essential creativity
This forwarded to me from curator of cool, Jason, at work. Who, interestingly, has a blog about work. If you’re wondering what the day-to-day looks like in the creative department, that’s as good a view as any.
My favorite quote from the comments on the video reads, “You won the Internet today, my friend.”
Art is so… fancy. Art tries hard to be cool. Art is bedfellows with intellectuals, critics and scholars. Art dresses in clothes that it feels it should be wearing, because that’s what’s in Vogue. Sketching, on the other hand, wears shorts. Sketching drives a ‘67 Ford Bronco and hides a bag of weeks-old Milano cookies in the glove compartment. Sketching is flippant, carefree and Summery.
No one pays much attention to the sketchers. It’s more like a means to an end. In the early days, sketches laid the foundation of bigger works. The da Vinci sketches, for example, aren’t so much art as a peek into the working mind of an artist. An artist meant for bigger things. The sketches, beautiful sure, but not a destination so much as the twiddling, tinkering, pondering train ride to Gettysburg.
The truth is, it’s all in the sketches. Sketches are the ideas. And Baldessari, Burden, Keinholz and Warhol destroyed the notion that art necessitates execution.With that being the case, I can see an argument for redefining the role of sketches. Or at least our perception of it. The materials and techniques need to advance, though. Watercolors, guache and other lame sounding materials need to give way to more innovative techniques. This site might be paving that way: http://www.urbansketchers.com/ These guys have got the goods, and they seem organized. Pass the cookies, fellas.
You know how the intro shot of any movie in New York starts with a helicopter’s view from above the city? I love that. It feels grand. Now you can start off your own day with the same kind of drama. Just set your laptop to this site: http://www.pixelcase.com.au/vr/2009/newyork/ and then when you wake up, turn over and take a look. You’ll feel like you’re starring in your very own movie. Which of course you are. Make sure to go into full screen mode (lower right) and click on the various “tours” (lower left). Then just let ‘er fly.
History has proven that rollerblading was an embarrassment to all that is street culture. Hell, it’s an embarrassment to the street itself. This new deck design from cool designer Rinzen for even cooler Paris hot shop Colette gets all up in its face. It’s a bit like an older brother picking on his little sister, but you know, she kinda had it coming on this one.
Our schools teach us to think in compartments: one class for biology, a different one for economics. We define ourselves in singular ways: our jobs, our religion, our dream. And the instructions say that to succeed, we must focus: read without interruption, study without a break, get through school without a year off. And at our jobs, our success is very often measured in how well we accomplish tasks of uninterruptedness: continuous hours of work, attendance in meetings, contribution to conversations, rapid response to dialogue. In that environment, distraction is the enemy. Distraction pulls us away from our goals, or the goals we are trained to reach for.
Yet, creativity offers a different take on distraction. I think of creativity as “odd bedfellows.” The joining together of two things that normally wouldn’t hold hands. Abbot and Costello, art director and copywriter, waterlillies and paint daubs. The perception is that artists see the world “differently,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think they just piece together different parts of it to make something new. But whatever your definition of creativity is, somewhere in it is the harnessing of distraction or, at the very least, a patient acceptance of it. That is the part that is so hard for everyone not involved in the process to understand. A creative assignment, be it fine art or commercial art, in total may be, say, 100 hours. But it is not a linear 100 hours or, more simply put, not all 100 of those hours can be spent just thinking about the assignment. Why? Because that’s just one bedfellow. And a creative notion needs the other. Finding it is what happens when you’re distracted.
Continue reading ‘Creative people must embrace… something… what was the question?’
Video game covers and trailers, to date, have taken on the same rule of thumb as comic book covers; gorgeously painted works of art on the outside but inside the numerous panels are too time-intensive to render in that kind of quality. Likewise, video games often look good in a trailer, filled with well-rendered cut scenes that don’t get lived up to in actual game play. That’s all changed.
Attending the press event for Playstation and then walking through E3 today, I was floored by the insanely good artwork all over the place – from posters, to trailers, to booth decorations to, yes, game footage. The frame rates, chip capabilities and disc sizes have all grown up before our very eyes, to a point where anything seems possible. That has actually been true for a while, but until this year, not many game developers were truly taking advantage of every piece of available space to them. They are now. And from an art direction standpoint, many games rival many movies. But more importantly, unlike movies, the gaming industry takes it on as a personal challenge to out-do itself every year with more stunning visuals and more engaging experiences.
Continue reading ‘Video games are gorgeous. The best part of E3 was the art itself.’
