Clara Lieu's Blog

Moving this Blog to Artprof.org

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In my calendar, I have a bi-weekly task that shows up: “WP blog.” Yet week after week, I would get swamped under other work and I would delete that task. I’ve been doing that for far too long, so I am realizing that it’s time to move this blog to the Art Prof blog.

I started this blog in 2006, that’s 14 years!!  I think I was hanging on because it felt bad to let go of something that has been a record of my artistic development for so long. But with Artprof.org at full speed right now, I’ve had to re-organize, consolidate, and take a closer look at how to make my content production more efficient.

Hope you’ll follow with me over art the Art Prof blog! Thanks for all of the years here on WordPress.

Clara

Unhealthy Withdrawal, or Intensive Focus?

 

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With Art Prof Teaching Artists Deepti Menon and Alex Rowe

Final critiques are done, grades are submitted, my faculty shelf in the office is empty.  Everything is wrapped up and done for this academic year at RISD! This period between the end of the spring semester and RISD Pre-College is always an awkward time for me, and I never know quite what to make of it.

I’m in a place where I have to start anticipating summer session, but it’s also some much needed down time to focus on Artprof.org. My summer schedule is hectic to say the least, and I know that my life pretty much shuts down during summer session. These weeks before summer begins feel really precious to me in terms of getting uninterrupted time to focus on my work.

I teach 5 days a week for RISD Pre-College, which is much more intense than my schedule during the academic year. (this includes a daily 1 hour commute) I can pull it off though, because the program is only 6 weeks long, so it’s a crazy burst of adrenaline, but it’s short and goes by quickly.

I finally dug myself out of my video editing funk, have been very productive over the past few weeks.  Shoots for the coming months have been planned, I’ve got 2 tutorials that I’ve made significant progress on, and I even had the time to dig into some really old video content that has been sitting around for much too long.

Several years ago, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the editing process of our pro development Q&Art videos.  I thought about those videos as being a really long, arduous task, which is probably the reason why I never got around to finishing all of them back then.

So it was surprising that when I came back to edit these videos in recent weeks that not only did I polish them off really quickly, but it felt effortless. A huge reason is because our library of Broll, pop-up images, banners, etc. is about 10x what it used to be.  I loooove it when I get to reap the rewards of content I’ve worked so hard to slowly accumulate over the past few years. I also think I’m now much more ruthless about cutting footage than I used to be. These pro development videos used to be about 7-8 minutes long, and the ones I cut recently are more like 3 or 4 minutes long.

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I love it when a tutorial shoot gives me an excuse to go plant shopping.

Now that I’m not on campus one or two times every week, I’ve been working at home on all of these editing projects and shoots. Although teaching takes time away from my personal projects, I do love teaching, and I enjoy getting out of the house and interacting with other creative people.

With those interactions gone for a little while, I can’t figure out whether I’m withdrawing into a period of intensive focus, or if I’m removing myself from the more social aspects of my life in an unhealthy way.

I never quite know what to do with myself in terms of striking a balance of working intensively and not isolating myself the world during this time period before the summer kicks into high gear. Still haven’t found a way out of this, so maybe the solution is to stop thinking about it, and bury myself in my work. Distraction has it’s positive aspects!

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From our upcoming Imagined Environment tutorial with Cat Huang and Julie Benbassat. 

All the Way

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Although I’m a big planner, every project I work on has its own learning curve, and inevitable changes occur the more I work. I do have plans at some point to do a full out gesture drawing tutorial where I demonstrate how to draw from a live model, cover anatomy, the real deal. However, the logistics of that tutorial idea are complicated, largely because you need a lot of space which we just don’t have right now. Some day!

I do however, get tons of questions about gesture drawing, and I wanted to find a way that I could teach gesture drawing without working with a live figure model. Last December, I had so much fun sketching our friend’s bulldog.  He was incredibly challenging to draw, as he literally could not sit still for even a moment, but I found that to be a really exciting challenge to tackle.

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After that experience, I realized finding someone with a pet like a dog or cat would be the solution for a gesture drawing tutorial.  I liked the accessibility of the subject of a pet; too often people tell me that they have to draw from photos because they don’t have access to a live nude model.  Yes, drawing a dog is not the same as drawing a live nude model, but you can definitely get great drawing practice and learn from it! While the subject may be different, the same fundamentals of drawing can be applied with an animal.

Naturally, I turned immediately to Lauryn Welch, who let’s just say has a mild obsession with her cats Tor and Spicy. Our joke at Artprof.org is that the first thing Lauryn will do when she sees you is stick her phone’s home screen in your face and exclaim “Look at this photo of my cat!”

