Category Archives: Business

More Myths about Inspiration & Creativity

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Don’t accept a falsehood for your reality–if you have to create your own, then do it!

Back on that old topic of whimpering: of all the [wonderfully dire and woefully valid] reasons I can’t possibly do the enormous amount of work required by this assignment, there’s none simpler or more honest than Number 11:

11         BUT I DON’T WANT  TO _______________ (you fill in the blank)!

            Boo Hoo.  It’s not always optional, is it. Just keep firmly in mind that sometimes doing the required thing leads to unexpected delights in the end product. Not to mention the thoroughly predictable delight of having it done, finished, off the To Do list and out of nagging territory. Just get it out of the way now and you’ll be ever so relieved. Maybe even pleased with yourself!

12        ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE ARE (take your pick):

Eccentric; loose; savants; savages; radical; anti-intellectual; uncontrollable; fluff-headed; egocentric; snobbish; smelly…

Everybody is one or more of the above at some point; look at all of our pop-culture idols who get hung out to dry on a daily basis, not to mention all of the religious, educational and political Saints who irk the multitudes so regularly.  So imperfection is hardly a reasonable excuse for avoiding being (or being in the company of) an art maker.

13        IT’S SELFISH &/OR IRRESPONSIBLE TO BE AN ARTIST.

How about how selfish and irresponsible it is to be good at something that enriches lives and shapes culture and to refuse to exercise, to share, those gifts.  How unkind it is to stifle your true self and passions (and spend your life unfulfilled or with a chip on your shoulder) so that you live a half life and cheat your friends and loved ones out of your rich complexity.  How about that for selfish and irresponsible, huh? Choosing a ‘safe’ path never guaranteed anyone’s actually being safe, anyway.

14        NOBODY (read: Not Everybody in the Universe) WILL LIKE IT.

If you find anything that everybody likes, let me know.  For that matter, if you find anything NOBODY likes, I’ll be mighty surprised.  So, isn’t it good enough for you if you think your work has some value?  It may not make you a market mogul, but it’s amazingly fulfilling to be an artist, and (other than food, which is admittedly desirable) practically no other wealth compares.

15        THE GREATEST!!!

Who says?  There is no single Greatest of anything that everyone will agree on yet, and the odds are pretty good that they won’t all agree anything you do is the Greatest—or worst—ever, so why lose sleep over an untried concept.  Do your best and be done with it.

16        IF YOU CAN’T SAY (do) ANYTHING NICE (or well), DON’T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL.

A half-baked effort is usually better than no effort at all; no effort guarantees a lack of (or negative) result, and misguided or incomplete efforts can occasionally be rescued or luck into a better-than-deserved result.

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Think beautiful thoughts!

17        IT ISN’T AS GOOD AS _________________’S.

Probably nothing anybody else ever does will be as good as my work, but aside from that impossibly high standard, you have as good a chance as any of doing work better than somebody’s, at least occasionally, as long as you do work.

18        ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT.

But they don’t come to all of the specific people who desire them, or ‘on time,’ or in the desired form.  Your dream might end up in someone else’s stash of prizes if you don’t put up a fight for it.

19        I CAN’T DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE.

No, but a computer can do it for you, or you can use a straightedge, or you can hire a stand-in to draw your straight lines.  Don’t tell me your whole oeuvre as an artist/designer is going to be straight lines.  Sheesh.

20        CREATIVITY = INTUITION.

Intuition is an indefinable sense or sensation that can bring soul and emotional depth to the work (both process and product), but true creativity takes that nebulous touchy-feely power and combines it with study, effort, logic, research, skill and courage and synthesizes all of the elements of an artist’s knowledge and experience and passions into a concrete Work of Art (process and/or product).

21        THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TIME.

True.  We’ll never be given enough time for everything that’s important.  So it’s up to us to TAKE the time.  And MAKE the time.  There’s no real alternative.  It’s called Making Choices (and living with them).

