Art – Page 18 – Sidewalk Face

Making Art is Like Organizing Cooked Spaghetti Part 2

May 4, 2020September 25, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Can’t believe you missed part 1, the essay everyone is talking about even though it was written 5 years ago. Link at the bottom. Catch up!

While looking through old posts, this title made me smile. Yep! That still sounds right. I think I will elaborate.

Let’s start with the point of it all, as in is there one? Is there ever a good or necessary reason to organize cooked spaghetti? I can’t think of one. Just put it on the plate and eat, right? I’ve never thought of my belly as an organizational device before but sure, that’s a good if temporary place to store cooked noodles while we strip them of nutrients. Otherwise, if there is too much, put it in Tupperware. It’s organized in the sense that it’s not co-mingling with other leftovers and I can find it again. But if I had to organize it strand by strand, it would be really hard and seem pointless. Just like art!

I think you know I don’t really find art pointless but surely you have had the experience of looking hard for this particular point and having a hard time locating it. Art is so messy and irrational. Art is mysterious and defiant. Art is useless and compelling. Art is strange and upsetting. Art is for eating, not for organizing. Art is for contemplation not for transaction.

It may be more accurate to say that justifying art making is like organizing limp noodles. It’s so easy to cook spaghetti and it’s pretty to listen to music and draw in a little book or make a face out of an evaporating water splotch on the sidewalk. The harder job to say explain to one’s self why this is a reasonable acitivity. To formulate a coherent, satisfying and convincing argument for why this process should be repeated over and over. To give one’s self a satisfactory explanation for why the resources of time and money are being used to fund so much unnecessary visual detritus.

Let’s say you did organize the heck out of those gelatinous strands of cooked Italian dough. Then what?! Would you be excited if someone very close to you, such as your very own self, informed you it would now become a regular part of the work week. Maybe.

Making the art is easy, understanding the art is hard. Justifying the art is impossible.

I make art because I don’t know how else to deal with reality.

Link to Part 1

Making Art is Like Organizing Cooked Spaghetti

Art, Humor

All the Good Advice I Didn’t Take

April 16, 2020by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

From my Dad:

If you want to make money, sell a product not yourself

and/or

Get a masters in business, I’ll pay

My response:

Nope, don’t care about money, more interested in freedom

(Wait 20 years and find out freedom is money, whoops!)

From my successful Art World Friends:

Get a Master’s in Fine Art

Make your work bigger

Maybe make your work better (if you can)

My response:

Nope, don’t want to go into debt, would rather spend money taking time off from work and just making art.

Like to keep it little cuz………..that’s just how it comes out? Don’t know how to make it bigger? Don’t want to store big shit?

Can’t make it better but I’m trying.

From various people who care:

Buy a house

My response:

Can’t cuz I didn’t take the earlier advice

—

All of this advice haunts me but I don’t regret my decisions. I think I would be very unhappy and not fit for friendship if I had been employed as a mid level manager these past 20 years. I would probably have a house though. I wonder how it would be decorated?

Art, Creative Process, Instagram, Sidewalk Faces

Sidewalk Face 1000

March 31, 2020by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Since October 2015 I have posted 1000 sidewalk faces to Instagram. I choose this guy to be number #1000 because he embodies everything I value in the project:

Pavement

The classic medium of my genre!

Seeing Potential

I like noticing things and examining closely so I turned that into an art practice. That’s how I entertain myself on endless dog walks, traversing the same streets year after year, I look for what is unusual or has changed. It’s my modern urban way of scratching the ancient hunter-gatherer itch. I got excited by the rusted metal pipe remains of his nose. The small things make my day.

Minimal Interference

My personal goal is to do the least to get the most. I try to make them feel as if they emerged on their own from what was naturally there. Sometimes my contribution is artificial and obvious, it’s more important to make a good expression than be austere but it’s part of my ethos to not overwork the image. This one is very minimal and that makes me happy.

Availablism

Wanting a little more detail than the curved sticks were providing, I added additional eye features with spit. That’s availablism. Use what you have.

Emotional Expression

Some of you may recognize this face from Instagram, first posted in 2017, as #541. I walk by him most days and he looks about the same. However after a nice rain the evaporating water made his halo more pronounced and it was time to do another portrait! I knew right away he was special, such joie de vivre (French for joy of living). As you all know I post as many miserable faces as happy ones. I am always pushing to find greater emotional nuance in cement, sticks, stains and detritus. But whether my characters are content or sad, I am enriched by sharing them with all of you. They may speak to me but it’s when I read how you interpret them that I get my greatest joy.