in front of Hirschfeld is not an option. Pressure mounts. My subject notices a change in me, and sits taller in his chair. He transforms from a bump on a log to the glorious person he is. Now I am off and running!
Olympic legend Jesse Owens said, “It’s extra effort that separates a winner from second place. But winning takes a lot more than that. It starts with complete command of the fundamentals. Then it takes desire, determination, discipline, and self-sacrifice. And finally it takes love, fairness, and respect for your fellow man. Put all these together and even if you don’t win, how can you lose?
Paul Gaunt graduated with a B.A. in fine arts from Indiana University in 1987. He has a caricature concession on the Casino Boardwalk of Hampton Beach, NH. He joined the ISCA in 2000 and won the Golden Nosey in 2002.
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