inspiration – Page 13 – Sidewalk Face

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.

Creative Process, Writing

Which One?

November 12, 2019November 14, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl1 Comment

My last post started with a sentence describing my morning routine. When I started the first sentence, I thought I was going to be covering the thematic territory of this little essay but to my surprise, things went in a totally different and disgusting direction. If you have to ask yourself if you read it, then you didn’t. You wouldn’t forget. In fact, if you read it, you probably made a point to never visit us again. Link at the end.

That is what makes writing, like all creative acts, so much fun. You really don’t know what is going to happen.

What I had been intending to say in the previous post was this: Every morning I get up before anyone else, turn on the coffee, head to the couch and start informing myself about how screwed up everything is. First I give the Washington Post a shot at it, a few editorials later I mosey over to the Dailymail and check to see if a Kardashian is wearing a new outfit cuz, that’s weirdly like an antidote to the first activity. But unfortunately they cancel each other out and I am none the better for any of it yet nevertheless out a full hour of my life. Why do I do this? I ask myself this question every day. I swear to myself we are going to do better tomorrow. This is the absolute last time we read 200 Breitbart readers comments on an article about Greta Thunberg, or hunt for spoiler synopsis on the latest horror movie I am curious about but too afraid to watch. Some days I read recaps of shows I watched the night before. A tad redundant?

What I tell myself I should be doing is this, writing. When I know what I am supposed to write it’s a pleasure. But once a post is done and “more” is not a specific task but a general goal, I revert back to reading on the couch. Yesterday I managed to get myself over to the writing area, opened up WordPress and wondered if maybe something interesting was lurking in the 14 draft essays we have saved. Here is the list of titles.

A few of these I am going to write for myself. I still want to, I still have something to say. But one of these I am going to write for you. Which one do you want to read? The title with the most votes gets written.

Just based on titles alone, I would pick Free Will, Heavy Metal and Having Ideas. I totally want to read that. I opened the draft to see where I was headed. Nothing. Not a single word. So if that gets picked, it might not even help me get off the couch. I mean, what is going to come of it? I’ll put on some Mastodon and figure it out.

I also liked the title Not What I Expected Part 2. Unlike heavy metal, it’s mostly written! And funny. Why the hell didn’t I publish it 4 1/2 years ago? So stupid. The only issue is it needs an ending. Do I bring it back round to present day? Also, it was an actual part 2 to a previous post which might need to be reshaped for context. Wait a minute, I’m starting to feel like I have a task! I like that! Gotta get writing!

Update! My awesome brother made me a voting form. Click here to VOTE:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScrUFShNxZ2nbBzPlB5ly2jMgbiO1R6qH6wsTKqW5xeaKBv_g/viewform?usp=sf_link

Gross Post Link Below. Trigger Warning for those with Infestation Fears.

Not What I Expected Part 3

Art, Creative Process

Waiting For It

September 24, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Any given artwork is made over a period of time. The gestation period is inherently uncertain, a series of conscious decisions by the artist and other contributing factors outside the artist’s intentions. A marker could be losing ink and create a more textured line than intended, the artist finds them self either annoyed and starting over or pleasantly surprised and continuing. At each moment, an outcome and a reaction, a constant stream of decisions. The more chaos in the process, the less certain the outcome. If you paint in oil, make lots of preliminary sketches and perfect a technique, you may get a painting pretty close to the one imagined before the process began. But even then happy and sad deviations will occur. We don’t have the power to make our thoughts material in an instant with no mechanical intervention.

As someone who has very few concrete ideas of what I want before I start, I don’t aim for an outcome. I am much more interested in the moment by moment reaction to each new iteration. A very fast series of yes(es) and no(s) to the most recent addition. My whole goal is to not know what I will get, to work so fast and with so much randomness that I can’t possibly guess what the result will be. It’s not magic but a very good approximation, I think, and feels exciting.

The process of making a sidewalk face ranges from 5 to 15 minutes, about the time it takes for Decaf’s whimper to start getting annoying. So the evolution of the face is fast. Occasionally, sensing I could do better or needing supplies not locatable in the immediate vicinity, I go back to a spot and do a second version, my way of sketching and perfecting.

Most faces dissipate before I encounter them again. Wind or feet knock all the elements out of alignment and the character devolves back to a gunky stain or evaporates or decomposes or whatever.

But! There is one type of Sidewalk Face that does take time to fully develop, the faces I make in living matter. Aliveness and growth are additional chaos elements. I start the ball rolling and then wait to see the result, natural biological forces take over the creative process. It’s a collab with mother nature. How can it get more fun that that?!

Want to see what happened to him after he fell off? Check it out!