art advice – Sidewalk Face

Art Making is a Risk

January 5, 2021March 9, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl4 Comments

When you make something, you risk living with the knowledge of your own assessment. Is it good? Is it worthwhile? Does anybody freaking relate to it or care?! The answer is sure to be no as often as yes. The thing you make might be mediocre, useless and ignored by all who know you. Who wants to grapple with that? If avoiding feelings is your number one priority, don’t make anything.

Uh, oh! There’s a problem. Not making art is also risky. You might have to confront the feelings you have about creating nothing and always turning outward for access to interesting stuff.

Art making puts you in direct conversation with your hopes and expectations. That’s some risky business right there because you might not be satisfied with the outcome. But who cares when the process is so fun! Of all the perilous things you could do, making art is the least outwardly consequential. There are no art police, there are no art laws. It’s great territory for private indulgence in extravagant, showy, badass behavior. It’s where you attempt to impress your self over and over. When you succeed, Woah! It feels good! It becomes the thing that makes sense of everything senseless, creating an antidote to the horrors of reality. It’s the vast void from which you conjure the tangible like a medieval wizard. It’s sure to happen if given enough time, space and respect. Personally, I find regular indulgence in the creative process the most satisfying way to know myself and generate love for the world.

All the expectations you encounter, all the self-assessments you give and receive, they can be useful. Mediocre art is always the first step to good art. Useless art is only a breath away from becoming treasure. You can and will find someone who relates to your offering, but only if you have one to give.

Be a delinquent in your art practice. Thumb your nose at whatever you disdain in your art practice. Be wild and daring and reckless in your art practice. Be risky where the reward is greatest and the consequence the least onerous. Otherwise pay your bills on time and call your mother. Everything in its time and place.

Art, Creative Process

Observation x Repetition = Intuition

December 28, 2020March 9, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

In my late 20’s I worked as a product photographer, shooting doodads for catalogs with medium format cameras. It was heaven. Across the hall from our photography studio was an art studio. It had a cryptic phrase on the door, What we do is secret. I liked that. It appealed to me. I did a lot of secret stuff. Maybe this was my club. Over time I got to know the artist and started taking a painting class there. Scratch the sentence above, this was the real heaven.

There are two things I remember from the class and they’re related. You must look at your work. Closely and often. The teacher had us tape the work to the walls, step back and really stare at it. Over and over. Many times throughout the process of making it. The second was to evaluate the composition. Was it balanced? Did it feel good. You would only know that by doing the first thing, looking at it.

It takes patience, focus and concentration to really look at something. Imagine you had to write an essay on the thing you were looking at. Could you? Can you retain the color palette when you look away, can you describe what is happening in the upper left corner? It’s hard enough to focus on something good, what about looking at something in development, something that is clearly not good. It takes patience, perseverance and something special to identify what is not working and figure out how to fix it. That special thing is what art is all about and it takes a lot of practice.

I quit my photography job and rented a space in the art studio. It was a pleasing and scary surprise to go from employed and stressed to the max, to unemployed and making art every day. From a warm industrial loft to a cold industrial loft, from charming clients with chitchat to listening to Bjork’s Vespertine on repeat. As a very frugal person, this turn of events felt like a fairy tale. My husband (whom I have to thank for financing this interlude) and I joined the San Francisco Modern Art Museum. I went there often and stared at art. Sometimes I would look at a single painting for 15 minutes. I was making the composition conscious in my mind, I was guessing how the artist made the work, what mark came first, what came last. I got really good at looking deeply at art. It was a wonderful time. I think about it as the best time.

I honed my sense of observation like a runner increases endurance. I was regularly doing marathon observations. One thing that happens while observing is ideas bubble up. Let’s say the act of observing is turning the stove on high and ideas are the air pockets surfacing in the boiling water. As you become conscious of what you are looking at, you become conscious of possibilities, of things you can try in your own art.

The next step is to act on one of these ideas, any idea. See what happens and repeat. Repeat the ones that are most interesting and the ones you naturally feel like repeating. No point trying to make yourself do something you aren’t interested in because nothing will come of it. But where there is interest there is the will to experiment. If you keep looking, you will keep having ideas and if you keep acting on those ideas and looking at the outcome you will generate more ideas and more action. This is repetition. It’s a big fruitful circle. Intuition is the final fruit. The noticing, the idea and the desire to take action merge. It’s the whole process in a single flash of insight.

As I mentioned in my post of December 12th, What Value Matters Most, Shoutout LA interviewed me about observation. You can read my response here and see a portrait of me with the doggies! That interview sparked me to sort out my thoughts on the topic of intuition, observation and repetition and this essay today was my attempt to speak about it with more nuance. I cut multiple paragraphs about intuition while editing this to keep it focused on the equation set in the title. But as I still have more to say about these ideas, I’m going to use that material in another post and try and define what exactly intuition is. Are you on the edge of your seat?!

Art, Creative Process, Sidewalk Faces

The More You Make, The More You Make. So Make More.

September 30, 2020October 4, 2020by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl8 Comments

I’ve noticed that if I leave the house without my good camera I probably won’t make any faces. Maybe one will scream at me until I snap a portrait but a reluctant one-off face rarely leads to another. Like a leaky water hose, some creativity dribbles out but it’s not intentional.

If I do take my camera then almost for sure I will make a face. I’ve intentionally turned the hose on so of course I am going to water a plant. And if I’ve made one face, I am very likely going to make another. And if I make two I will probably make four and the fourth one will really jazz up my day. At that point I am loose and playful. I am on the hunt, I am hooked up to a sprinkler dousing the whole yard in creativity.

**Were you by chance looking for someone like me?**

At the beginning of the pandemic, touching anything felt dangerous so sidewalk face making slowed down dramatically. At that point I was washing plastic wrapped bags of bread in the sink like dirty dishes to disinfect them from the amazon delivery. Boy was that tedious! With the feeling of an invisible threat everywhere all the time, it felt wrong to make faces so I did some with my feet, I only used plants and I went back to the archives.

Now I feel okay touching things again. I’m always wearing a mask. I have hand sanitizer and everything has been baking in the sun for hours. But all those months of reticence meant I wasn’t bothering to lug my camera around and hunt, hunt, hunt. So yeah, one would pop up here and there but was I making an effort? No. Did I feel enthusiasm? No. Was my practice thriving? No. It felt kind of far away and faded. It felt dry and dehyrated.

Recently I’ve brought my camera along and you know what, I’ve been regularly making four faces on every dog walk. The first is sort of should I or shouldn’t I? What the heck. Let’s do it. Then maybe the camera stays out, around my neck. The 2nd one is just happening. No need to question if it’s a good idea. The third is like oh hell yes. And the fourth is me wondering if I could arrange to do this all day.

I can’t color correct them as fast as I make them. The last one I made is a new all time favorite. Creativity is a conduit, a pipe, a portal, a channel. You have to do things to keep the channel clear and open. Just like exercise keeps the cardiovascular system healthy, making more leads to making more. So if you want more, make something and make it soon.