Creative Process – Page 5

Happy Anniversary Sidewalk Faces!

October 10, 2016October 10, 2016by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl3 Comments

Today is the one year anniversary of my first Sidewalk Face post on Instagram. I posted 317 faces in my first year. More actually as I posted a bunch from Joshua Tree, CA and Hawaii but I didn’t label them as Sidewalk Faces because they were not near my sidewalk.

When I started I did not have rules. But over the year these are the rules that emerged.

Sidewalk Face Rules

#1 – They must be good.

#2 – They must be made from materials in the immediate proximity.

#3 – They must be made quickly.

GOOD

I would like them to be good. That doesn’t mean they are all good. I only post 1 out of every 3 or 4 that I make. I consider them good if they show personality and emotion, and if they are different or better than what I have already made. If I see something in the environment that I haven’t see before (such as a cracked egg ) I feel like I really must try and make a face out of it. This often supersedes rule #3. The more desperately I need to get back, the more interesting the item I will find on my way home.

Sidewalk Face_Egg.jpg

MATERIALS

I only use stuff I find around me. I do sometimes see something like a piece of dirty styrofoam or anything that could be an eye, pick it up and carry it with me looking for a good way to use it. If it is shot within walking distance of my Los Angeles home (90%+ are) then the materials came from my neighborhood. I consider it particularly great if everything comes from within a few feet but the first rule is more important than the proximity rule. Everything I shot in Hawaii was from Hawaii. Same for the desert. If I make some in another city I will only use materials from there.

TIME

I usually spend 5 to 10 minutes making each one. I’m not totally sure about that as I don’t wear a watch or keep track. But I only have so much time and the dogs only have so much patience. Occasionally I’ve made one, walked on to find an object that would make the face better and doubled back for a re-do, usually to the intense annoyance of both myself and the dogs but rule #1 is the most important rule.

Here is how it starts, I spot something of interest; a shape, a stain, an abandoned object, a butterfly. I ask myself what I could do with it, could it be a nose, a mustache, a head, a critter? Then I look for what else is needed, additional parts or a background. I usually go with my first instinct, my first choice. If I place the butterfly in the middle of that cracked pavement, I don’t place it anywhere else. I don’t want to over think my decisions because for me personally, thinking and originality are often inversely correlated. My thoughts aren’t that interesting but somehow my actions are. That’s why I do it, to surprise myself.

sidewalk-face_butterfly-mustache

I am looking forward to another year of this project. Many people have sent me faces they have made and that inspires me to keep going. Hunting for new faces makes every outing an adventure. It’s never a dull day.

You can see all of my Sidewalk Faces on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/eaglecrowowl/

Art, Instagram, Sidewalk Faces

Andrew Goldsworthy, Instagram and Me

April 10, 2016May 4, 2016by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

I wrote this blog post last October. Why haven’t I published it? I too would like to know! Call the Art Police Procrastination Division and get someone on the case.

_________

On October 8th, 2015 Terry Gross interviewed Andrew Goldsworthy on NPR’s fresh air. I’ve been a fan of Goldsworthy since the early 1990s, saw the documentary about him called Rivers and Tides. He is an inspirational character. He goes into nature and uses what he finds there to make ephemeral sculptures. If you don’t know his work, here are a few examples:

andy-goldsworthy-1

I was listening to the interview while dog walking, my main interaction with nature such as it is in my hollywood neighborhood and pondering how Goldsworthy’s pursuits are highly unusual. Most people can not hang about in nature all day crafting whatever comes into their heads. How many people are doing that on planet earth right now? It’s got to be a pretty small number right? Just economically he is the only person I know of to get paid for this kind of labor. So I was thinking about his activities and how pleasant it would be to do that for a bit. I don’t mean to make light of his effort or imply his experience is not strenuous and painstaking. I wasn’t imagining fully being him, just that I would enjoy a small taste of his process. In my current station in life it is rare that I am fully connected to space and time, reacting only to what is around me. Mostly I am interacting with the virtual world and juggling twenty things at once and suddenly it’s 2 months later. Very different. Anyway, dog walk over, didn’t hear the whole podcast, back to the grind.

The next day I was dog walking and saw this:

And for some reason that I think had to do with Andrew Goldsworthy, I thought I should try and turn it into a face.

Before I got home I had made four of them. I made another one on the 11th. I made eight on the 12th. Knowing I could and would put them on Instagram sealed the deal. Boom! It exploded into a full blown obsession. I’ve made forty in 2 weeks.

So the process is this: I see something that I can use or seems like part of a face and then I start assembling. I look for needed material in the immediate vicinity. I have found and collected a few bottle caps that I stash in my purse and have used more than once but outside of that, all the objects are found on location, mostly within one to four feet of the face.

