Make Your Art No Matter What – some notes

Notes from Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens.

Artists need

  • To make art
  • To have a community of likeminded artists caring for each other
  • To consume art and information in any form

Time is always a scarce resource. This is at least as true for artists who need to manage their time carefully. Tool: keep a time diary.

How to make time for the right things:

  • Have a sabbat: do nothing productive, including not making art, 1 day a week. Slowing down will reorganize your thinking and priorities.
  • Have a personal maintenance day once a month. During this day, create a list of goals for everything: what to try, where to be, with whom, what is important, etc.
  • Warm-up exercises: a ritual start to get your mind into a productive state
  • Ask help. If someone can help free up hours of your day.

Making 100% of your income from your art will not make you happier.

Create an inventory of your skills, both technical and general. This will help you understand the jobs you are qualified for.

Do not let your employer dominate your life. Employment is a contract. That is all.

Investigate how your peeroes (peer heroes) are making money.

On Looking

In ‘On Looking’ (‘Met andere ogen’ in het Nederlands) by Alexandra Horowitz, I read, paraphrasing: if you look closely, there is always something interesting to see.

As a photographer, I was already convinced of this. You should be able to stand anywhere and take good pictures. This principle is also one of the starting points of my Noord-Holland grid project: every block can bring interesting pictures.

Some photographers suffer from the opposite: looking for the most amazing image; Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. BS. Recognizing a good image is then based on the images in your head. And thus, touching on Horowitz, you look over the other interesting things around you.

A third way of photographing is fantasizing about an image and making it. That is more or less how Jeff Wall works. He drives around the city, recognizes an image, remembers it, and later reconstructs it to make a photograph of it. Or Viviane Sassen, Andreas Gursky, Gregory Crewdson. The freedom of the mind is your only limitation.

Jeff Wall - The Thinker

Today in the mail

An incredible set of presents in the analog mail today.

From left to right:

Punk zines Terror Management and How To Photograph Punk Musicians In 5 Easy STEPS from Terror Management. See also his blog.

The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, by Aperture and see the site of Erik Kessels—super inspiring guy.

Two pictures for the zine MADNES by Bouwe Brouwer in a suspect plastic bag.

The photo book Black Diamonds by Rich-Joseph Facun. Ik did not know him yet, my friend Raymond recommended it to me by my friend. I will report about it later.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, not boring at all!

Evelyn Waugh

I had not read Waugh before, thinking he would be rather boring. I found this book, A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, in the estate of my father, who had better taste. So, I almost had to miss this beauty.

A young upper-class English family with one child leads a tame life. Pampered by butlers, gardeners and other household staff, the days drag by. One hits the booze early and uses lunches and dinners out of doors at clubs where you must be seen.

When his wife Brenda cheats, wanting to divorce him and pick him bald, Tony only seems to wake up. He refuses further cooperation with the divorce and leaves on a voyage of discovery to Central America.

In London, dinner is served at 2100 hours. Tony is in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. At first, he drinks chocolate milk before bed, but slowly, a catastrophe unfolds. The local guides abandon him and Dr. Messinger, his companion on the trip.

Brenda’s affair does not end well either.

een handvol stof

Tony falls ill and hallucinates a stream of trivialities from his former sedate life. While hallucinating, he reaches the city, the trek’s goal through the jungle. But even the city turns out to be a hallucination. He is picked up by a white man left behind in the jungle. This man takes him hostage and wants Tony to keep reading to him forever from the books of Dickens that he cannot read.

In England, Tony’s cousin has inherited his big house Hetton and continues Tony’s sedate life.