Etsy For Animals: EFA Artist Interview

Etsy For Animals: EFA Artist Interview

Recommend Improv training

I would like to recommend Improv classes to helping getting past that blockage we are all doing The Artist Way for. Like writing of the morning pages, Improv trains us to get past that filter/censor, past that blockage that we create for ourselves that inhibits our free expression. Instead there is a focus on spontaneity, not worrying about failure yet staying in the same theme. The improv class I am currently taking is great There are other improving training groups around Austin and I have heard good things about several of them. If you need something that is a different approach to get past that censor, I would recommend at least trying an Improv class.

I have been taking a intro class at at Merlin Works. And I am truly enjoying it.

One really nice place to see Improv acting, is at the Hideout Theatre. It's downtown, one block from the Paramont.

Here is a web site for other Improv opportunities around Austin. The Improv Collective

So much easier to talk about why I can't do stuff than actually do it

OK. This is in place of my morning pages, which I confess I haven't been doing.

But it's occurring to me that I find it so much easier to dream about doing creative things, or talk about doing creative things, or talk about why I can't do creative things, or write about what's stopping my doing creative thing, or write about what I need to do or not do in order to do creative things, than it is to actually do creative things.

I know what it's about. I'm scared of failure. I'm scared of making a lot of effort to do something and just find it's crap or mediocre or boring or naive or full of holes or weak or that I'm untalented or have nothing to say. I'm scared of putting lots and lots of effort into doing something and falling flat on my face, or making a complete arse of myself and ending up out of pocket, ripped off, or in some worse place as a consequence.

But that's what risk is all about, isn't it? And is anything significant ever achieved without some element of risk? I think I've been looking for some kind of risk free project, I suppose. And that's about as likely to find as a risk free investment.

I have to have some kind of vision, combined with some kind of commitment.

I have to just get on with doing something, rather than writing stuff like this.

All I'm doing otherwise is going over the same old ground, and getting nowhere.

I know what I have to do.

Creative, PowerPoint, WIT

This is funny. Well, it's funny to me. And really that is all that matters. But it's great if others find it funny too. And for this blog. It is funny and she is creative.

http://officesupplyart.blogspot.com/2008/07/work-is-funny.html

Someone liked my art enough to use in on their blog

Just thought I'd show off...

Someone saw my "blue colander" on Flickr, and used it for their teaching blog, which can be seen here.


Didn't get paid for it, of course, but someone appreciated my art!

Painting Progression

Here is an interesting little "collage" I did using Picasa2.

Picasa2 is a great photo sorter/catalog/album program. And it has some good basic tools for fixing up your images as well. I highly recommend this freebie from Google.

Back to the image, this is shows three stages of a watercolor that I did a number of years ago. From the photo I took of flowers, through the sketch to the final watercolor.



You can click on it to see a larger version

Resistance

It is amazing what you will find to do to avoid working with your artist. I have recorded or sketched several ideas recently with plans to paint them. Have I? No. I have one that I started a couple months ago. Have I finished it? No.

But I am not sitting around collecting navel lint either. There is going to the gym, work around the apt. Art groups, Go Club, Buddhist group, friends, and the Improv class I just started. All really nontrivial stuff. Well maybe not the Go Club. : )

What am I not doing or putting time into is Meditation which is what kept me sane and alive for a couple years. And working on my Art, my visual art. Where/when am I putting the brush to canvas? Or going beyond a simple pencil sketch?

p.s. I did paint a little last weekend with my niece who is finding joy in painting and sketching. She likes to sketch fashion designs. She has already sold her first painting, a self portrait. She's 11.

Artistic integrity

Oh well. I seem to be dominating this blog. What can I do? It's as much anyone else's as mine, and people can post here if they want to, and be more prolific here than me, if they so choose. I can't make people post here in order to make me feel less...vulnerable...or whatever it is I feel.

But anyway...

I've been thinking about artistic integrity, and how I feel I've lost it in past years. As an actor, I'm aware of the fact that we are to some degree whores if we allow ourselves to be so. We're at the mercy of bad writing, bad direction, and all the associated politics that goes with film making or theatre.

