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Tag Archives: Sally Mann

Building a Framework

11 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by judithar321 in aging, books, discipline, inspiration, writing

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

aging, art, dogs, Gail Caldwell, Kirra Jamison, Sally Mann, Swimming

Mission Pool

View out the locker room door, Mission Community Pool, San Francisco.

For the past month or so, I’ve been editing and critiquing a book manuscript for a couple of business consultants. The topic is ‘reinvention,’ as in how we can stay ahead of ongoing change in terms of our jobs and careers. There has been a flurry of articles recently about how technology is replacing human labor and about how the list of today’s top jobs will be transformed over the next decade. For a critique of how this impacts actual human beings, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s New York Times book review.

Reinvention as a more personal matter is also in the wind as my friend and fellow blogger, D.A. Wolfe notes in her Huffington Post piece, “The Age of Regret, The Age of Opportunity,” The theme of transforming regret into something positive is also picked up by writer/photographer, Heather Robinson in her post, “Heat Lightning.”  After recently celebrating my 60th birthday, regret, opportunity, and subsequent reinvention are on my mind as well.

While I have enjoyed the editing project, it has also left me a bit restless and frustrated with myself. After all this time, I still do not approach my own writing with the kind of purpose and drive that is present when I a) have a job that pays or b) have a publication deadline.

I am easily distracted and undisciplined, and all too ready to push my own creative work aside in favor of fulfilling other pressing and not-so-pressing tasks and commitments.

Hmmm, which comes first washing the dishes or doing some writing?

Hmmm, which comes first washing the dishes or doing some writing?

That’s the regret.

The opportunity and reinvention reside in my ability to change that. I need to commit to my writing with as much vigor as I have given my exercise regime. No one makes me go to the pool, yet for the past six years, even while commuting to a full-time job, I have been swimming at the local pool three times a week. This past winter, no matter how cold or snowy, unless the roads were impassable, or the gym was closed, I was in the pool every Monday, Wednesday and Friday between 1:30 and 2:15 pm without fail. It’s an addiction. I don’t feel right if I don’t go. If I pursued writing with the same discipline, it would become another healthy addiction.

A friend told me the other day, that with a few rare exceptions, she doesn’t follow people she doesn’t know on Instagram. As a busy person who spends plenty of time working in front of a computer screen, she has good reason for this. The Internet can be a huge distraction and time waster.

In her New York Times op-ed, “How to Find Your Place in the World After Graduation,”  Pamela Druckerman, advises that the creative process benefits from a little boredom,

You need to be blank, and even a little bit bored, for your brain to feed you ideas. … A lot of life consists in the dead time in between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos.

She is right about needing blank time as well as the pornography and cat videos — to which I can plead “Not Guilty!” with a clear conscience. Yet I do follow a lot of people I haven’t met on Instagram and in other places — Robinson and Wolfe among them. In fact, if I wasn’t such a busybody and cheerleader of other people’s work and ideas, I’d never have any subjects for my “Talking Art” column.

And, I would have missed out on this video, about Kirra Jamison, a Melbourne artist. It has reminded me of something I’ve known for a good long time and have heard from several other creative people, but have not done for myself.

As the video follows Jamison through her morning routine, which involves rising at six a.m., walking her dog in a nearby park, and then riding her bike to a yoga class — all before heading into her studio, she notes,

I’ve learned not to wait for inspiration, but to create a framework for it.

She says her routine grounds her for the rest of the day and gets her in the zone to start working, concluding that,

Having a routine and showing up day after day without fail is the most important thing.

Naturally this looks very appealing when done by an attractive 30-something who lives in a gorgeous live/work space and has no one else to negotiate her time with beyond her dog. But still, every writer and artist I’ve known or read about has this kind of discipline.

My close friend, Martha Nichols, who tops the masthead at Talking Writing, for example, has been an early riser for years, grabbing that quiet time to read and write before the family descends for breakfast. Another friend, the novelist Jane Ward is also an early riser for the same reason.

In her heart-wrenching 2010 memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, former Boston Globe book critic Gail Caldwell describes her typical work day, which back then included a certain amount of desk time before a long afternoon dog walk with her (now deceased) friend and writer, Caroline Knapp. The book, by the way, is a beautiful testimonial to friendship and to dogs. I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about either.

In her new book, Hold Still, photographer Sally Mann describes a typical day in her studio, which has a specific sequence and involves long hours that often extend into the night.

