Like the kid (and the dad) in the Disneyland ad, I’m “too excited” to sleep. It’s a good feeling. Anticipation is one of the greater pleasures of love, travel, painting. Knowing that something exciting is going to happen, and more or less how, gives vitality. You set yourself up for it.
We all know the feeling when looking at a work-in-progress or even a blank canvas. You have an idea how the forms and spaces will evolve, how a look or a feel will be.
A subscriber who signed off as “Over The Hill Portrait Artist” wrote, “You must be one of those Millennials, they don’t think like we mature artists.”
Thanks, O.T.H.P.A. Millennials are the generation born between 1980 and 2000. While this rules me out, 80 million are in America alone — the largest age group in history — and many are artists. In a recent article for Time magazine, Joel Stein describes a calm-looking anxious person checking a smart phone hourly and sending and receiving about 80 texts per day. This is apparently a kind of stress-reducing tick caused by
My late friend Bert Oudendag used to open his oil tubes from their back-ends, squeeze the contents onto a steel tabouret and carefully fold in 50% by volume of stand oil, a small amount of copal varnish and a drop of cobalt dryer. He then put the mixture back into its tube and put the remainder in a glass jar. All this was in aid of an extended and more fluid brush stroke that gave his work a kind of Franz Hals character. He was particular about his stroke.
Until recently, a retired beekeeper named Burt Shavitz was living in a 400-square-foot converted turkey coop in Parkman, Maine. He had a refrigerator, a radio, cold running water, a wood stove, and the wag of his Golden Retriever’s tail. He called his home “Camp,” having built onto it 40 years earlier with scrap lumber and windows he’d found at the dump. When asked once if he needed the Internet, he replied, “Like a hole in the head.”
Louise and I left Glasgow after packing her digital piano, the Rhodes, the amp, the cables and the mixing deck into the back of her Vauxhall Corsa. We curled the off-ramp and headed north, the moorlands expanding around us in mounds of soft jade and broom. As time passed, our words awoke like an old engine — at first in little tumbles, then chugging with a warm hum. By late afternoon we’d crested the northwestern tip of Skye and arrived at a crofter’s house, now called Red Roof — a miniscule, chapel-like café with a pitched ceiling, a weaver’s guild, pottery studios, orbited by a flock of sheep. Artists’ spaces and holiday rentals sit hungry for future poets. I got out of the car and stood in the thousand-year-old wind.
Do you ever wander back to that time when you first started thinking about making art? Do you ever think of the vision you first had — how your art would be made, its themes, its look? How simple it all was then. For some of us we thought it was just a matter of learning the skills and enacting our vision.
Then, with a little seasoning under our belts, we modified, changed, expanded, contracted — we grew. Or perhaps we regressed.
I’m laptopping you from an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic, where I’ve been reading 29-year-old filmmaker Lena Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl. Risking an evening of unsavoury navel gazing or too much of the wrong information, I find the book has instead revealed the tale of a human being unloading a poker-faced truth. “She simply tells her story as if it might be interesting,” wrote artist Miranda July of Lena’s work. I thought of painting.
Recently I wrote a letter about the similarity of running a business and being an artist. As usual a whole bunch of artists agreed with me, and a whole bunch of others told me I’d been drinking my turps. Then yesterday I picked up a reading sample–that’s book-talk for a preview of an upcoming book. The Starbucks Experience, Five Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary by psychologist Joseph Michelli will be out next month.
Michelli was granted unlimited access to the inside workings of Starbucks. In case you didn’t know, Starbucks is the biggest chain of coffee shops in the world. There are now more than 11,000 outlets in 37 countries–five new ones start pouring coffee every day.
Sharon Rusch Shaver, is a professional artist living and working in the state of Tennessee…
I’ve been asked, “How should I structure my time in order to build momentum and keep it going?” She has in mind concentrating for the summer. The fact that she mentioned structure and momentum indicates she understands the main problems. Here’s what I suggested:
Make plans to cut back on socializing, restaurants, Ultimate Frisbee and visiting relatives. Think of your project as an internal adventure but make sure your library card is up to date. Get lots of art materials in advance, particularly supports. You may plan on a format or a set, but be prepared to change your mind and to go out and get something different.