art making – Page 15 – Sidewalk Face

How to Make it Super Not Fun

August 19, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl6 Comments

Take something you love and put it in a cage. Tell it you will set it free when it solves Global Warming or reshoots the final season of GOT.

Wait six months. Wonder why it seems dead.

So I was doing Sidewalk Face for several years and getting pretty darn excited about the body of work I was creating. I was making multiple faces a day, I was posting to Instagram nearly every day and I was starting to have big hope and ideas about THE FUTURE. I was FANTASIZING about possible outcomes. That was actually super fun for a good bit of time. I was going like gang busters, making a website and listening to lots of marketing podcasts. Ask anyone who knows me, I wouldn’t shut up about marketing. Don’t you wish you had been there!

As sometimes happens, I walked right off a cliff. And no, I didn’t see the sign that said Grand Canyon National Park. I was too busy looking down.

It all just suddenly felt like a big hopeless chore. Marketing podcasts are great if you want to market stuff people actually buy like gizmos. But I am not making gizmos. I am making ephemeral faces out of crap because what else the hell are you supposed to do on your 7500th dog walk.

I got depressed. I posted less, I took less photos. I stopped seeing faces everywhere. I felt very concerned.

The one thing I know for sure is that art is my spiritual practice. Art is what gives me joy. I had to find my way back to a practice that was fun and not duty. It got me pondering what exactly fun is and why do I value it.

I am writing about that this week. Tune in tomorrow for my post called What is Fun?.

Art, Sidewalk Faces

The Crap to Beauty Ratio – Why Los Angeles is the Best for Making Sidewalk Faces

June 26, 2017June 26, 2017by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl1 Comment

Since writing a recent blog post about making Faces in Other Places, I have been reflecting on how perfect my neighborhood is for this particular activity. Before this analysis I had sort of been patting myself on the back thinking I can do this anywhere. But I must now acknowledge I am blessed to live in a locale that consistently provides the perfect ratio of man made detritus to organic detritus.

It’s very hard to create these faces without trash. How can I make an orange smoke a cigarette if I can’t find a cigarette butt? It’s also hard to make trash attractive. But combine a little crap with a little flora and bingo bango you just might have a new friend. The weather here doesn’t dip below 60 degrees, it never snows and rarely rains. The neighborhood is teeming with a diversity of plant life most of it flowering all year long. Come on! Why isn’t everyone turning roses into faces? To put another cherry on top of this environmental sundae of possibility, I live in a neighborhood full of Spanish style fourplexes from the 1930s. Why is that helpful? Because everyone is renting and no one likely to be around owns or cares about the stuff in their yard. How nice to have orange trees dropping their rotting fruit in apartment complex driveways so I can jam cigarette butts in them without feeling like I am stealing produce. And that red stuff on the end of the cigarette that hopefully makes it look lit up is the droppings of a bottle brush tree. There is so much stuff to choose from. It’s like shopping at a Walmart Supercenter that has a special junkyard section as well as a Botanical Garden in the back. I am free to pluck leaves and seeds and petals without feeling like the petty fauna thief that that I am. Would I have done this to a rose in some well tended rose garden? No! Not only embarrassing but also wrong. This rose was the single flower growing amongst weeds in front of our local post office.

The final thing that works really well here is the anonimity. Of course there are people around, I’m hardly the only dog walker in the hood. But people in Los Angeles DO NOT CARE. If I was wearing a purple flashing spiderman costume (what? why?!) nobody would pay attention. They would assume, if they even bothered assuming, that I was on my way to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to pose with tourists. I like this because when I am arranging trash in the dirt I don’t want to converse with anyone. I don’t want to explain myself and most importantly I don’t want to stop. I want to get the photo.

So all in all I am pretty darn lucky to live here. Praise Be.

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Wormhole to previous blog post: Faces in Other Places

Art, Sidewalk Faces

Why I Like To Be Constrained

May 22, 2017May 22, 2017by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

If you are into choice, western modern life is the greatest time and place in history to be alive. I am into it big time. Don’t want it taken away thank you very much Handmaid’s Tale. But for art making, if your entry point is anything it’s a bit overwhelming to figure out what would be worth doing.

Imagine you want to go swimming but just as you hit the water 13 beautiful options open up such as an infinity pool on a cliff in Malibu, a secluded ocean in Brazil, Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks and a hot tub with a hot companion. How could you choose? Even if you did choose you might ruin your good time by ruminating over the choices not taken. That is the problem with choice. It’s a time waster.

I have found I am much more productive as an artist if don’t have to think about what I am going to do during the time I’ve allotted to doing it. So I like a lot of constraint. I will only use alcohol based makers on 9 x 9 inch paper to make only abstractions. I will only draw faces in this little book. I will only draw faces with pencil in this other little book. I will only take photos of faces I make out of stuff I see while walking my dogs. And so on.

Of course at any time I really want to violate the rules I do. The muse is the most important part. If she’s pouring out than job well done. No need to play by the rules. But how to get to that elevated state on a regular basis? I find deep repetition works best, eliminating time wasting choices and getting down to making a whole lot of something similar so your style, your individual voice can emerge. It is through quantity that you can see if you are on to something.

I am writing about this because a super cool Insgramer named @trent_lindo recently commented that he was thinking of taking up painting and wanted to know if I had any tips or suggestions. I was at the doctor’s office when I texted back:

Trent Lindo text cropped 2

I never did finish. Trent this is my finish. Thank you for inspiring me to write about this. As your photographs on Instagram show, you already know what I am taking about. I hope you have a lot of fun painting. If you listen to music while doing it, nothing is more pleasurable and you get a cool prize at the end.