Feel free to ignore this review of Ignore Everybody



Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod


This is a great book and I recommend it to anyone who wants to do something creative, especially if the people in your life are not very creative.  A few years ago I learned the hard way that just because someone claims to want what's best for you, it doesn't mean they actually know what's best for you.  Sometimes you are better off not taking their advice. 

The book starts out with a bang:


1. Ignore everybody.

The more ori­gi­nal your idea is, the less good advice other peo­ple will be able to give you. When I first star­ted with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard for­mat, peo­ple thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for mar­kets to digest i.e. cutey-pie gree­ting cards or whatever?

Here are his first 10 main points:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being “dis­co­ve­red” by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail.

5. You are res­pon­si­ble for your own expe­rience.

6. Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Com­pa­nies that squelch crea­ti­vity can no lon­ger com­pete with com­pa­nies that cham­pion crea­ti­vity.

9. Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Eve­rest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props.

You can read the rest here: http://gapingvoid.com/ie/



I love what he said about no great novels being written with really expensive, designer fountain pens.  I think we rely on external props that we think will somehow make us more creative (like certain brands of computers, for example) instead of adjusting the technology to fit our own needs or being creative enough to make something out of nothing.  I find it amusing and ironic that so many artists, who avoid joining groups, clubs, or organized religions because of the perceived threat to their individuality, have no problem joining certain cults of technology or personality.  Likewise, the push to social media and "liking" what your friends like, re-tweeting and re-blogging on Twitter and Tumblr, and sharing images in the hopes of getting immediate feedback creates an environment of conformity, a certain hive-minded collective consciousness that can deaden the impulse to think for oneself.  As David Meyer put it, "We live in an Internet culture where individuality is supposedly celebrated, but where the tyranny of brand reputation is ruthlessly enforced on a collective basis."

Such is the nature of the Internet, where every person is a brand, every blogger a pundit, everyone with a pulse an expert of some sort, ready to dispense advice, some of it free of charge, the rest available once you pay for an e-book, webinar, or personal consultation.  It's great to gather advice and receive the wisdom of those who are willing to share it, but sometimes, when you really want to do something daring and unusual, you just need to ignore everybody and do what makes sense for you. 

Here are some of the "truths" that I am currently ignoring:

• I need to replace my Hotmail account with a Gmail account because everybody's doing it.
• If you are good at more than one thing, just focus on one of the things you are good at and only develop that particular talent.
• You can't make art on a PC. Every artist needs a Mac.
• The only good smartphone is an iPhone.
• If I crowdfund my art with Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, I will make a lot of money.
• Every blog must be self-hosted on Wordpress.
• You shouldn't build your own website if you're an artist, even if you know how to do it. It's much better to pay someone else to make a cookie-cutter website instead.
• Educational debt is good debt.
• I have to follow everyone who follows me on Twitter, no matter how boring or irrelevant their tweets are.
• I need to read as many blogs about blogging, tweets about Twitter, and Facebook posts about Facebook as possible because social media and SEO experts have all the answers.
• If I spend a lot of money on this person's webinar/book/conference call about how to be a successful artist/interior designer, all my problems will be solved.
• Being on social media will get you discovered and lead to overnight success!

What have you chosen to ignore?

Art and Fear

Rod Serling, curator of the Night Gallery

A recent study made an interesting discovery: viewing scary movies before seeing abstract art makes viewers appreciate it more.   Here's the abstract:

Which emotions underlie our positive experiences of art? Although recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that emotions play a critical role in art perception, no research to date has explored the extent to which specific emotional states affect aesthetic experiences or whether general physiological arousal is sufficient. Participants were assigned to one of five conditions—sitting normally, engaging in 15 or 30 jumping jacks, or viewing a happy or scary video—prior to rating abstract works of art. Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art. These striking findings provide the first evidence that fear uniquely inspires positively valenced aesthetic judgments. The results are discussed in the context of embodied cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Learning this made me think about something I'd been considering for a while: showing episodes pf classic TV shows with art-related plots during my open studios.  Of course, this would be in the background, for the sake of ambiance, just like the music I play in the background.  I've even started making a list of particular episodes of shows I'd like to screen.  It's amazing how many shows--from The Dick Van Dyke Show to 227--have episodes about a character wanting to become an artist or even getting "discovered" by a curator or collector by accident.  There were a few I thought might be too creepy to show at an open studio, but now that I've read this study, maybe I should reconsider.