A few years back, The New York Sun ran an article about a (then) new art magazine, called Paper Monument. I have read and reread this article probably once a month since then. For one thing, it is exquisitely written and of course about my favorite topic of art, creativity and the importance of art and creativity. There is a lot of self-reflection involved in the launch of a new art magazine, that dares to print on paper, in the first place. But it begs questions about the role of art and how, in this crazy world, to reflect upon it. But it is a lesson for everyone, everywhere. I have used it, in speeches, as an example of how to think about new technologies, as well. Most importantly, this line “But nowadays, just standing still, and seeing, and thinking, is a revolutionary gesture.” I truly believe that is true. And it is a powerful notion. Following is the excerpt I try to remind myself of as often as possible, but the whole article is very interesting:
Danger Mouse is the guy who did that mash-up album of The Beatles’ White album and Jay-Z’s Black album. He’s back with another album ensnarled in controversy, called “Dark Night of the Soul.” But you knew all that. The album is a who’s who of musical and cultural importance; from The Shins’ James Mercer to The Strokes to Sparklehorse to Iggy Pop to. What was strange was that David Lynch’s name was also attached to it. That didn’t ever seem to make sense. Well, now, because of some potential lawsuit, the album has been released but with, get this, no music. That’s right, it comes with a blank CD. One guess what you’re supposed to do with that thing as, oops, the songs have somehow all turned up online. The thing you might not know is that there’s a show opening tomorrow night (May 30th) of David Lynch’s photographs that appear in the music-less album’s attached book. The show is at the Kohn Gallery on Beverly and is also called “Dark Night of the Soul.” And the music playing in the background will be, you guessed it, the unreleased music of Danger Mouse and crew.
The chaos of it all got me thinking about David Lynch movies, shows, photos and weather reports. It’s all stream of conscious. It doesn’t move in a linear fashion, or even in a temporally correct kind of way. Instead it meanders in and out of environments and realities, the only thing you have left to hold onto are themes, which you eventually come to realize, are the most important thing anyway. It seemed weird for him to be involved in a music project from the beginning, but now that it’s all so confusing, it’s actually starting to make sense.
Here’s where you can listen to the album
Yes, a year ago. I can’t remember to eat dinner most nights, but this random moment somehow sticks in my brain like a thumbtack. I was reading an article about a crazy Frenchman, named Michel Fournier, who was planning on taking a balloon 25 miles up into space so that he could jump out and set some kind of record. It was an interesting article, but the user comments were twice as entertaining. For fun, I did a search to see if I could find one of them that I remembered. Yup, the digital library of everything ever uttered still works. I don’t know why, but it still makes me chuckle.
The article was called, “Frenchman Plummeting 25 Miles From the Sky Will Break Sound Barrier, World Records.” Published in Gizmodo
This guy’s user comment was:
Based on the information above, here are 10 headlines to accompany his potential death.
10. World record set for longest suicide.
9. Man locks self in capsule, floats into outer space.
8. Man in fire retardant suit catches fire.
7. Unidentified aircraft shot down by military. People continue to live.
6. Sky diver hit by jumbo jet.
5. Parachute proves useless for man rocketing to ground.
4. Death drop, 15 minutes without parachute.
3. Man dies of shitting, heart attack.
2. Man jumps from space, lands on flagpole.
1. Man survives jump, eaten by bear.
People are funny.
You’re wondering what happened to him, aren’t you? Well, as it turns out, he never got off the ground. It would seem that improper attaching of the balloon part of his contraption caused it to float away while he was filling it. Why do the French make fun of us, again?
As you may have noticed, my RAM (Random Artist of the Month) is actually more like RAW. That’s what makes it random!
There’s so much to like about Robert Longo, for me. He studied sculpture, but preferred drawing. He was/is heavily influenced by all forms of popular culture and mass media. But he did something that no artist did for me – he bridged a gap between drawing and fine art in a way I hadn’t seen before. All the drawings I had studied and admired in art school, and before, were more like sketches. Rarely would you see a drawing for drawing’s sake and if you did, it was usually of the Picasso variety, which felt like the pen was held with two fingers near the top. Longo’s “Men in Cities” series, which depicted business men (and women, actually) against a white seamless background, were rendered to perfection. The images were stark and gorgeously applied with thick lines and layers of shading. It’s said that graphite is his clay.
The writhing poses of his figures in that series added to the effectiveness of the image and the white seamless background which served to single out the image in some kind of hero-ized fashion was, potentially, ground zero for all the ads we see today on white backgrounds. It is not as though he invented the white backdrop, but for many, it was the effectiveness of that series that burned that graphic style into our brains.
I followed Longo through his career for a long time, buying his books and prints and even spending time emulating his drawing style. He has other great pieces of work, most notably his “Black Flags” series, but also continues to do extraordinary charcoal drawings that blow your mind and challenge your brain. He has an incredible eye for iconic imagery and depicts them in such a way that you are forced to evaluate your belief system and understanding of it. From Longo’s drawings, one can learn about photography, sculpture, fine art and graphic art. But one can also learn about the world, media and the place of the observer.
You see remnants of his work and style all over the place. Take this Portland artist, Zach Johnsen. His drawings/illustrations are also top notch, and he’s certainly got his own thing going on, but there is a lotta Longo in there. And that ain’t a bad thing.
