Courage/Creative Process

One of the things I go for in my work is a sense of ease.  I want it to look like it breathed itself into being which, counterintuitively, takes a degree of planning to pull off consistently.  While every project is different, planning for me can include thumbnail sketches, doing materials tests, color tests and cutting/collage exercises to help work out ideas about composition.

Here are some of my color notes for the Boulder Barrel Project.  I chose Mars yellow, transparent red iron oxide, titanium white and green gold for this project after spending time looking at neighborhood architecture and landscaping in Boulder, Colorado where my barrel will most likely end up sited.  Accent colors are still up for grabs and could include raw umber, teal and magenta. I’m using Golden acrylics, a mix of heavy body, fluid and high flow paint.

“It’s not good when it’s done, it’s done when it’s good,” said Tool guitarist, Adam Jones, in this interview with Rolling Stone last November.   Tool hasn’t put out a new album since 2006.

As someone months into a new project I thought would be be done by now, but that just isn’t yet, I can relate. Perfectionism?  Maybe.  But I prefer to think of it as meaningful restraint.  Jones and Tool are under a lot of pressure from fans to produce their next work.  But I’m glad they’re holding back.  Because by waiting until the work meets their standards they’re saying that their art matters.

A new song from Tool?

Here are a few tidbits from Tapestry, a conference for people engaged in data storytelling/the art of making data comprehensible by presenting it in ways people can relate to. Participants at this year’s event, which took place at the historic and creepy, but lovely Stanley (The Shining) Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, were a mix of data people, designers, journalists and academics. I went because science communication has popped up as a theme in One Mans’ Land (working title), a documentary I am making.  To my delight, most of the presentations had a strong, visual focus.

“Doodler and designer,” Catherine Madden talking about her favorite drawing app, Paper, at Tapestry, Estes Park, Colorado, March 2016

Drawing to Think

Two presenters, designer Catherine Madden and comics author/artist Nick Sousanis, put drawing at the center of their presentations.  Both raised drawing up as way to deepen your understanding of an idea, organize complex thoughts, and open yourself to new connections. The type of drawing they both demonstrated is more sketchy and imaginative than the life drawing you may remember from your art education.  As someone who’s already using a sketchy flavor of mind-mappy writing to organize big projects, I’m excited to see what can change by inviting more images onto the page.

When to Get Feedback?

Here’s another juicy advice-nugget from designer Catherine Madden.  When seeking feedback, get it early in the process before you’ve added details to your work.  In her experience, “If you build a polished prototype you open yourself to criticism, but if you build a rough prototype, people see the potential.”  Financial Times editor Alan Smith was on the same page.  “Exchange ideas early.  Show your work to people early and often.  This is why interdisciplinary teams work so well.”  For visual artists in the fine arts, the issues about when, why and from whom to solicit feedback on your work are different.  But one of the things I love about high tech culture is this open, collaborative mindset that stems from a sincere desire to get to clarity, to get to the good stuff quickly, by cycling through crap ideas at a rapid pace.

Tapestry conferees milling around in front of the Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado, March 2016

Learning More

Have I whetted your data visualization appetite?  If so, check out NYU professor Enrico Bertini’s podcast, Data Stories for more.  Also, if you are a creative person with a technical bent interested in adding a new skill to your set, or know a young, creative person for whom a career in data visualization sounds like a good fit, check out Tableau.  My outsiders’ ears heard the buzz.  Tableau developers are enjoying a moment of demand.

Weird evergreen garden, Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado, March 2016

LINKS:

Catherine Madden’s Visual Thinking course on Skillshare

An award winning example of data journalism, Killing the Colorado by ProPublica

Paper app by Fiftythree

Rethink World Hunger, an effective presentation of data by an advocacy group

Visual Hackathon

HelpMeViz, data visualization community

Are You Secretly Afraid of Data?

Rethink Media,  a non-profit focused on building communications capacities of nonprofits

The Unflattening, a comics dissertation by Nick Sousanis

“Think about giving the best thing possible and it will return back to you.

– Enrico Bertini, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

If you’re an artist who thinks of your work as play, or who has referred to your work in the studio as playtime, I’d like to invite you to think differently, and go deeper this year.  It’s not that play doesn’t happen in the studio.  It does!  Play fosters risk-taking, discovery and flow.  And it’s worth doing for the fun alone.