My initial approach to this cat drawing tutorial was to cover the fundamentals of gesture drawing and to keep the tutorial as simple as possible. The tutorials we have at Artprof.org really range in terms of length, we have tutorials that are as short as 7 minutes, while our oil painting tutorial is almost 2 hours long. I like having that balance so that people who want to more complex techniques can get it, but that there are lower commitment tutorials that are quicker to absorb. Coming off editing the oil painting tutorial a few months back, I was ready to shoot something short and sweet.

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Except that once Lauryn and I started chatting while drawing on site at her house with Tor and Spicy, I realized just how much had to be covered in order to teach gesture drawing without leaving out important points.

After that first shoot, I took home that footage, edited it, and made a list of all the points we covered.  I looked at the list and realized how many concepts were missing. Lauryn came to our studio last weekend where we went through all the missing parts.

On top of that, once we started talking, we slid into other topics such how to learn from looking at gesture drawings from art history, and critiquing each other’s gesture drawings. Which of course resulted in a trip to the library to check out tons of books to find just the right gesture drawings that fit our discussions in addition to several hours of searching for public domain images online.

The process of finding gesture drawings from art history is addictive and fun, nothing more exciting than discovering new drawings! Here’s an ink wash below by Eugène Delacroix that I had never saw before.  In fact, I never looked closely at Delacroix’s drawings before so this was a whole new universe of drawings I had never encountered.

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Gesture drawing by Eugène Delacroix

By the time I had edited the footage from the second shoot with Lauryn, I realized that the footage of us drawing on site from the first shoot felt incomplete.  We were missing some shots from specific points of view that were crucial towards illustrating certain ideas, so of course, we scheduled a third shoot in June!

So much for a “short and sweet” tutorial.  We haven’t even done the third shoot yet and the edited footage is already at 40 minutes. I guess this is what I get for being compulsively thorough in my teaching practice.

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“The Hustle”

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This week I gave a new lecture called “Business Tips for Artists.” I covered logistical topics such as taxes, contracts, commissions, but actually I think the more compelling part of the lecture was where I discussed networking. I think most people understand that networking is necessary to have a career in the arts, but in terms of defining concrete actions to make it happen, most people are at a loss for where to begin.

I thought about how explain networking in a way that would be concrete and easy for people to follow. There a specific directives that I give such as saying “thank you,” following up, and being polite and gracious. You would think those would be a given, but I’ve been in enough situations to understand that actually, saying “thank you” is the exception in most cases. Many people are asked to follow up, but never do, which astounds me when I think about how quickly one could write a simple email reminding someone about your recent interaction.

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Ultimately, the best way for me to illustrate how networking works was to create a visual map of an example that happened to me. This image above explains how I got my first college teaching job.  While the map looks easy and straightforward, it maps out a process that took 3 years to come to full fruition. What started as a conversation with one of my former professors at RISD, when I was in my second year of graduate school eventually led to my first college teaching job and my first bona fide solo exhibition.

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2006 solo exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art

Networking is inherently frustrating because most of the time, you don’t get immediate results, and so many directions you make a lot of effort to pursue often end up as dead ends. That can be really frustrating and many people get discouraged and begin to lose faith in the process. Until it does, and something falls right in your lap. You never know, and those opportunities will never present themselves unless you put yourself out there and follow every bread crumb that comes your way.

Self-Flagellation

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Lately it seems like I can’t seem to cut myself a break in terms my work. I’ve been struggling to find a balance in terms of the live critiques we are doing on YouTube and producing our tutorials.  I was realizing the other day that the gouache tutorial, which was shot last September still isn’t done. (although it’s really close) The last tutorial I released was the oil painting tutorial, and that was back in December. The live critiques are time sensitive because we are interacting with our audience so much, (which is great) but, the consequence is that I haven’t touched any editing on the tutorial in months.

When I look at that the past few months in terms of producing our tutorials, I’m absolutely appalled at myself. I’m furious that I am letting the gouache tutorial sit for so long, and that I’m not distributing my time on various parts of Art Prof in a more even manner.

And yet who is upset about this?  Just me. I have conversations with my students at pretty much every class session in my classes at RISD about the exact same problem.  I’m constantly telling the students to calm down, to cut themselves a break, and to try to embrace the small victories along the way. If only I could take my own advice.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is so common among artists, and I wonder if it’s because there are very, very few concrete milestones that validate our work. (if you win a Guggenheim fellowship, I’m sure that’s good enough reason to give yourself a pat on the back) While I would never want to be a professional athlete, sometimes I’m jealous that success in the field is so well defined; you won the game, or you didn’t. And the fact is, all of us look at our finished pieces and see only what we wish had been done better.

