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Knowing how to speak about your art, your ideas, and your process... it's a core skill. Lasker, despite the passage of time, continues to feel shockingly fresh, clear, and exciting.

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How To Be Creative: How an Artist Turns Pro

I have been turning to Steven Pressfield quite a bit in the past two months to try and conquer severe Resistance and (so-called) “writer’s block.” This video has such a heart-stopping set-up. I saw the first 40 seconds and was gulping for air and breaking out into a sweat.

Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo also has a pretty great segment on “The Myth of Writer’s Block.” I’m going with that for now, as this week’s guiding light. He says:

Please don’t say to anybody “I have no good ideas. Begin by saying “I don’t have enough bad ideas.”

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MARK WHALEN FEATURE - The Creative Lives Season 2

The backstory to a very hot Australian artist, now based in L.A. I can’t stop looking at his work, and just seeing portraits of him in his studio have been a major source of inspiration.

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How to Build a Workbench

Frequently, when I find something that is inspiring, it’s actually such a stretch of the imagination to see myself being able to accomplish similar feats or inhabit similar worlds of excellence, that I simply find myself enjoying a passive feeling of awe, appreciation, and “gosh, gee, wow.” 

I like everything about Cristiana, from where she’s based (Porto, Portugal) to her accent, to her scruffy mohawk to her awesome accent. Her professionalism needs no pointing out, but as a DSLR filmmaker I do wish to note the clarity, elegance, charm and great beauty in the way she makes these videos themselves. She is a rockstar!

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https://hyperallergic.com/356273/beer-with-a-painter-tal-r/

Tal R, once again. This entire interview merits quoting, but I randomly chose one passage to entice you to read the full thing. He’s so hyper aware of the process of making true art. I’m looking forward to following his career for a long time.

“In the process of becoming an artist, there is a child world that needs to be destroyed. It sounds brutal, but there is no direct link between being a child and becoming an artist. Then you rebuild yourself. You find the way to work with necessity again.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I realized that I wanted art to be about necessity. If you know what you want to do, then a lot of mistakes — a lot of spelling mistakes, a lot of dyslexic mistakes — will be okay, because there is necessity. Later, things will correct themselves. If you don’t have necessity, but instead have only strategies, you end up just doing experiments.

I think that is the biggest misunderstanding of the last thirty or forty years of art education, the idea of “just experimenting.” You don’t try just for the sake of trying. There is something you want to say and you can’t. Therefore you try, and you fail. And from failing, you learn.

That is all I tried to teach my students. I said to them, “You should invest in failing. Invest in losing. Get comfortable with that. Don’t ask why something meant something to you, but try to articulate it. Slowly you will find your way. There will be things that you hate in your painting which will suddenly become your option and your possibility.”

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Tal R Interview: Painting is like Free Falling

I’ve recently discovered Tal R, and find his work some of the best being done today. It is certainly reminiscent of Matisse, but not to the point of being derivative. I love how easy he makes it all look. And he turns out to also have a fantastic repertoire of thoughts on the process of picture making. Below are some excerpts from this video.

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First of all, the worst thing you can do - unless you’re Buddha or Jesus, which few of us are - is to stand in front of a blank canvas and just feel and do. If you do that, the result will be very predictable - because you will tap into what comes naturally to you. You must have something in your pocket, some idea of what you want to do. It’s like going to a silver anniversary. Don’t bring a finished speech. Know what you want to say, but don’t prepare how to say it.

Painting is like free-falling with the idea in your pocket. The painting should unwrap that idea in a way you didn’t see coming. The rush of it is the debate you have with yourself. You unwrap something by posing questions. You don’t have an idea that you want to carry out. I’d never have become an artist then. I love it because it’s the most challenging thing I know. It’s where I utilize most of my skills and take the best plunge.

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When you set out to do a painting by thinking about the colors - then you’ve already gone astray. Much of what you do should be predetermined. 50% should be predetermined. There must be a need for the painting. The painting has certain needs, it wants certain colors and shapes.  …The more requirements a painting has, the harder it is to paint. It’s what breaks young artists every time, all their ideas. The process of painting is confronting all those ideas.

Your idea is to place the objects like this. When you begin, it all comes apart. You have to develop a new language, new shapes and ideas, because your idea is overruled by the things that have to fall into place. They lie behind your idea of how to go about it. But at the end of the day, I don’t care. I just want the painting to work out.

Sometimes you remember things and… It’s like a catchy tune. You look ahead and do a variant. And whenever it turns around and spits you in the face, you’re happy. You want to lose yourself. It’s more fun to create something you hadn’t seen coming, yet you want to stay within the framework. You have an idea of what you want to say, but you don’t know how.

You’ve also gone astray if you crave the struggle. Then you’re an idiot. If you crave the struggle, the struggle becomes your idea, your challenge. This is the right mindset: I need to say something, plunge myself into it. You have to say: I don’t want to struggle; I want to deliver. I want my idea to unfold. But your training, your instrument offers resistance.