As an artist I have always liked reacting to something. I think that is why I am an editor. Editors react to footage. When I make art, I don’t visualize something first and then try to make it. I’ve tried but I don’t like the results and I don’t like the process. That’s a lose lose so why bother? I have to quickly make something I can react to. As soon as there is something, a line, a shape, a color, I can start to do more. The impulse just clicks in like a wheel on a rail. All art making is a reaction to something at some point in the process. This essay is a reaction to thinking about what I have been doing lately. When I film something, it’s a reaction to light, or composition or something interesting happening. For some people I imagine the reaction is in their imagination, an image comes to mind. The moment of reaction is the muse.

Making these ephemeral faces is so pleasurable just as I imagined when listening to the Goldsworthy interview. Being super focused and having the whole process constrained to that single drawn out moment is a relief, an escape from multitasking and endless computer interaction. I like having some of my creativity happen in the outside world. The only problem is obsession. Can’t seem to stop.

Here are a few of my favorites:

___

As you may know if you follow me on Instagram I have not stopped and just posted Sidewalk Face 159, today April 10th, 2016. Glad I wrote this when I did as so much has happened in the meantime. Perhaps I will write about what is happening now and post it next August!

You can see more by following me on Instagram at:

https://instagram.com/eaglecrowowl/

Art

Making Art is Like Organizing Cooked Spaghetti

June 17, 2015by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl1 Comment

Warning! This post is a lot of complaining and elaborating about art making minutiae that may make you want to stab your hand with a pencil or click over to the Playbuzz quiz What Genre of Metal Are You? (I’m Industrial/Experimental). But if you have a creative addiction and like analyzing your monkey, read on.

If my title is true, trying to impose some control over floppy noodles is more fun than it sounds because making art is my favorite pastime. But how is something so pleasurable simultaneously so maddening? Is my inability to control it part of the appeal?

As I stated in my post Little Book of Abstracts https://eaglecrowowl.com/2015/01/25/little-book-of-abstracts/, I decided to do only abstract art in my then recent blank art book. It went exceedingly well and I completed all the pages by late March, 2015. I thought I would share more of that here but I made the process too tedious. I wanted digital access to everything so I started scanning each page, got bored and gave up, or lost consciousness of the endeavor and stopped. I think I told myself that I was to use my computer free time to scan rather than web surf but that didn’t pan out. Also, I greatly prefer making new art to documenting old art so that might have contributed to the loss of enthusiasm. Most of my blogging about this happened in my head. Any mind readers out there who enjoyed my psychic posts? Your welcome.

Upon completing book one, the most natural progression seemed to be making a Little Book of Abstracts #2. I looked around on the web for a square hardcover blank book and couldn’t find anything I liked, most had spiral binding which is the worst. So I ordered 3 more blank books from L. Cornelissen & Son in London and paid the same amount in shipping as I did for the books themselves. So worth it! Take that frugal Caren. But no sooner had I done something a little extravagent, justified by previous success, than the mental momentum hit some existential traffic and productivity slowed to a crawl. Here’s what happened.

In book #1 I did the pages out of order, so for a long time many of the spreads had an image on one side and a blank page on the other. It looked nice and clean.

However, a number of the spreads had images on both sides as sometimes I would do a theme and variation kind of thing.

The inconsistency bothered me so I decided there should be imagery on every page. A cool thing started to happen where I would pair a dense marker based image with a light and subtle pencil based image.

Nevertheless, as the book filled out, I started to miss the clean blank pages and several drawings I felt were harmed by the newer drawing they got paired with.

This bummed me out. I told myself that in the next book, there would only by one drawing per spread.

So the rules for abstract book #2 was one drawing per page and they would be drawn in order, first drawing on page one, second drawing on page two, etc. I wanted to rebel immediately but told myself stick to the plan! I really liked my first drawing but for whatever reason, my second drawing was of a radically different style. They did not sit well together. In the first book that wasn’t a problem as they would be separated by mulitple pages and I would make the art between them harmonize. Now I didn’t have that option. Seeing these two disparate images together every time I opened the book galled me. The problem just got worse, each successive page seemed to relate less and less to what had come before. Instead of feeling joy when I opened the book, I felt irritated. This is what I get for paying $30 in shipping!

I am always torn between rules and no rules. Of course there are always some rules. Whether you consciously create and follow them or take notice of them after your effort to see what they were, they are there. For example, a medium is a rule. If you are using markers, you aren’t using paint so the rule is markers. A rule is just a choice and art is full of choices. I have been paying a lot of attention to whether I am making my choices with my conscious mind or unconscious mind and to what effect. I think the most interesting stuff comes from the unconscious. No sooner does it come out then my conscious mind seizes on it and wants to make rules to help us get more. But the rules often backfire, like they did in the second book. It’s so frustrating.

Some where around the time I was finishing the first and starting the second book I had an idea for another abstract project with another set of rules. I would make larger abstracts on individual pieces of paper and get a frame I could put them in so that I could hang it up and see the work. It’s hard to get the little books to prop up and stay open so that I can step back and look at the art from a distance.

More on that project and how I think the unconscious works in art later. Or tune into my live and uncensored psychic podcast where I do mental mixed martial arts cage fighting with myself while drawing more nonsense for no good reason because I am free and I can do as I please.