Most of the time I’m immersed in my work enough that this generally isn’t a major problem, but lately it’s been weighing down on me a lot. Time to buckle down and get that gouache tutorial released, perhaps that’s the milestone I’m craving so much right now.

 

Art Career “Hotlines”

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I keep in touch with a lot of my students, and it’s always fun when they get in touch with me and let me know what they’re up to. I’ve been teaching long enough that my former students are at a huge range of stages in their careers; some just graduated, several are in MFA programs, and many have been working professionally for many years now.

That also means that I tend to get many panicked phone calls from former students when they are having a crisis about their career path. A lot of students think they are the only ones struggling, and some confess that they feel embarrassed that their careers aren’t further along.  It’s easy to look at your peers on social media and assume they are living these amazing art careers.  I know from talking to so many students though that that is rarely the case, and that actually, most artists struggle with similar issues.

A former student called me last week, they had been out of art school for a few years and felt that they were at an impasse. At one point, they told me about a student who was in their class at art school whose career was taking off like a rocket. As if they weren’t struggling enough with their career, seeing someone else the same age and with the same art school degree was just adding more salt to the wound.

That’s when I confessed that I had experienced a similar situation:  a peer my age, who had a meteoric rise into the art world when they were really young. I won’t get into any details since you’ll probably be able to figure out who it is if I do, but let’s just say that my peer’s career got a boost that will never be in the cards for me. I’ll admit that when I think about this peer, it still makes me seethe with jealousy, but you have to learn to cope with it or you’ll drive yourself nuts.

One of my best coping mechanisms is figure out who my “hotlines” are. I have a “hotline” for every part of my life. I have a friend who is my “hotline” for parenting concerns, and several “hotlines” for my artistic concerns. I explained to the former student that there is no shame in asking for help, and that you cannot build an art career by yourself.  You need that support system to put things in perspective so you don’t end up self flagellating all the time.

To be clear, a “hotline” has to be someone who is much older than you. Yes, it’s great to have peers who you can talk to about your artistic practice, but it’s not the same as talking to someone who has 20 years more experience than you! That experience they have will give you the reassurance that no, you’re not crazy to feel the way you do, and that yes, there are solutions to what you’re worried about.

So if you’re struggling, find out who your art “hotline” is, and remember, it takes a village!

Stability, or a Lack of Progress?

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For the past two months, things have been really quiet for me.  Quiet enough that I’ve  been able to turn off the email notifications on my phone and it hasn’t affected my ability to reply to important emails in a prompt manner. (part of that initiative is to free up more continuous blocks of time where I have fewer interruptions)

I can’t figure out whether I should see this lull in my work as a positive or negative signal. On one hand, part of me finds the lull unnerving, and worries that it represents a lack of progress on my part. There hasn’t been any concrete progress several areas I’ve been targeting for a while, there has been radio silence from several people I’ve been trying to get through to, and no new opportunities have arisen.

On the other hand, my partner Tom reminded me the other day where we were two years ago: we were in the process of preparing to launch the Artprof.org, and there were so many fires that had to be put out nearly every day. At the time I felt like I was barely able to keep my head above the water.

The first year of the site was pretty rocky. We had very little content on Artprof.org,  especially when it came to the video tutorials when we launched the site. Not only did we have to produce lots of content quickly to beef up the site, but we kept troubleshooting different formats and presentations for that content. The changes were ongoing, felt endless, and required many rounds of feedback and testing to figure out.

I have to remind myself that there is a comfort in the stability we’ve achieved. (only took 2 years!) We have enough video tutorials that the diversity of content we’ve always aimed for fairly well represented. There are still many basics missing like watercolor, anatomy, and linear perspective, but we will get there!

Our progress is incremental, but definitely growing everyday, and the numbers are there.  I’ve noticed that we are getting more and more comments on our YouTube channel, and the number of subscribers we get everyday keeps rising.

I think the problem is that you only tend to hear stories of people who have these meteoric rises, when really, those stories are the rare exceptions.  It’s much, much more common for projects to grow bit by bit.  (I was surprised to hear that it took some time for Kickstarter to get going)

Trouble is, those stories don’t tend to get as much visibility since let’s face it, it’s just a lot less romantic to hear about a long hard slog. Hearing about the people who rocket into success practically overnight is just more exciting and impressive.

Artprof.org is a free website for learning visual arts which features video tutorials, art critiques, and more.

“Drawing” with My Eyes

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I was pretty horrified when my phone reported to me that I had been spending about 4-5 hours on my phone daily.  Now I’m on a social media diet.  I removed a bunch of apps from my phone and have these specific rules for when I’m allowed to check stuff: Facebook once in the morning on my laptop, Instagram once in the morning.  I think the one rule that is saving me is that when I’m exercising on the treadmill, (which I do daily) I let myself shamelessly look at anything on my phone. (Hello Michael Fassbender!)