One scary video that I especially would like to show is an episode of Naked City (one of my favorite police procedurals of all time) called "Portrait of a Painter."  The painter of the title is played by a young William Shatner.  His situation is quite horrific.  He wakes up to find his wife murdered in his studio and can't remember what happened the night before.  It's a tense psychological thriller, and, in the typical Naked City fashion, is the story of a man at the end of his rope, with the aura of film noir and existentialism about it.

In the meantime, I don't even have a TV at the studio so that idea will be put on hold for a while.  But I have put together a special musical playlist just for October that is moody, melancholy, and vaguely macabre.  I wanted something that would reflect the moods evoked by Midnight Intrigue and the Dark Night of the Soul Series.  I plan to feature them in the hallway outside my studio this time.  Nothing extreme, though. No heavy metal, no angry, thrashing guitars.  But lots of strings.  And Tori Amos and Elysian Fields.  It's more Tim Burton than Wes Craven.  Now that the weather is starting to change and the days have gotten noticeably shorter, I feel like the playlist is ideal for an October evening.  I like making playlists.  It gives me an excuse to buy new music, a luxury I very rarely indulge in these days because of all my other expenses. 

But this eclectic playlist is a mixture of music from many different artists, some famous, others more obscure.  I've got "Moondance" by Van Morrison, "I Put a Spell on You" by Natacha Atlas, and "Fall" by the multi-talented Cree Summer, who played my favorite character, Freddie Brooks, on A Different World.  There are few songs with the color black in their titles: "Black Crow" and "Black Capricorn Day" by Jamiroquai, "Black Acres" by Elysian Fields, and a string quartet version of The Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black" by The Vitamin String Quartet.  I have to admit I am very fond of Vitamin String Quartet.  I think they do their best work with rock and hip-hop.  I already have their cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on my ever-expanding "Music for my Art Shows" playlist and enjoy seeing the reactions of people who think they are listening to classical music and then suddenly realize it's not. I have several more of their covers on my Halloween playlist, including their take on "Zombie" by The Cranberries.  To amuse myself, I added a song from Wicked, (one of my favorite musicals) and "I Want to Be Evil" by Eartha Kitt, which is even more fun than her "Santa Baby."  Another fun song in the mix is Michael Jackson's "Threatened," a sort of spiritual successor to "Thriller" in which lines taken from the opening and closing monologues of The Twilight Zone have been edited together so that Rod Serling is its featured "rapper."  Interspersed throughout are a lot of instrumentals.  I like to pair instrumentals with abstract art.  Besides the Vitamin String Quartet covers I already mentioned, I have a beautiful piano instrumental bonus track from the end of No Doubt's Return of Saturn album, a hypnotic song called "Ink" by Syrian group Hewar (sadly out of print now), and some incredible melodies by Egyptian jazz quartet Masar. The entire playlist is a little over three hours long, so each song will play only once.  And after the years I spent working in retail and having to spend every day listening to the same songs repeatedly, that's the way I like it.  And I forgot to mention that the whole thing begins with "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder as a reminder not to take the songs that follow literally or seriously.

Coincidentally, Art and Fear is also the title of an outstanding book for artists.  If you are in need of some motivation and don't have time to read The Artist's Way series (which, by the way, I also recommend), it's perfect for you.  It addresses issues like perfectionism, creative blocks, and motivation.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

• In large measure becoming an artist consists of learning to accept yourself, which makes your work personal, and in following your own voice, which makes your work distinctive.


• If ninety-eight percent of our medical students were no longer practicing medicine five years after graduation, there would be a Senate investigation, yet that proportion of art majors are routinely consigned to an early professional death.


• What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit.


• Tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.


• The risk is fearsome: in making your real work you hand the audience the power to deny the understanding you seek; you hand them the power to say, "you're not like us; you're weird; you're crazy."

If The Artist's Way is like a super deluxe 64 ounce mocha with flavored syrup, whipped cream, and a dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg on top, Art and Fear is like a shot of espresso.  Both are like caffeine to energize your artistic career, and which you choose is really a matter of taste.

So as I close, the idea of the role fear plays in artists and in their audiences is a very interesting subject.  Don't be afraid to share your comments.  (Unless you're a spammer.)

30 Art Books from Blurb under $50

I am so excited to have published my first book with Blurb. Overall I'm pleased with their service and the quality of their printing.

As an artist, I know how difficult it can be to promote yourself online. There are thousands of books that artists and galleries have self-published using Blurb, making browsing their immense selection a daunting task.  I know firsthand, having spent hours diving deeper and deeper into the archives to seek ideas for my own book.  It was so inspiring to see how many talented artists have taken the time to share their work with the world in book form. 

