Tag: art
-
My Idea is not My Identity. And You are Not Your Ideas.
I see this “my idea” problem all the time with creatives, artists, makers, and muse-oriented folk. Artist gets an idea. Artist smeagols idea. Artist hoards idea and pampers idea until idea multiplies like black mold. Artist scares off — or kills off — anyone who comes anywhere near idea. Artist finally releases idea. Idea flops because…
-
From Daydreams to Written Dreams
Chapter five in a series on Book and Art Business 101 wherein I show how the solid logic of art business sold me on self-publishing. If you’re too busy for the whole series, download your copy of my Cheat Sheet for Book and Art Business 101. I have a hard time with conversations. Anyone who has spent any amount of…
-
Art Business Logic Sold Me on Self-Publishing :: Intro and Chapters
or Book and Art Business 101: How the Good Business Sense of Self-Publishing Finally Won Me Over I am not one to easily say I was wrong, but, my friends, I was terribly, horribly wrong. Wrong for the past ten years or more concerning a very important part of the publishing industry and art business.…
-
On Haters
Starting to fully understand the concept of the “hater” in rap music. I thought it was simply one-who-hates, but it’s not. It’s pretty specific. The word has a creative bend — remember, rappers are artists: A hater is someone who will always be against you and the good work you want to do in the…
-
Lone Wolf Artist: On Bad Myths, Guilds, and Societies
Some idiot along the way started lying to us. The lie was this: that genius, that true genial power, can only happen when some dude or dudette cordons themselves off from society to spend the next decade crafting his masterpiece. Lone wolf artists. It has many sources, frankly, but the lion’s share of the burden of the lone wolf artist…
-
Dear Future Lance: The Project is Ash — and that’s what makes it beautiful
The best things I ever accomplish always immediately follow me: getting to my wits end, realizing that I am nothing, I am finite, I will die — meditating even on the circumstances that will attend my death and that I will only die in one of the many billions of ways that exist for man…
-
How Fred Danback Saved 12,000 Lives on September 11th
From Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care :: In the early 1960s, Fred Danback came home from the Korean War to work at Anaconda Wire and Cable, a copper wire factory in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, thirty miles north of Manhattan. It was a booming enterprise. But he soon became troubled by what he saw at the factory. To…
-
The 54 Poems I Wrote at 27 …ish
After much deliberation, I decided to keep the whole tradition of doubling my age and writing that many poems in a year. You’ll notice that April Thirtyish has already passed, so I’m late in posting. I’ve gotten about half of them written and will begin posting this week. I started this whole mess with 46…
-
Don’t Kill Your Darlings. Exile Them.
I don’t believe in writer’s block, but man was I stuck on this novel. I say that in passing, but I’m forgetting that some of you don’t know I finished the third draft my fourth novel (my first publishable novel). See the update bars < if you’re looking at this on a laptop. Mobile will have them below /. So that…
-
The Alex Seton Life Jackets
Empathy. It may well be the driving force behind all art – that we learn by making decisions along with another. This is the crux of story, but it also works in terms of seeing life through the eyes of a sculptor or a painter. The story behind Alex Seton’s Life Jackets :: In May…
-
The Creative Center at University Settlement
Based in Bowery, NY, The Creative Center believes that medicine may heal the body but art heals the soul. They started out with free art classes to ladies with cancer and grew to include artist-in-residence programs in over 20 healthcare centers. The Creative Center also hosts galleries… …that sell the paintings of these cancer and illness…
-
The Makehouse :: Rest for Weary Artists
If you’re creating art of any kind in the New Jersey, Eastern Penn, or New York areas, you might check into a Makehouse residency. The Makehouse brings together a diverse community of artists, fostering an environment of generosity and non-judgement. Emphasis on the word “environment.” They make house like this by hosting retreats out in this Thoreauvian-style…