John Cleese, insightfully, on the relationship between play and creativity.

Play is serious business for children, a deep, imaginative mode that facilitates learning.  But when adult artists use the word ‘play’ to talk about what they’re up to in the studio, it comes off as breezy shorthand for pleasure that means “I did something fun.” If you’re using any of the #studioplay hashtags on social media you’re calling on a stereotype of the artist as a childlike figure content to mess around with paint. It’s inauthentic. (I know that’s not who you are. No artist is.) And it fails at communicating the juicy, more interesting stuff about who you are and what you do.

Meaning

Art is fun (when it’s going well). There’s a narcissistic, almost primal pleasure in seeing something of yourself reflected back at you in a mark you’ve made, whatever that mark may be. I get that.  It’s part of the draw. But it’s not why I chose art. I chose art as my vocation, and have chosen it again and again at the crossroads in my life, because it holds meaning for me.

Jackson Pollock painting for the camera. Is this work? Play? Or is something else going on?

Unfortunately, the meaning I get out of art isn’t constant.  Sometimes my work feels guided and purposeful. Other times it’s a struggle.  I don’t see art as special in this way. This is something that all of us who want to do meaningful work have to face. When I think of what I do in the studio as play in the service of enjoyment, when I dismiss the more challenging work I feel called to do, or that is required of me by deadlines, then purpose fades.

Practice

I like the word ‘practice’ for what happens in the studio because of its many meanings.  Practice connotes seriousness.  A doctor works in a medical practice.  An attorney practices law.  But it’s also linked to play.  A musician has to practice before she can play a new instrument.  Athletes practice before they play.  And then there’s the spiritual angle.  You can practice your religion.  Or start a meditation practice.  In all cases ‘practice’ suggests  an ongoing commitment to a growth oriented endeavor. To have an art practice is to engage with your work and your materials in a complete way, physically, intellectually, spiritually.  Play may be a part of your process. But it’s not the most interesting thing you do.

A playful GIF that I love, reverse-motion. Artist unknown.

I’ve grown to love the word ‘ambivalent.’  When I was a kid I thought it meant wishy-washy and didn’t like it at all because it sounded feeble.  I had to experience it repeatedly for myself, the uneasy push-pull that happens when you’re drawn to something and put off by it at the same time, before I started to get it.  For creative people, ambivalence is fuel.  Attraction draws you to a subject and then whatever’s repellant about it spikes your curiosity, keeping you engaged because you want to understand.

Artist Marilyn Minter’s retrospective, Pretty/Dirty, up at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art through January 31st, stirs ambivalence.  Her photographs, paintings and videos depict a raunchy, feminine sensuality that titillates and repels.  Check out the Green Pink Caviar trailer below to see what I mean.

Here’s another video, a talk Minter gave at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014.  She does a great job here telling the story of her art, connecting photographs she made as an undergrad of her beautiful but addicted mom to her current work. She also talks about her struggle to find her voice as a painter while vying for success in the New York art world, two big aims that didn’t always mesh.

“From the minute I went to school I heard, ‘You’ve got to loosen up.’ I gave it my best because I could copy anything.  I could create the illusion of the gestural mark but . . . I could see that it looked phony.” – Marilyn Minter

I’m ambivalent about blogging.  I love language and think writing is interesting but also find it confining.  If you can put a complex thought in words it means you’ve pinned it down.  Take that same thought, make a series of images about it, and you’ve probably opened something up.  Look at Minter’s work.  Her epic paintings offer liquid drips, edible gold and glitter-flecked, freckled skin.  They are gorgeous, a pleasure to view.  They’re also political, raising questions about feminine presentation, sexual agency and power.  If you get Minter’s work, you get it viscerally.  It raises shame and erases it.  I’m not sure you can do that in words.

Each time I redo my website is an opportunity to reconsider this blog.  Keep it or let it go.  I’m keeping it, enthusiastically this time because I’m ambivalent. So for the second time in ten years I’ve cleared the deck, deleting all my old posts except for a few reported posts about beeswax.  It’s my goal to post weekly, words and/or images. This’ll be a lab of sorts. I’ll be adding new categories and trying different things.  Stop by on Mondays to see what’s new.