The only drawback of shopping for art books on Blurb are the prices.  Their print on demand service allows users to set their own prices, and some of the prices are cringe-worthy. I want to make a profit too, but selling an 8.5" x 11" book for $100 or more is not the way to do it.  Fortunately, not all the art books on the site are so grossly overpriced.  I've found many lovely books on the site for less than $50.

I'm pleased to share what I discovered. The books I've highlighted below have the total package: beautiful covers, nice layouts, and quality artwork.  I have yet to order any for myself, so I can't vouch for what they look like in person. But if their online previews are a good indication, they would make a lovely addition to an art book collection.  Some aren't even in English, but the pictures are so gorgeous they speak for themselves.

1. Icons: Giorgio By Giorgio Uccellini








2. Circular Keys By Asher Bilu












3. Roux: An Exhibition Of Traditional And Non-Traditional Printmaking By Houston Museum Of African American Culture :: Book Design: Ann 'Sole Sister' Johnson For Solefolio
 

4. Nature's Palette By Mark Anderson













5. Journey, Paintings By Nicola Parente by By Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Inc.  











6. Heavenly Bodies Paper Cutout Works: The Exploration To The "Planet Platonic" By Mayuko Fujino














7. Eric K. Wallis, Artist: A Catalog Of Recent Work By Eric K. Wallis








8. Scapes: Paintings By Lynne Hollingsworth By Lynne Hollingsworth









9. Berkeland: Original Oil Paintings 1997 - 2008 By Dan Berkeland

10. Con Mexico En La Piel: Portafolio 2008 By Angel Gonzalez De La Tijera











11. Lassen By Mark Harris











12. Let's Meet For Coffee: Journal Sketches By Jerome Domurat 

13. Unpasteurized By Boise State Graphic Design Class









14. blur b By David S Rose










15. Deep Calls To Deep: Exploring Beyond Through Mixed Media Image By Sharon W Huget 

16. Eric Hesse: Recent Work by Eric Hesse














17. I Can't Believe I'm Telling You This: The Myspace Portrait Project By Jeff Hurlow 











18. Brettisagirl By Brett Manning

19. The Dancing Houses: The Architecture Of Trinidad & Tobago Infused With Rhythm By Brian Wong Won









20. Introduction: Hsin-Yao Tseng By Hsin-Yao Tseng











21. Stories That Cover Us: Meditations And Fiber Art By Pacific Northwest African American Quilters By Lynne K. Varner-Hollie And Deborah Boone; Edited By Gwen Maxwell-Williams

22. Pop By Artist Olan Montgomery











23. Nathan Pendlebury Paintings By Nathan Pendlebury (Foreword By Richard Smith)









24. Fran Recacha 2003 - 2009 By Fran Recacha

25. Gods And Foolish Grandeur: A Selection Of Paintings By Stephen O'donnell












26. What I Do At Work When I'm Supposed To Be Working By David Fullarton 











27. Solas By Jemma K Derbyshire

28. Paintings 2007-2010 By Pamela Staker










29. My Alphabet Of Anxieties & Desires By Jennifer Linton














30. The Walled Garden By Dianne Fogwell













Support these artists and galleries by purchasing a book from them.  Use the code CSVIP to get 10% off your order.

Book review: Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic by Daniel Harris

It's funny, but I appreciate books like Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic by Daniel Harris now that I am no longer a stressed-out college undergraduate.  It's a book about aesthetics, particularly "The Aesthetics of Consumerism" as Harris has subtitiled it.  What I like about books like this one is the way they look at the objects with analytical scrutiny.  What does "cute" or "quaint" or "delicious" really mean in the context of our modern world?  This book is an attempt to answer those questions.  I think that what it does for the realm of the visual is similar to what TV Tropes does for creative writing, finding common symbols in our culture, grouping examples of them together, and even giving examples of their opposites. 

As an artist and designer, I feel like it isn't enough to just make pretty things.  It's also important to consider subtle nuances of subtext and symbolism.  I think Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic is a good introduction to the topic, particularly because of the clever definitions Harris gives:

Cute

Something becomes cute not because of`a quality it has but because of a quality it lacks, a certain neediness and inability to stand alone, as if it were an indigent starveling, lonely and rejected because of a hideousness we find more touching than unsightly.

Quaint

Quaintness is an aesthetic not only of clutter but also of imperfections, of scratches, chips, and cracks. It loathes the regularity of modern products so completely that it goes out of its way to create artificial irregularities in brand new things, thus faking the necessary dilapidation of quaintness, as when decorators "distress" exposed beams with motor oil and drill bits to counterfeit smudges of soot and the ravages of woodworm.