22        YOU CAN’T FAKE INSPIRATION.

Maybe you can’t, but I can.  Seriously, folks, most people won’t know the difference if you substitute delirious hard work and enthusiasm and use all of your know-how to its limits.  If that isn’t quite Inspiration, at least it’s mighty inspirational.  When in doubt, review Item Number 10 in Tuesday’s post (linked above).

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Go ahead: try your wings!

Simplicity Itself

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photoSimplicity, I think, is like most of the virtues and values that we humans might hold dear–those who have it don’t necessarily appreciate it, and those who talk the most about it tend to know the least about it.

The rich and comfortable are so obsessed with the idea or ideal of simplicity nowadays that there are magazines, fashions, classes and whole philosophical movements devoted to its study and cultivation. People will expend massive quantities of energy and spend large quantities of money on trying to simplify their lives and themselves, when very likely simply giving up the energetic striving and letting go of the amassed money would do the trick in a trice. (Perish the thought!)

The poor and underprivileged have ultimate simplicity forced upon them, and tend to choose whether to embrace the unsullied earthiness and quietly hardworking ways thrust on them by their circumstances or to battle against them. Probably a majority of people, both poor and rich, will always think the grass greener where they are not, and hardly give thought to how hard the next person is trying to get over the fence onto their own enviably other property. Dissatisfaction may be an essential part of humanity’s natural state of being, much as it naturally chafes us to think so.

On the other hand, looking at what dissatisfies us with as unsparingly honest a glare as we can might in fact shed some light on how to find better contentment, not necessarily by having more or less of something (tangible or ephemeral) but by giving it all its appropriate due and then saving our true love for the most meaningful virtues and values of all. At the very least, that narrows down the field for most of us. At its best, it frees us up to say that life is remarkably livable where we exist right here, right now, regardless of the shade or tint of the lawn. The simple presence of any one particular leaf of grass or bud of bloom in the one square foot of soil nearest to hand may be quite enough, at least for one simple day.photo

 

The Vast American Landscape

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digital image from a photographAs November approaches and the always-tedious white noise of political ravings grows ever louder in the US atmosphere, I find myself musing once again that so little is what we think it to be. Clearly, if you read my post the other day, I am seldom content to accept the appearance as the reality, but it is never more significantly the case than around the time of elections. For all that Americans love to crow about being the truest democracy in the world and having the power to determine our own destinies and that of our nation (never mind our meddling globally), what’s most notable around voting time is how little anyone really does his or her research and how thoroughly gullible, petty and narrow-minded most of us are on our best days. It’s really kind of miraculous that, young as America is in the way of being a nation, it still exists as one. We’re all on our own paths, wavelengths, and possibly planets around here.

And those who rise to power in our country are no less prone to manipulating that sort of foolishness than those we claim to abhor elsewhere. We give things whatever ‘spin’ we prefer and, by golly, hordes of similarly spun fellow denizens jump right into the vortex with us, leaving reason and, ultimately, hope far behind. One might think that the current age of electronic wizardry would make us more aware, if not more cautious, of all sorts of trickery and monkey business, but alas, we cling to our ignorance and wilfulness with just as much dimwitted fervor as always. Knowing that the camera sees only what the photographer aimed it at and the recorder hears only what the engineer had it turned on to hear–and that the results of both operations can be almost endlessly manipulated after the fact so as to be something entirely new and different from the initial truth, however truncated that might have been, we still choose to stand with facing our own chosen suns while right behind us, out of frame, utterly different realities are carrying right on with their appointed happenings.

So in honor of this form of deception, whether imposed upon us or self-inflicted, I give you my image of the Grand Canyon. Or, as it was before a little Photoshopping hocus-pocus, a dirt pile under the freeway overpass, whose ‘magnificent agaves’ are small tufts of grass, whose brilliant coloring is all hand-applied, and whose vast open sky is a digital blanket pulled down to cover the abandoned storefronts looming behind the little hillock. What you see is what I get, my friends. Keep it in mind on the way to the voting booth, won’t you?