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Per Kirkeby Interview: We Build Upon Ruins

Below are two large sections of the interview, passages that delineate very clearly how a painter works, and how you often have to “kill your darlings,” something most creatives understand.

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When you look outside, you never see clearly or innocently. People carry a lot of baggage. Interviewer: But aren’t there more layers? I mean, I look outside - and I see the trees and the light. That’s what I see first. Then I start looking for a kind of system. Those leaves are hanging down because the trunk ends there. But I don’t see that first. What I see first is innocent, in a way. So to what extent or when - is the innocence of the first observation replaced by structure? When I paint and repeat the same things over and over again, I see them quicker in nature. So this profession has a certain loss of innocence, if you will. Interviewer: Do you really need to see any more? Do you have to look at the garden? Yes, absolutely.

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My painting isn’t good until it goes under. I mean that the original intention, the smart and clever - that you always have when you start on a painting… The first evening I think it’s all great, intelligent and clever. The next morning I can see that it’s not enough to make a painting.  Paintings which are done like this and just look pretty - and grippingly colouristic, that’s not enough - if there is no structure within, a solid skeleton. I cannot start by making this structure. The right structure slowly emerges from the picture.

I often start my paintings by wiping my brush on the canvas. This creates a kind of mashed potatoes or swamp. I want to get to the point where I control that. Or put it under some kind of control - which is not rigid, but rather a commitment. I have to commit myself to this potato mash. I do that by keeping on painting. Along the way I alternate - between premeditated interventions, which nearly always go under… So the control, as I called it, emerges from the nature of the painting itself.

I think painters are really good at daring. Risking something which at first glance looks good, also to me. “Now I can put it with the finished paintings.” But it’s always taken up again, and I sacrifice what was good. As a painter you constantly want to overcome your own virtuosity, but at the same time you strive for virtuosity.

Interviewer: And what lies beneath that? A process of recognition? Yes. And that something must have a price. I prove to myself that it has a price. That thing about painting over what looks good at first glance. But one builds on ruins. And something even better is created.

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Mr. Mears stars in this BBC series focusing on the complete menu of survival scenarios (desert, snow mountains, jungle, etc.) and I’ve enjoyed his calm and non-sensational approach to his craft.

This show focuses on one story that is perhaps my all-time favorite, inspirational, harrowing tale of survival: the account of Steven Callahan and his survival in a life raft in the Atlantic Ocean for 76 days, as he drifted from south of the Canaries to the Caribbean.

That book is called “Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea.” I’ve read it three times, and plan to revisit it often.                                    

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042JSNQI/

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Snowboard dude abides.

Best quote: “I’m either traveling, or injured.”

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J73GTfj0x-E)

Goodness, goodness, goodness. This is like a "good life choices” and “10x your positive outcomes” version of Jeremiah Johnson. Hot dag!

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Coming and Going

Strolling around in the snow this past winter in Santa Fe. Mom’s verdict: “That’s just weird!”

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e940maFDeN4)

If you join one of the Wim Hof workshops, you stay in his school in the woods in the countryside of Poland, next to this ski mountain. After 3-5 days of learning the breathing method and rapidly increasing your ability to deal with ice cold water immersion (he has a natural waterfall and pool on his property), the final challenge is climbing this mountain, spending the day wearing shorts and shoes only in arctic temperatures. Bonzai!!!

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Kilimanjaro Expedition 2016 With Iceman Wim Hof

This was the final adventure / moment of truth in Scott Carney’s book “What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength.” It was not without its minor moments of controversy, mind you.

The main takeaway with this one was not cold endurance, but how using Wim’s breathing technique they overcame the most debilitating obstacle of mountain climbing - serious and life-threatening altitude sickness.

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My light table of favorite logo designs from http://designspiration.net (search parameter: “logo”). While not textbook perfect brand marks or logos (sometimes they’re a bit painterly or not ultra-legible), these are simply what floated my boat after staring at thousands of logos for several days.

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10 more logos from http://designspiration.net (search parameter: “logo”).

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNVLjsAvp3E)

Spending months and even years trying to figure out what is the most intelligent approach to get back into web coding (i.e., the best way to tackle a big problem is to just get stuck in long thoughtful observation of the problem - not!), I’ve been rummaging through the “code a website 2016″ “web design conference″ search results on YouTube and have found some fairly insightful presentations. And what a treat that you can sit in on industry conferences from the comfort of your dusty 3rd world hovel!

This guy (Mr. Magdalin) has built the latest WYSIWYG software to create websites and I think he’s managed to finally get an awful lot of things right. The platforms that have come before (I’m talkin’ about you, WordPress) have been infamous for creating totally garbage, bloated code.

And gadzooks, for a first-time presenter, his presentation itself is superb! I love his long view on the history of code geeks, and his quick snapshot review of all the various software interfaces across the creative spectrum (e.g. Photoshop, 3D Modeling, Compositing, etc.) and how to this day, web coders are almost entirely looking at screens like those too-casually-dressed cyber-punk fakers in The Matrix with their backwards scrolling Katakana. ;-) 

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM39qhXle4g)

Regardless of his eventual progress or talent as an artist, this was a really great talk!