Creative Artist is a redundancy

kw: quotes, creativity, artists

Sometime in the mid-Twentieth Century, composer Dmitri Shostakovich said, "A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one." This quote was the cryptogram in yesterday's newspaper, and once I had solved it, I said to myself, "No way!"

I'll first get this out: To do art is to be human. Everyone has artistic creativity, whether in the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, photography, crafts, scrapbooks and collages, architecture or design; performance arts such as singing, dancing, acting, or playing an instrument (or several, even at once!); or language arts such as poetry, essay writing, all kinds of fiction from "mini stories" of 100 words to novels and trilogies, plus script writing for stage or screen. The terms "skill" and "art" have enormous overlap, and may be entirely synonymous.

I suppose Mr. Shostakovich was talking about his own feelings, that after completing each composition, he felt dissatisfied and impelled to immediately begin another. He must have been so seldom happy! Does the impulse to create truly stem from dissatisfaction? I think not. The natural world, including that mass of human artifice we call civilization, is filled with beauty. Of course, not all. A rundown house may have some majesty left in its structure, but is mainly an eyesore, so of course the impulse to fix it up does arise from dissatisfaction. And a scene of devastation from a flood or other disaster has lost its beauty, but we can either participate in cleaning up, or protect it while nature restores the landscape in her own way. I think of visiting Mount St. Helens a number of years ago. The result of the 1980 eruption was a moonscape, beautiful only if you prefer your scenery lifeless. After just a few years, the biosphere was rapidly restoring itself, and now it provides many a pleasant view.

Of course, some places are naturally devoid of life and yet are beautiful. The wallpaper on this computer consists of many pictures taken in national parks. One on the screen right now is a picture of water-and-wind-scupted sandstone ridges and valleys, situated in the "four corners" area in the American Southwest. Peering hard, I notice there are a few bushes clinging to rock faces, but one does not notice them amidst the scene of geological beauty. This is an area in which life is expected to be scarce. But in southern Washington, with its heavy rainfall, one would expect a thriving biosphere cloaking nearly every inch.

When we have a settled workplace, whether office, cubicle, or the cab of a delivery truck, what do we do? Don't we hang or set some things we like here and there, or even clutter it up with trinkets? Show me an office with no hint of decoration, nothing expressing the occupant, and I'll show you someone with way too much self-control, or perhaps a security super-chief who is too paranoid to allow any smidgen of personality to be known.

Some people make their living from providing art for others. Are they driven to create work after work by dissatisfaction? Each work may be perfect. But there are so many things to express! I had the tremendous pleasure to attend a performance by a talented folk songwriter. She performs others' music on occasion, but she has things to say, and says them well in her songs. I also perform folk music, but seldom perform a song I've written; it wouldn't take long, because I've written only four that I think worthy of public consumption. I get sufficient joy from performing another's work skillfully and with the warmth and affection that an audience will love. So the work of art that I produce isn't the song itself, but the audible package the audience receives. Sometimes I might be dissatisfied with a performance. Thus I continue to practice. But even if it has gone perfectly, that doesn't mean I will do it exactly that way thereafter.

My main area of visual arts is making mobiles. I don't do so frequently; it is time consuming. I typically use found objects. Light ones. Sometimes when I'm done I find the mobile satisfactory, sometimes not. I made one using feathers picked up over many years and kept in the freezer (Always freeze a feather you want to keep, to kill mites and other parasites the bird may have harbored). A feather mobile can be quite beautiful. It also gathers dust quickly and is the very devil to keep clean. So that one is satisfying in one way, but not in another. Only once have I "repeated". Many years ago I made a mobile using pine cones of different sizes, from different kinds of trees. Around 15 years ago I made another one, because the first one had been lost or destroyed; I don't recall which. But I have one photo of the older mobile, so I won't forget it. I gave away the newer one, so perhaps one day I'll make a third.

The reason an artist who is not living of his or her art continues to create is because that is what humans do. We can't stop ourselves, or if we try we go insane.

How to ruin a good speech

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, speeches, art, artists

In May 2012 author Neil Gaiman addressed graduating students. The transcript of his speech is published in a very small book, Make Good Art. The delivery took 19 minutes. The reading would take most of us about 8-10 minutes, but the goofy typography of Chip Kidd's design makes it take about an hour. I guess, to get a book out of it, Mr. Kidd had to mess around with it, stretching less than 2,000 words onto about 65 pages.

Mr. Gaiman's recipe for turning lemons into lemonade is, as the title suggests, "Make good art." Need I say more? I will, anyway. I have long contended that genuinely good art, whether fine art, writing, or performance, ennobles the reader/viewer/audience. If it doesn't, it isn't good art. Contrast the side-splitting but gentle humor of Red Skelton with a comic I saw on a cable TV show once: his entire act consisted of grinning and jumping and saying, over and over, with various inflections, "It's the S**t!!" And no, I don't know how long that act is, because I changed channels after about a minute.

C'mon folks, you know the difference between a true laugh and a snicker. You know the difference between delight and dismay, between an audience in transport and one hoping nobody sees them taking in the show. And those who claim that ugly art is somehow "great" or "beautiful" just enable their own degradation at "artists" who need a really, really serious attitude adjustment.

Now, Mr. Gaiman's books sell very well, so he must write well, and the speech is well written. I like his message, what I can glean from it, anyway. If the dark red/light cyan typography weren't so hard to read—there isn't a single letter in the book in black ink—I might have enjoyed it more, and gotten more out of it.

This post is also backdated to the day I actually read the book. Like my prior post says, it's been hectic.