Robinson, whose blog, Lost in Arles, has hundreds of loyal followers and garners a couple dozen comments for each post, recently told me in a comment that she pushes herself to post every Tuesday and Friday. Even if an idea isn’t readily available, that framework helps her make it happen.

In addition to a set routine, all of these people are self-driven and committed to their “own” work in a way that I am not.  Not yet, anyway. The concept of creating a framework for inspiration has captured my attention as something that I really could do. And now that I’ve entered my seventh decade, feels more important than ever.

Without changing my existing routine one iota, the first step is to set a period of time every day —no matter what else is going on — when both my phone and my Web browser are switched off. Step two is making that time my designated “frame” for letting my mind go blank before thinking, reflecting, and writing.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

What about you? How do you get yourself into the right headspace for creative work?

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Where Do Ideas Come From?

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by judithar321 in art, inspiration, writing

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

artists, Chuck Close, creativity, fine art, intention, Kathleen Volp, Manos Studio, pottery, Sally Mann, Sophia Ainslie

My fascination with creativity started at our kitchen table, where I’d sit across from my grandfather, both of us drawing. One day, while I worked with my pencil and crayons, he painted a landscape on the back of an old shirt box. I don’t know what happened to it, but I still have this one that he painted on canvas.

Painting by Jacob Scheinfein

Back then all I cared about was my inability to make “realistic” drawings. Too bad he didn’t tell me (or maybe he did and I don’t remember) that making art is much more about perseverance and hard work than it is about innate talent and inspiration.

As artist Chuck Close says, “ Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Practice may not always make perfect, but it does put you on the road to creation. It helps you figure out what you like to do and helps you develop skills and goals. If my grandfather were alive today, I’d ask him, Why that house, those mountains, that tree? Does the scene on canvas match the one in your head? Was there a message behind it? What were you thinking about when you took out your paints and got to work? What was your intention?

A few weeks ago, this video of designer Karin Eriksson at work in her pottery studio, captured my attention. In it, Eriksson seems both deliberate and intentional as she measures out her lump of clay, places it on her wheel, and goes to work. She knows what form she wants that lump of clay to take and how to get it there.

In this case, I’m guessing, the form is already designed — we don’t see if any “rejects” or “seconds” come out of her kiln — and so this video is about process and control, not about what went on in her head when she made the prototype for these pieces. Perhaps this work was executed exactly as planned, but it also may be the result of trial and error or happy accident.

For photographer Sally Mann, accidents are part of the plan. She captures her images using old cameras, faulty lenses, and prints them using the wet-plate collodion process. The resulting photographs have streaks, dust spots, and other “imperfections.” She likes the element of the unexpected that her process engenders. As she says in this clip, “I feel I’m at the whim of the angel of chance because all these wonderful things happen on the plates.”

Last year, when I interviewed artist Sophia Ainslie, she said that in some of her work, “… accident was an important part of the process.” But even when your goal is specificity and deliberation, you have to work with mistakes, “If the mark happens to be in the wrong place—whatever that may mean—,” Ainslie told me, “then you’ve got to run with it and make it right.”

When putting my own ideas down on paper — as opposed to writing up an interview, for example — I may have a broad sense of what I want to say, a tiny kernel of an idea, or even just a feeling to build on, and the bulk of the piece comes while I’m writing  and rewriting it. As Chuck Close suggests, I often don’t discover where I’m going until I get to work.

Sometimes I’m hit by that hyperbolic “bolt of lightening” that puts me in “the zone,” and the words seem to flow of their own accord. But that rarely happens.

The other morning my friend Kathleen told me that she has so many ideas that she is having a hard time settling on a direction for an upcoming show. Then the next day she reported that she’d just spent a whole day working on a new piece only to be disappointed with the outcome.

I tried to remind her that this always happens when she’s starting a project. And then I joked that as a writer, when I’m not satisfied, I can just hit the “delete” button. She didn’t laugh. For artists, the cost of rebooting is much more than frustration and dejection — the materials they use are expensive.

Here is some of her work-in- progress.

Photo and artwork by Kathleen Volp

In their tiny gem of a book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking David Bayles & Ted Orland caution that, “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”

Frustrating but true for all of us, whether we express ourselves through music, words, or images. As Kathleen says, “It’s all about bringing your own voice to your work. You have to be clear and be true to that voice.”

Doing so is hard work. It is painful, messy, and frustrating. But it is also satisfying, affirming, and just plain wonderful.

So, artists, photographers, writers, musicians and bloggers, 

  • Where do your ideas come from?
  • How much of your creation is about controlling your medium and how much is about overcoming obstacles and setting yourself free?

Discuss!

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