 

Call Me Thomas–No, *Really*

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graphite drawingIn some areas of experience, I am admittedly as credulous as a baby, but generally I suppose I tend toward the skeptical. If American political, religious and social rhetoric can’t turn anybody into a skeptic I don’t know what can, but I find there’s plenty of fodder for the mill in endless other realms. ‘The Most Delicious Boeuf Bourgignon You’ll Ever Eat!’ Truly? Then why does your [self-] acclaimed dish look so convincingly pre-digested and taste exactly like I would imagine cheap dog food to taste? (Just so you know, the idea that I’ll never want to eat Boeuf Bourgignon again after yours doesn’t count as its being the best I’ll ever eat.) No such thing as Climate Change? Feel free to run around in your skivvies while half of us are bundling up for the lowest temperatures in forty years and then mummify yourself in a zeppelin-sized parka while the rest of us try to keep a modicum of cool somehow–all I can say is, I learned how to read a thermometer when I was smallish, and the patterns on that alone have changed plenty in my brief time stomping around the planet to convince me that the weather’s different from what it once was.

‘Organic’ food? Great! But know thy USDA regulations–and what many needful things they may well lack. ‘Green’ energy from windmills? Well, yeah, I am fully persuaded that the simple movement of our breathable atmosphere is far more reliable and consistent and predictably present for generations than, say, vintage Pleistocene joy-juice (a.k.a. stinky petroleum-based fuels)–as long as we also keep in mind that there are offsets: the parts for contemporary wind farms are produced and serviced in very few locales yet and are often therefore shipped across the continent by truck–teams of semi tractor-trailer drivers plus guide cars are required for shipping a single giant blade of one of those behemoths several days cross-country–both to their workplaces and to be repaired. Yet I wouldn’t say wind power isn’t one of our better currently available alternatives. I just think the inquiry must be made, and honesty and transparency are useful all along the way.

Question authority? How about questioning everything and assuming nothing!

All the same, none of us is equipped to investigate every single experience, idea or item that comes our way so thoroughly as to fool ourselves we’re magically well-informed. We must assume, trust, take chances and hope or we will surely stultify and die. Not to mention that it’s very easy, especially for those who, like me, have any tendencies toward insularity, NIMBY attitudes, fear of change, anxiety disorders, allergies or eccentricities that don’t fit nicely with the communal norms to simply hole up and hide from unpleasant and unpredictable reality. And when you boil everything down, I find I’m not actually the least bit attracted to being a conspiracy theorist, aggressive activist for or against anything, or to adopting the kind of narrow, mean-spirited and curmudgeonly attitude that I find repellent in other people.

So I may pry a little bit at the lid of the shipping crate to see what’s really inside it or nag you a little to justify your claims that you’ve invented the world’s most astonishing miracle product, but beyond that, I’m content to believe that the universe is generally fairly benign and most of the people in it rather pleasant and honest, after all. Clearly, you needn’t take offense at my insistence on your being straightforward with me and my preferring to be forthright with you, although I still believe in the value of a certain few little white lies, so you’ll never know absolutely whether I do or do not think those summer pants of yours make your backside look like the White Cliffs of Dover.

Meanwhile, you may call me a bit of a Doubting Thomas, or better yet, just call me Thomas, which was in fact the name my parents had reserved for me in case I turned out to be a boy-child. Because, let’s face it, their previous one-child history of producing girls didn’t prove anything, and their doctor certainly wasn’t able to guarantee my girly-tude in those ancient days, so it was more practical to assume that the little Kathryn Ingrid sprout could possibly show up and be a Thomas Lauren instead, or even have the personality of a Katrina (another option they kept open) rather than a Kathryn, whatever that meant. It’s just best to know that we can’t always guess how things are going to turn out and we don’t always know everything, at least unless we do the homework and get lucky. And if it all catches us by surprise, that might not be an entirely terrible thing, either.graphite drawing

 

Real-Life Mysteries

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While I’m on the subject of mystery stories (see yesterday’s post), there’s a true one that I hadn’t ever heard of until recently that almost defies imagination, even generations later. But that’s what true mystery stories do, isn’t it.