Cool

Far from reflecting confidence, coolness grows out of a sense of threat, of the strain from living in metropolitan war zones where our equanimity is constantly being challenged, giving rise to a hyper-masculine folk religion that fetishizes poise and impassivity.

Romantic

Lovers are portrayed as refugees from their own kind, ostracized and oppressed by society at large, which has been eliminated from romantic advertisements, creating eerily unpopulated spaces, the echoing ruins of a civilization that the aesthetic wipes out as effectively as the neutron bomb.

Zany

Zaniness allows us to misbehave and yet minimizes our risk of being ostracized as eccentric. It is based not on real individuality but rather on the harmless iconoclasm of the typical prankster...

Futuristic

The futuristic creates its imagery through willful disobedience, an almost bratty, aesthetic misbehavior, rather than through a genuine spirit of inventiveness, of artistic prescience about the appearance of tomorrow.

Delicious

The misrepresentations of the aesthetic of deliciousness must be understood as a part of a systemic campaign, not only on the part of chain restaurants but of food manufacturers in general, to camouflage the insipidity of packaged foods and neutralize the skepticism of a society still adjusting to its loss of control over all aspects of food production.

Natural

The vision of nature presented in magazines is tailored to rival the artists of Madison Avenue, to supply eyes spoiled by the fluorescent tones of consumerism with their chromatic fix, the addictive drug of loud, saturated tints that can only be found it the most exotic reefs and rain forests.

Glamorous

Bad posture and and grooming are key components of contemporary glamor because they exhibit the contempt that this sylph-like slob feels for the dress she is wearing, a blase attitude that sends an unequivocal message to readers that that woman in the snakeskin Versace dress and Medusa curls is above posing, above trying to look good, above conforming to social expectations.

Clean

Faced with the unglamorous task of persuading people to buy products whose function is purely negative, namely, to get rid of dirt, companies have devised an imaginary, exhibitionistic type of cleanliness that we can see and smell, a glittering mirage that makes an emphatic impression on our bodies and seduces us with its lustrous sheen and mirror-like polish, thus reassuring us that we have indeed gotten something for our money.

I hope these little tidbits have intrigued you enough to read the book.  If you do, come back and comment on it.

The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson - A Saturday Solutions Book Review

Since Independence Day is coming up next week, I thought I'd share an important book about freedom. Don't you love it when you serendipitously come across a book in the library when you're looking for something else? That's how I came to read The Freedom Manifesto a few weeks ago. The book's full title is The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. I wish I had found it back in 2007 when it was first published.

I'm writing about this book on this blog because as artists, we need the freedom to create. Unfortunately, we often deny ourselves that freedom. We don't give ourselves permission. We have been taught to have a particular set of standards and ambitions that get in the way of creating the art that needs to be made. We worry too much about whether our art will sell or about other people's measures of success. But Julia Cameron said, in her own manifesto of sorts, that "To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you as just a little silly." This book makes that admission loud and clear, and encourages its readers to do the same.

What I love about Tom Hodgkinson's irreverent book is that he questions so many of these notions, and does it with such a wry British sense of humor. (Ironic, isn't it, for me to turn to a book by a British author for inspiration on Independence Day?) He writes about the rules that were meant to be broken and explores fun ways of breaking them.

There are so many great quotes from this book that I had a hard time narrowing down my list of favorites. Here are several observations and pieces of advice that resonated with me:

On beauty:

• Things used to be more beautiful. That is fact. The industrial process can be seen as a process of uglification, as everything becomes objectively uglier when it submits itself to the rule of mass manufacture, cheap labour and profit. Noble, contemplative Quality is murdered by venal, avaricious Quantity.
• Perfectionism itself is a  kind of death; the machine can turn out thousands of perfect objects, but they have no life.
• Only buy beautiful things. Only make beautiful things.
• It is one of the terrible ironies of the age that something as expensive as plastic, which relies on limited supplies of oil, has become cheaper than wood, which is endlessly renewable.

On shopping:

• To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming.
• To be able to find an odd item that looks good from a second-hand shop proves you have real style and are not just a mere follower of fashion. Style is about being yourself, and fashion is about being like the others.
• Don't make luxury into a meaning.
• Treat abundance and want with the same detachment.
• When it comes to freeing ourselves from faith in machinery and technology, one answer is to go backwards. I have discovered that it is very easy to live like a millionaire, if you simply go back in time a little. Super 8 cameras from the 1960s, for example, cost about £1 and are much more fun than the dreaded camcorder.

