art making – Page 5 – Sidewalk Face

You-Can-Do-It-Ness

September 27, 2021September 27, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl10 Comments

I write for two audiences, you and me.

For you I edit my stuff rigorously. If you’re bothering to come over here and see what’s up, I want you to feel rewarded. So, I try to keep it tight, focused and upbeat. I regularly eliminate meandering paragraphs and I only keep complaints if they are very funny. I wish I could be funnier. I try but funny is a hard thing.

Content wise, I write for myself. I need a lot of encouragement. Not just a mega dose every month, but many little bits and bobs of you-can-do-it-ness throughout the day. I am a never-ending cheerleader for myself. Not to promote myself, but to keep myself going, to be the kind of person other people can stand to be around. So almost all my content comes from this place. A place of internal encouragement. I want to be happy. I want to be a source of happiness. This is me figuring that out.

Making art is one of my top ways to keep myself sane so that’s why I write about it so much. There are so many ways to be creative and I don’t have a universal system. I don’t know if what I do will work for anyone else. But I love thinking about it. Also, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s nice that my monkey mind will get stuck in this particular eddy because it’s not unpleasant. Way WAY better than thinking about worldwide current events.

My number one all-time best creative practice is keeping a blank notebook and bringing it with me when I go somewhere. I feel like this deserves its own essay so stay tuned! And thank you for being here. It’s very nice to see you!

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Heads up! I added two new menu categories, Humor and Creative Process. This is an easy way to see some of my better posts if you are new here.

Art

If you don’t like your art, you haven’t made enough

September 1, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl15 Comments

If I’ve made three duds in a row, I get irritated and start to doubt myself. A terrible cycle is likely to start. Space opens up to make art, but I’m not so sure I want to spend my time creating more proof of my mediocre-ness. I do something else instead and then I feel bad I’ve wasted the opportunity. Can you relate to this? Does this ever happen to you?

If you look at your art and feel discouraged, don’t give up!

Giving up will stop the production of disappointing art but it will not stop the disappointment. The only way to get satisfying art is to do more.

If you make one hundred of something, and then look closely at them, you will notice a number of things:

You can see quite clearly what you gravitate to. That’s good. You need gravitational pull. Nobody can stand to work hard on something that isn’t interesting.

You will like something more than something else. Become very consciences of that and try and do it more. Go as hard into that as you can. See what it is about. Not just once but loads of times. So many times that a dud barely even registers. Let yourself experiment, let yourself play. It’s not precious because you are about to make forty more!

Give yourself permission to go so hard and get so weird that you are almost positive it’s going to be crap. Safe choices will always be disappointing in the end. You may not hate it, but you will also not love it. You are going to love it when you look at it and know you escaped danger, you were on a knife’s edge. You almost fell but, no you actually stuck the landing. The little wobble you can still see in the work, that’s the magic, the thing that makes it yours and no one else’s.

Here’s one of my tricks to get myself to get weird. I listen to my favorite music as loud as I can. I get super pumped up noticing how cool the music is, the lyrics, the melody, the production, the whole vibe. It took so much creativity on the part of several artists to make something this delicious. There is no way that any of the music I like was made by people not being brave. Music is deeply weird, deeply personal, very risky. When I am grooving hard on music, I say to myself, I want to do this in my art, I want take chances, I want to be vulnerable, I want to be bold, I want to send a message.

Sometimes what I end up with is a total mess, but at least it is a mess and not a blank piece of paper or a duplicate of something I have done before. I am here to make the art that only I can make. That’s my personal goal. For me. To please myself. To leave this lifetime, with a lifetime of art made. I am unhappy with a lot of it. And I am also very happy with a lot of it. Because I make a lot of it.

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PS – The sentence, if you don’t like your art, you haven’t made enough, was booted from another post but so obviously good I made it a title. Kind of like when one of the contestants on the Bachelor is rejected by the suitor but becomes the next Bachelorette. It sat in my drafts folder waiting for me to write all this text and I finally did it.