The story of a female immigrant serial killer/mass murderer, born in Norway but made in America, was a hideous and irreconcilable tale of horror and crime in the 19th Century and remains one today. Belle Gunness, who is believed to have killed all of her own children, two husbands and a handful of suitors, not to mention an accomplice or two of her own along the way–possibly executing as many as forty people in her lengthy crime spree–is surprisingly little known nowadays. I fear that this may be because we have so many other hideous and oversized monstrosities and real-life mystery stories handy to horrify and mesmerize us that many likely get pushed out of memory by the current ugly news. Undoubtedly the advent of World War I‘s dreadful specter was a factor in overshadowing a single murderer’s story rather immediately on its discovery.

All the same, once I knew of it, I found the woman a compellingly repellant subject for another mystery story illustration, being a subject worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe style drama or, yes, a true-crime cinematic epic. Though it was one of those news stories that ‘rocked the nation’ when uncovered a hundred years ago, the tale of Belle Gunness is relatively obscure nowadays. There have been a few generally tepid and mostly heavily fictionalized stories, books and movies based on the horrors wrought by this one woman’s apparent sociopathy and the trail of blood left in its wake, but it’s remarkable to me that such a grim, terrible story is scarcely known on a wider scale anymore.

Frightening, dark, and perhaps an indictment of the worst of human nature in general, yes–but I think perhaps part of the reason I find mystery stories so gripping is because I think they remind us–again in that somewhat ‘safe’ and detached format of past-history or fiction–that brilliance and the abyss are constantly in conflict in the human heart and only by understanding this and being willing to examine it in ourselves can we have a chance of rising to beauty and shunning the grotesque urges that we might have–and, if we’re truly fortunate, catching up the would-be wrongdoer in humane and forgiving and healing arms before she can ever fall so far. That’s my hopeful fiction, and I’m sticking to it.

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La Belle Dame sans Merci of the prairies, Belle Gunness. What fearful horrors shaped this woman’s inner darkness?

Today, I present Belle Gunness, a truly fallen woman and black widow whose mystery may never be fully unraveled, for your contemplation. May we never see her like again.

Competitive Edginess

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Who really wins or loses when there’s a competition of sorts in hand? Seems there’s usually ample opportunity for both sides to get the better of each other, and even more so, for both to end up battered and belittled by the ordeal. I’m all for battling against one’s own failings and worst characteristics, but by George, I’d rather not have anyone else taking advantage of my myriad weaknesses. I feel a certain–possibly smug–contentment right here on the sidelines, watching all of the other snarling and smirking dupes work themselves into a froth by attempting to best each other all the time, knowing as I do that as long as it is a competition, somebody’s bound to come out on the bottom of the stack.

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Join Me for Dinner

The beast that ate the hunting dogs

Was fatter than a hundred hogs

But oddly still was hungry when

The hunters chased him down again

So dinnertime—you’ll be delighted—

Found dogs and masters reunited.

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Whistle a Happy Tune & Sit in the Catbird Seat

About six million starlings

Roosting on the overpass

May pass the evening pleasantly

By dumping on the grass

While singing chirpy little tunes

Of evening’s charming cheer,

But just remember their first task

If you should drive too near.

Their cat companions lie in wait,

Meanwhile, beneath your couch;

When you come home, they like to roam

Right in your path, then crouch,

Paws up, complaining with a scream

If you should chance to trip

Upon their fine reclining place;

They’ll fly right off to rip

That couch to ribbons, smithereens,

On this remote pretext,

And if you scold or turn them cold,

They’ll turn and rip you next.

