At least season your gruel ffs
About over a month ago I went to a exhibition on Flemish art. They are honestly fascinating with so much detail you can tell they were very much obsessed with the observable world. (they also perfected the use of oil paintings, so learned that too)
But what was also interesting is that almost every object in a Flemish painting can carry deeper moral or religious meaning. So you can spend hours looking trying to find symbolism.
One painting caught my attention though and took me on a little journey I’ve been on since just hadn’t had the time to write about.
This painting by Jan Massys forces you to “read” in order to reveal a popular Dutch proverb. When read aloud in dutch these symbols spell out "De wereld voedt vele zotten", which means “The world feeds many fools”.
The central theme is warning against gullibility and a lack of critical thinking. The fools passively and eagerly accept what is given without question, gorging on some bland porridge.
Going to this exhibition coincided with reading a lot online about the “next great plugin for colour”, conversations about AI etc, so it wasn’t hard to make some association.
The pursuit of the easy fix is visible especially with anything tech related, with a vast digital marketplace selling shortcuts to the aesthetic of the celluloid and others. Presets, LUTs, plugins, DCTL you name it, with the promise to instantly transform digital footage into cinematic masterpiece.
The appeal is obvious for a lot of people, it’s a bypass on the often intimidating learning curve of colour science, and a shortcut to a final look without understanding any foundational steps. Generic and brittle. The modern porridge. Homogeneous bland mixture that carries the illusion of cinematic nourishment but ultimately starves the artist of genuine skill and creative voice.
Why is the process of creation important over immediacy of the product? The process is where actual value is generated. And don’t get me wrong, the process is not about rejecting the technology or choosing to be inefficient but ensuring we remain the master of our tools, using it to deepen our skills.
If you are struggling with an issue, manually matching footage, building a look from scratch, figuring out why something feels off, you are not just learning a solution but the principles behind it as well. You are able to solve problems you’ve never seen because you understand the fundamentals.
If your creative satisfaction is tied only to the final product and its external validation, you are setting up for a fragile existence, crushed by projects that fail, constantly chasing a fleeting high (we are all victims of it at some point).
Embracing the process means finding joy and value in the act of creation itself. The problem solving. The flow. It allows you to value a project you learned from, even if the result wasn’t all that glorious.
And I don’t know about you, but that sounds better than porridge.