What Is the Two-step Recipe for Great Art?

Alex Van Halen says the two-step recipe for great art is to do the homework and learn the basics, then break all the rules. That is how it works for Van Halen. Homework means immersing yourself in it, listening and watching everything you can get your hands and eyeballs on, and experiencing as much as possible.

David Lee Roth turns that homework into a song: get your heart broken, then get it broken in a foreign language, then run away and join the foreign legion. Then you have a song. Robert Vargas applies the same test to a painting. The bigger the painting, the bigger the heartbreak. He had just come back from a world art tour, five countries in a month, painting in Paris, London, Greece, Berlin, and Tokyo with no preconceived idea. Eating the food and having the conversations informed the process. Once he knows why he is doing it, how to do it comes together.