On the future:

• The future is always about machines. But I don't think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many, many times.
• Worrying about the future is a useless act; it does nothing to improve the present.  Funnily enough, the people who encourage others to worry about the future are those who want your money now. They themselves are not worrying about the future; they are maximizing their profits today.

On working:

• It is the separation of our lives into mutually competing zones that causes the problems, the anxieties, the illnesses, the debts. Our goal should be to bring them together, to integrate them, to harmonize them, so work and life become one and the same thing.
• One unhelpful solution thrown up by modern society is the dreadful aim "work-life balance." Oh, horrors! Quite apart from being an ugly, awkward and vulgar little phrase, there is something rotten about the whole concept because it implies that work is bad and life is good. Well, make work good, make work into a creative pleasure, and you won't have to worry about balancing the good with the bad; all will be good.
• We are encouraged to believe that we are useless, unable to look after ourselves and hence need an employer to subdue our unruly self and slot it into a strict timetable. When you realize that, in fact, you are free, this problem ebbs away.
• Career precisely reflects the dynamics of other modern myths: it is a greedy monster, never satisfied, always wanting more. And career encourages what I consider to be a terribly unnatural self-specialization: in our urge to compete, we tend to try to become very good at one small thing to the exclusion of all others.
• Careers don't allow us to be fully ourselves; careers take as an index of success money and status rather than pleasure in work and creativity. "Vocation," on the other hand, means "calling," and it is a task that earns you a living and which you enjoy doing.
• Create your own life. Cast off resentment. Reject the idea of 'have-tos'. You don't have to do anything. You have free will. Exercise it.

However, I don't agree with everything he has to say in the book.  There are times when he seems to overgeneralize and idealizes life in medival England too much, and in one cringe-worthy passage about civility, as these commenters also have noted, he completely misses the point of the American Civil War. (In fact, I hope than in a later edition he will correct this egregious factual error.)  He's not a historian and it is definitely not a history book. But if you read it these shortcomings in mind, there is a great deal to be gleaned from it.

This book might inspire you to go to your studio and make something you never thought you could make before. Or quit your job. Or go Occupy something. It certainly inspired me. Just wait until you see what I'm posting on Independence Day!

You can read more of Tom Hodgkinson's writing at The Idler.

Saturday Solutions book review, Earth Day Edition

Tomorrow is Earth Day, a day that I first celebrated as a Girl Scout by watching the film of How The Lorax Was Lifted (the old school filmstrip version, not the hi-def CGI version in theaters now) and cleaning up the side of a road with the rest of my troop.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks of Earth Day as a day where you go out and do something to help the environment.  But for those of us who are artists, we can start in our studios.

I became interested in having a sustainable studio practice as a complement to Post-Consumerism.  And one day I found this wonderful book, Green Guide for Artists: Nontoxic Recipes, Green Art Ideas, & Resources for the Eco-Conscious Artist. From recipes for milk paint to plant based pigments, there are great ideas for using natural and ingredients to produce great art.  Because some of the ingredients are items you can pick up at your local grocery store (as opposed to the often pricey art supply stores so many of us frequent), you may find a green approach more economical as well.  

Pictured in the photo with the book are two of the buckets I use to wash my brushes in.  As many of you know, my painting medium of choice is nontoxic acrylic paint.  I wanted to take my environmentally friendly approach one step further.  Instead of pouring paint-contaminated water down the drain, I wash my brushes in buckets and when the water in them evaporates, paint skins are left behind.  I have been saving the skins for use in some pieces I am currently working on.  When they are complete I will post them on here.

Saturday Solutions Book Review - The Artist in the Office by Summer Pierre

There are a few books that I think should be in every artist's library.  In addition to Julia Cameron's phenomenal The Artist's Way Series, I would also recommend The Artist In the Office become a fixture in the collection of every creative person working a day job to pay the bills.

The talented Summer Pierre, who is a writer, artist, and musician, wrote and illustrated this charming book.  In it, you'll find inspiring quotations, like this one:

There are also great suggestions for making the most of your time at work.  For example, why not take advantage of your lunch break and use the time as a mini-vacation?  Summer Pierre has a few fun activities you can do away from your desk:

 

So much of our creative output depends upon our own outlooks and attitudes, and I think this book inspires a level of optimism and positivity that every creative person needs to continue to do great work, both on the clock and in our artistic pursuits.

You can find The Artist In the Office at numerous online retailers.  It makes a great gift for the artists in your life.