First, you need a foundation of knowledge and skills. You can't be Picasso if you can't handle brushes. Second, you need to use those skills to express something that is both deeply personal and that resonates with an audience.Success in art is not just making a living, or being famous and acclaimed. Those are consequences. Success is moving and being moved. It is opening vistas. Unsettling the status quo. Peeking beneath the veil of convention.
Making art is not an artist's job. It is an artist's life. This is why it is exciting. But it also creates anxiety, and second-guessing. Putting your passion on display can be scary. How do you know what is your true passion? What if your work is ignored, derided or misunderstood?
... being able to turn your career into a work of art, to thrive and lead with passion in a world in flux, requires finding a space, and I mean both a psychological and social space, where what you do is tied with who you are and what people around you care about — a community where commitment feels enabling, liberating, rather than just constraining.
Show Your Work! A new series by Austin Kleon
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Recently I read a book that I enjoyed very much becuase it delivered a potent message with great panache. The book is Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative By Austin Kleon. This is how Amazon describes the book:
You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself. That’s the message from Austin Kleon, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone. A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side.
And now I discover that Kleon has begun a series of shorts that continue the themes of the book. Show Your Work! Sharing Creativity in the Digital Age is made using Keynote to animate and Quicktime to edit.
Episode 1: Vampires (above) is about Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and how to decide who to let in and out of your life. Episode 2: Falling Out (below) is a story about Bob Ross, his mentor Bill Alexander, and what happens when a student surpasses his master.
Would you like to be inspired? Here’s what you should do:→
/Bang on a computer until you hear just the right drum sound. Write a 50-page short story, then throw it out. Sit in a boring room under fluorescent lights on a saggy, secondhand sofa, in the stale air of hours of futility. Break up your band. Have the worst date of your life. Imagine you’re a matador. Watch Nina Simone. Watch Benny Goodman. Watch Al Pacino, meet Al Pacino, be Al Pacino. Get insulted by Shelley Winters. Round up a marathon of the bleakest, most violent spaghetti westerns you can find. Realize you just might be a racist. Endure your mother’s illness. Most of all, try again, repeatedly.
Don’t trust us — these are tips from the experts. If you’ve ever seen a painting, or watched a movie, or read a novel, or enjoyed a performance, or followed a television show that moved you on some essential level, you probably wondered: What inspired that? We’ve wondered that, too. So we asked. What follows are the answers, in all their varied glory, to that question. In part it’s an investigation into the enigmatic nature of creative inspiration. (Which, it turns out, is often not so enigmatic. Step 1: Work. Step 2: Be frustrated. Step 3: Repeat.) In part, it’s an attempt to figure out just where creative culture comes from. (Sometimes, from the last Kleenex in the box.) And in part, it’s an excuse to celebrate the best music, books, plays, movies, TV and art on the horizon. We hope you enjoy it. Who knows? You might even be inspired.
A great introduction to The New York Times Magazine Inspiration Issue. Great profiles, some with video, with the stories behind some recent creative works. From Alicia Keys, to Anthony Bourdain, and many others. Very much worth the read.
Simon Schama: Why I write
/Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.
To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.
Simon Schama, writing for the Financial Times, delves into what inspired him to become a writer and discusses some of his favorite writers and passages. Despite his love for words and writing, my favorite work produced by Schama is his documentary series The Power of Art. It features eight artists -- Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko -- and each portrait of the artist weaves biography and historical context to help explain the true power of his works.
Made by Hand: The Cigar Shop
/In 1974, Dominican immigrant Don Antonio Martinez started a small shop in New York City selling hand rolled cigars. Thirty-eight years later his son, Jesus, carries on the tradition. The shop combines craftsmanship with community, mixing equal parts work and play.
A project from Bureau of Common Goods, Made by Hand is a new short film series celebrating the people who make things by hand—sustainably, locally, and with a love for their craft.
Previously on Made by Hand:
The Beekeeper
The Knife Maker
The Distiller