Do we choose to be mere props for some writer's whim? Or do we say "no" when the subject matter just offends us? It's hard to turn down work at the end of the day. Work's work, and being in a film, or being on stage is always a temptation if it means being seen and recognised. To some degree I think all actors are narcissistic, and the chance of appearing in a bad film can seem a better choice than being in no film at all.

I want to be able to choose. I want to have the courage to turn down work that goes against my morals and values. I've always held a lot of Hollywood in contempt for its gratuitous violence and misogyny. Why should I leave myself open to being used in a film that offends what I think is basically wrong?

Am I old fashioned in that thinking?

Can I afford to have morals, or are they a luxury for established actors?

I'm thinking that now just might be a time for me to reassert my artistic integrity, and say "no" to parts that I'm just not happy with. If I'm really honest, I wasn't happy from the get-go with the part I was given to play in the film I've been working on in the last couple of months. And perhaps I should have simply turned it down.

Would I have been cursing myself for having not taken it as much as I'm cursing myself for having taken it, I wonder?

Who knows?

I really would like to return to artistic integrity, though.

But somehow I think the world doesn't really want it...

"Brady bunch" video with music

"Brady bunch" video with music
Video sent by synchronicity

Another video, that I did a few years ago. It's an attempt to reflect some of the "Mes" that inhabit the body you see. Angry me, bitter, traumatized me, devious me, manic me, sane and confident me, depressed, sleepy me, glutton me and so on...

Another slant on the "masks" thing I'm on about in a lot of what I do.

Some sharing

Lots of creative block coming up for me at the moment: that's one of the things that happens with Artist's Way, I've found. It isn't easy, if you really plunge yourself into this process.

For me, I'm getting a very strong sense of finding creative blocks and fears, repressed creative impulses and such that go back a very long way for me, and into pre verbal (infantile) places. I'm certain that I'm encountering blocks that I set in place when I was a very small child, and getting beyond them to a place where I can contact my real power is far from an easy or comfortable process.

I've been in touch with an ex girlfriend who's made her first album, and frankly I'm jealous. Yes, I'm absolutely gung ho behind her creativity, but a part of me years to "already be there" and creating something that's as real and dynamic, rich and entertaining, clever and downright brilliant as what she's made for herself.

The inner critic in me has been telling me I'll never be able to make anything as good as she's made. It's been telling me I'll never make this film I've been hankering about throwing my weight behind, and it's been telling me to give up now because I'm just not the kind of guy that has success in what he wants to do - not profound, knock-em-dead success that some people have, anyway.

Again, I've been criticizing myself for not having made a movie when I was in my early twenties, like the guys who have pulled "strings" together (the film I've been working on). I looked at my old school Wikipedia site, and saw someone I used to go to school with - the ONLY person I used to bully, in fact - who's gone on to make some really successful films and videos, working with David Bowie and others.

I know I have to avoid this line of thinking, because it does me no good.

But it's still there. Or it's there at the moment for me, as I try to break through the blocks and channel the really good stuff.

I heard from another girlfriend the other day, too. Her sister was killed in a plane crash on the 4th. Lovely woman. 43 years old, incredibly creative, wonderful singer, really lovely person. Was burned to death in a plane crash. My sister died a few months ago, and again, this sense of the impermanence and fleeting existence we have drives me to want to create something with this precious life of mine, but what?

So this is what I'm sharing.

What the fuck do I do that's creatively wonderful, brilliant, important, moving and profound?

How long does it have to be shit?

End of share...

My Latest Test Glass

Here's a piece of some funky experimental glass I fused a couple weeks ago. The side portion needs to be fire polished (or maybe not - I kind of like the mineral-look).

I mixed a bunch of orange, yellow, and brown (70's colors) glass and fused it over a steel sheet with holes. The glass melted into this odd ooze. I love it!

Seeing the picture from inside

A Casper David Friedrich Quote

"Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards. Painters train themselves in inventing or, as they call it, composing. Does not that mean perhaps, in other words that they train themselves in patching and mending? A picture must not be invented but felt. Observe the form exactly, both the smallest and the large and do not separate the small from the large, but rather the trivial from the important."