Art, Creative Process, Striving to Be Better

Simplify Until You are Doing It

June 14, 2021by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl6 Comments

Sometimes I am making the art I want to make. Sometimes I stop.

Sometimes I have a great idea, get really excited, make a bunch of theoretical plans and then do nothing.

Sometimes I succeed in making a whole bunch of art. Convince myself I need to take it to another level. Attempt this level up by messing with the established process and find the “new and improved” process sucks and hate it.

Making art is delicate. You do not strong arm your way to poetry. Your process is like a wild animal. Your stewardship over that process builds or breaks trust. Without trust, the art does not come.

What to do?

Simplify.

Minimize.

Remove the parts that cause the jam. Think smaller. Think fewer steps. Less set up. Less clean up. Less not doing it. More doing it. Locate the thing or action that is inhibiting you.

Here’s two examples. One is positive and one is negative.

Negative first. Most of you know me over here as the artist making Sidewalk Faces as I mostly use those to illustrate my essays and I reference it a lot. But professionally, I’ve worked as a documentary editor for the past 18 years. When I was starting out, I wanted to practice all the time, so I also shot a lot of video to provide myself with material to edit. I got decent at shooting and mic-ing and I made a ton of one man band video projects, some professional, some personal.

So, I had a BIG IDEA! Actually, I had a germ of an idea that got big really fast. I had this vision for a short video about why people get tattoos. It came almost fully formed and it was a SHORT video. I visualized how it would begin and end. The scope of it was something I could accomplish quite easily on a technical level. It would just entail finding and interviewing a bunch of people. That was a little outside my wheelhouse, but I was so infatuated with the idea I did it. I interviewed a bunch of people and filmed in several tattoo parlors. It was incredibly exciting. It was maybe like getting high. The higher I got, the more I started to envision a bigger project, a feature length film. The scope of the project started to live more in my imagination than in reality. The higher the imaginary stakes, the more afraid I became of making actual mistakes. I never edited the material. It’s one of my greatest failures and regrets. The project totally stalled out. I let it get so big in my mind that I became afraid of it and ran away.

There were other contributing reasons, there always are. But I could have easily done the first idea. I could still do the first idea.

Here’s the positive example. I always have a blank book I like to play in. I think I have about 70 of them spanning decades. They are not art in and of themselves. They are messy and wild and private. But many ideas, projects, and sources of inspiration have germinated first in this garden of creativity.

Someone close to me gifted me a beautiful blank book. They inscribed it and gave it to me as an act of love. The book was a bit too special to serve my messy purposes and it went unused. Then I had a very bad period. I was distraught and overwhelmed with anger. For reasons that are not at all clear I told myself I could take out my anger on this book. For several days I used only black and red sharpie and made bold, ugly scratches on a lot of pages. I let my anger make the art. Slowly the anger softened but the wild abandon did not. More interesting abstracts started to come. More and more until the pages were used up. I started a brand new book of only abstracts. I used whatever art medium was around. Nothing special. Pens, cheap markers, glued on bits of whatever. It was easy to start and easy to end a session. Just open the book, grab whatever art supplies are nearby and go. It was incredibly fulfilling. After finishing the second book, I formalized the project into 9 x 9 inch pieces of paper.

The abstract drawing process works. All impeding decisions have been eliminated. Paper size is set. Materials are set. I now use only alcohol based markers and I have a ton of them. They are in little jars on a shelf in the main room. If I want to be doing this activity, it takes no more than a minute or two to set up and the same to clean up. I need it to be this easy or it wouldn’t happen for me. Despite the ease, I mostly only do this on weekend nights. The most crucial ingredient to art making is having some time. But when I have it, nothing else gets in the way.

Some processes are easier to simplify than others. And all art is cumulative so something that was simple might become something more complex. I am not trying to eliminate the complex from coming into existence. But remembering that it is cumulative and keeping the process going is utterly foundational. What stops cannot grow. Eliminate everything that is stopping the process.

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