Well, I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand.

Some days you wake up, and you don't know that you're about to have an experience that will change the way you think forever. Then again, some days you wake up in Paris, with plans to visit the Orsay museum, and it's pretty safe to expect one of these experiences.
In the Orsay museum, there is a painting by Claude Monet named "Effet de neige à Vétheuil". It hangs in a room that I'd like to be buried in, but let's leave that for another discussion. For the point I'm making today, I was lucky enough to find an online reproduction that is clear enough to show what I mean.

So, whenever  I look at impressionist paintings, I like to first come up very close and swim in the brush strokes of a while, and only then walk back and watch them turning into shapes. If I manage to get my nose up to the canvas without being really sure what the whole painting looks like, that's my favorite thing.
This "Effet de neige à Vétheuil", when seen up close, has a grayish-green area with these happy, bold white brush strokes on top of it, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Clearly it's a snow landscape, but what are the straight-up pieces of snow?



Then, as I walk back, I realize it's a fence, and the white stripes are the snow behind it!

 

Does it look exactly how it should? Absolutely. Could I ever have thought until then that it's right to paint the background thing over the foreground thing? Hell no! Will I ever, having seen that, be that liberated in my art? Remains to be seen. Could I ever think of it all by myself the way Monet did? The inevitable answer: not in a million years.

I have managed to carry with me that lesson about how important it is to be daring and free of preconception in art. Last week I came back to it when I heard my friend and colleague Doron talk about a scene he once animated, where the character is pushing a huge boulder uphill. Knowing that in reality it's the character that moves the boulder, he first hid the boulder and put all his effort into animating the character. When it looked almost done, he brought the boulder back and tried to fit it in - it didn't work. Then he realized that the way to solve this scene was to first animate the boulder, and then to build the pushing around it.

In Hebrew there's a beautiful cynical saying: "don't let the facts confuse you". In art, when we're creating new worlds, or re-creating this world in our image, we need to first be free enough from what we know to be true.