If it is everywhere, is it art?

kw: book reviews, fiction, art, artists

Rabbit, a former corporate "electroniker" turned street artist, labors to install something on the cornices of hundreds of buildings throughout the city, alone and in secret. Eve, a gold medal winner in biathlon, ponders a job in publicity while searching for her long-lost brother. A group calling themselves Poets seems determined to cover every surface with poster art. A creative, and dangerous, tension emerges between the Poets and other groups of artists who (gasp!) actually hope to profit from their artistic efforts. People in a theater hosting a child talent show are taken hostage by a man with a bomb and other weapons—does he think of his blockbuster bomb as a kind of art? His former "art" was official torture.

These are the major elements in The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor. It is hard to place the genre. I found it in the Mystery section, yet it seems to be Science Fiction. But the only sci-fi element is the invention of a smart phone that is in continual two-way communication with a data warehouse and its smart software which seeks to anticipate your wants and needs: One step toward an Orwellian population-monitoring scenario. And, perhaps, the Blue Light Project itself, intended to give the city an appearance of not being a city any longer.

I thought to trace the threads of narrative, but I don't want to fill this with spoilers. I have come close already. The persistence of quotes from 1984 emphasize the mind control theme, and I see the artists in contention with officialdom for control of the cultural direction. If I'm right, this is the author's main thrust, that Christo-scale artwork is needed to keep a measure of sanity and balance in an America that already appears almost post-Apocalyptic, in the absence of an Apocalypse.

Some art is made to last, and some is as ephemeral as the sugar-work atop a birthday cake. Urban art such as graffiti and posters is going to be tagged over or removed or destroyed in time, which leads to a cadre of collectors who pass by popular venues again and again, photographing whatever is there, whatever is new. The Blue Light Project is of such a scale that one needs to be hovering over the city to see it all, once it is triggered. How long is it supposed to last? Unknown.

The characterization and dialogue keep the story moving along. While there are bits of stream-of-consciousness, the action is paramount. When Rabbit runs through a railway tunnel, you feel it with him. The mob violence that erupts around the hostage venue is told from a few viewpoints, including one onlooker who dies, making it much more visceral than a narrator/god view. I was intrigued by a reporter's dissection of the crowd along the axes of Confrontation-Conciliation and Rationalist-Mystical (I'll have to dig into this bit of sociology). The safest way to solve a hostage crisis, however, is to sidestep all such distinctions in a creative way.

A novel like this sidesteps classification, as mentioned. I wonder if the proponents of any particular genre will take it in. The colophon indexes it with "Hostage negotiations" and "Psychological fiction". That is as good as any. It certainly got my psychology going!

De-ephemeralizing a light show

kw: art, artists, photographs

One nice thing about a book like Ripley's Believe it or Not: Seeing is Believing is that it clues a fellow in to interesting and unusual things. Today I came across their report on sophisticated images made with moving lights, produced by Lichtfaktor, a group of German artists.

They produce images such as this by making a very long exposure while one or several artists, using flashlights, lightbars or other light-emitting equipment, and wearing black or dark clothing, moves through the frame while moving the light sources in some pattern they've pre-designed. It is a kind of performance art captured in a single image.

No matter how they plan, the element of improvisation is huge. When you have both foreground and background lighting going on, as this image has, you also have to be careful that the people in front don't make a "blip" by running in front of the lights behind. Timing and staging make or break such a shot. This is way cooler than a pic of someone writing their name with a sparkler.

A living legend passes on

kw: artists

[Scanned from a local newspaper]

Though I've heard about the Wyeths all my life, I hadn't seen any of their art "in person" until I visited the Brandywine River Museum just a few days ago. This morning, I find that the current patriarch of the dynasty has passed on. Seldom does an artist touch the soul of a nation's people the way Andrew Wyeth did.

Though the news article includes an image of his best-known painting, I've added a photo of it here, taken at MOMA. I'd like to have a high-quality scan or photo of this painting, without the error of lighting that MOMA inflicted on it; the artist had already highlighted Christina in painterly fashion; the focused lamp detracts from the view. Click on this image for a wallpaper-size version.

Mistress of Metamorphosis

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, naturalists, artists

In Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, Kim Todd revives a nearly-forgotten hero of the Renaissance, someone whose amazing work did much to dispel the old notion of spontaneous generation. I obtained this illustration of a butterfly whose larva feeds only on Amaryllis from the Hippeastrum page of a French horticulture website. They obviously have more interest in the flower than the insect, as it isn't mentioned.
But generations of printers have reprinted, revised, edited, and frequently nearly destroyed, the work of Maria Merian, who published six lavishly illustrated books of the natural history of caterpillars in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Three books are based on her work in Surinam in 1699-1701. The earlier three were of European species.

The biography chronicles her life as a gifted artist and printer's daughter, who grew up illustrating flower books and others of a genre we'd call "coffee table" today. But from age 13, when she first watched a moth emerge from its cocoon, her lifelong love was caterpillars, the eggs they hatched from, the pupae they formed—cocooned or not—, the butterflies or moths that they produced, and the plants both larva and adult fed on.

She, more than any other of her generation, patiently gathered the evidence to show that a particular caterpillar always produced a particular adult, even though certain caterpillars have several color phases and certain adult insects have color variations of their own. She struggled with the red-herring depredations of parasitoids that confused the evidence by causing many pupae to emit clouds of flies or wasps rather than the expected insect.

Author Todd traces her life, and the career of her work over the three centuries following her death. Merian was an extraordinary woman in an extraordinary time, a great among greats. Simply being able to work in her chosen field at a time that Galileo was forced to recant that "the Earth moves", and that Newton felt compelled to write more of alchemy and theology then of science, is a marvel in itself. We are all richer for her vision, diligence, and passion.