Penny for My Thoughts

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digital painting of a photoNot to Worry, There’s More in the Bank

Do not despair that I have set low price

Upon my intellect and all its blooms,

Its wild embellishments, creative rooms

Filled full with every possible device

Invention and intelligence can build–

My brilliance shedding dazzling insights far

As light can travel from the largest star–

My memory mansion’s rooms are this far filled,

And yet I charge a pittance, just a cent,

For all the riches I have made to date,

And fling them with abandon, though so great,

Along the curb beneath your pediment.

Why would I cast my wealth thus at your feet?

Like pennies, I am also obsolete.

He Cracked a Wicked Little Smile . . .

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. . . as he was hatching his plots . . .

Quack Quack, Etc.

There’s nothing adverse

That I throw in the sauce

As I start to rehearse

The demise of the Boss

But as I descend

To the end of the day

It’s more tough to pretend

To be lightsome and gay

When I feel in my marrow

The building of rages

Brought on by the narrow-

Ness by which he gauges

My quest for perfection

In service to him

Whose extreme predilection

For being quite grim

As you guess is a needle

To nag and annoy

Like the high nasal wheedle

Of a self-centered boy

Until something explodes

In the back of my brain

At some one of his goads

And I go quite insane

So I must kill him gladly

By end of the day

And go off quacking madly

As I’m carted away

Blogsistentialism

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Sighhhhhhh . . .

I’ve got this little problem, see. It’s about my name. No, I am really pleased with the one I was born with–Mom and Dad did a bang-up job with that, as far as I’m concerned. Parents have it easy with the baby-naming stuff; it’s not their fault if the kid doesn’t match up with the moniker, considering that they had no way of knowing the shrimp beforehand to fuss over pairing name and gnome perfectly.

My problem is with my blog title. I’ve winged it with my online place’s birth-name, a version of my own, since I started the gig a little over a year ago, but in truth, it was pretty much a place-holder since I had no inkling then that I’d not only stick with the process but have people beyond the borders of my immediate family visiting with me here. So the problem is, if there’s nothing in the name of my blog to tell anybody outside of the aforementioned familial borders what the heck this blog contains, or why on earth they would have the remotest reason to bother visiting here. If, indeed, they did.

Now, then, I’m having a good old identity crisis. ‘Cause I don’t know what the heck to tell anybody either. On Tuesdays, yeah, you’ll generally find food-related ramblings when you show up. Other days, though, swerve from one topic to another so loosely and with such unpredictable abandon that I don’t know when I sit down at the keyboard what direction I’m bound to take. New drawing? New photograph? Reminiscences about travel, DIY monkeying, garden plotting, commentary on freeway drivers or a freshly minted and wildly ridiculous poem–I just haven’t figured out any sort of way to describe in a couple of words what’s on the non-Tuesday menu around this blog.

I’m open to suggestions. Thanks to my obsessive dilettantism, my spouse suggests that the family nomenclature for me of Short Attention Span Artist might just do the trick, but as accurate as it is in describing me (and probably what I do, too), it still doesn’t seem to me likely to tell a total stranger what to expect on arrival. Tangential adventures like mine could possibly be described as, uh, Tangential Adventures, but of course that’s pretty cryptic too. Art, Poetry, Photography, Essays, and Ingenious Insights combines the pompous and the dully categorical in a way remarkable only for its long-windedness.

I guess I’ll just keep a-sittin’ here in my little corner twirling my ponytail for a while and see if some astounding inspiration happens to alight upon my bedazzled pate. Ooh, Bedazzled Pate! Nahhhh, sounds like some kind of yummy mousse studded with masses of rhinestones. The truly big question remains. Who am I? Doubt that can be answered in this or any other lifetime. But perhaps I’ll figure out my blog’s identity one of these days, at the least. Feel free to help!

 

Pirates of All Sorts

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graphite drawing + textAlways Someone Else’s Problem

‘Twas the pirate Rumbustious Rudy

Who felt it his life’s work and duty

To divest someone’s self of his piffling pelf

And retain the remainder as booty.graphite drawing + text