I’ve been noticing lately that 9 times out of 10, when I check my phone, nothing happens that can’t wait for later. If something truly is important, it will come in a phone call. Remember the olden days when you could just pick up the phone and call someone without any warning? Nowadays, I get so few phone calls out of the blue that when I do, my heart skips a beat and wonders who died.

Still, this social media diet has been a rocky one, and I still get moments where I want to pick up my phone. I tried carrying around a pocket sketchbook, telling myself that every time I felt the urge to check my phone without a legitimate reason, I would draw something instead. That strategy was a total bust.

New strategy: when I think about checking my phone,  I stop myself and look carefully at what’s around me, and try to find something special that I would normally walk by. Like the leaf on the concrete that had a luscious soft shadow. The half folded bandaid on my bedroom rug. Two tiny shreds of spinach next to a “tower”of eggs.

I always tell my students that the process of drawing begins with seeing. If you don’t take the initiative to see something, you won’t draw it. I notice things that I wouldn’t ordinarily notice when I draw. Although I’m not picking up a sketchbook to draw when I want to check my phone, I’m taking a moment to stop and see.  To me, that in itself is a form of drawing.

Self-Care

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Since the beginning of the year, I’ve drastically changed my work schedule. Most of the reason is because I put myself on a very focused exercise and diet regime.  While this new schedule has been effective so far, I am well aware that the diet and exercise has taken up a lot of my mental energy. I feel more alert, energetic, and physically strong, but a major consequence of this is that my productivity has noticeably diminished.

I’ve been a workaholic all my life, and I’m the type of person who thrives on working. I’m most comfortable when I’m working and I look forward to getting so immersed in what I’m doing that eating feels like a disruption. (it says a lot that I love to eat) I’ll admit that most of the time, I prefer to work than to socialize or relax. My husband, who compared to the average worker has a really strong , industrious work ethic told me the other day that he feels like a lazy slug compared to me.

Which is why it’s surprising to me that for the first time that I can remember, I’m actually not bothered by my reduced productivity. I’ve been doing a hard stop on work and looking at my phone after my kids are in bed. Oddly enough, I’m not beating myself up for doing that. I’m watching TV & movies guilt free in the evenings for a change. (it does help that I’ve got a queue of movies I’m working through)

Another part of this shift is that in early January, we switched from doing live streams on our Instagram to doing live critiques on our YouTube channel. Any time we start a new initiative at Artprof.org, getting things jump started is a lot of time consuming trouble shooting on my part to figure out how to organize everything. That has eaten up a lot of time, and it’s only just now, almost 2 months later that I finally feel like I’ve figured out an efficient system for organizing the live critiques.

Since the beginning of the new year, I haven’t touched Premiere to edit any of the tutorials that are in my editing queue. (character design, creature design, and intro to gouache) There’s a gigantic backlog of portfolio critiques and Project Ideas that have been sitting around for a few months now.

Normally, I would be angry and frustrated with myself for letting content sit around like that for so long. Which is why I’m somewhat shocked that it’s actually not bothering me. I’ve been asking myself lately, why does it feel like I have to choose between self care and being productive? While self care feels really good, I feel very lopsided right now. Surely there has to be a way to strike a more even balance?

Artprof.org is a free website for learning visual arts which features video tutorials, art critiques, and more.

Learning on The Go

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I’m primarily a fine artist, and the materials that I work in have largely not changed for centuries.  When I look at my husband, who works in design and animation, I see him spending hours pouring over manuals, online tutorials, etc. to figure out the latest updates to software that he already has a lot of expertise in. The process is incredibly time consuming and is ongoing, you can count on Photoshop and Premiere continually evolving in the years to come! Makes me grateful that copper plates for intaglio printmaking are essentially the same materials as when Rembrandt was producing etchings centuries ago.

A few years back I was talking to one of my students at RISD who had just come from a department meeting with faculty and students. In a town hall style, the meeting focused on the department curriculum so that students could address parts of the curriculum that they felt were lacking. One of the primary concerns the students voiced was that they did not feel they were getting enough instruction in several specific software programs, which had them worried that they would enter the professional world unprepared with those skills.

While I agree that there is a basic understanding of the primary software programs that can and should be taught at an art school, I also know that our world is changing fast enough that to a certain degree, there are programs that are fruitless to teach at an art school. Within just a few years, that program can change so dramatically that it’s nearly unrecognizable, or something else will come along that is much better.

My husband and I laugh at the software he was taught in the RISD FAV department in the 1990’s and how totally irrelevant all of that content is today: Amigas he used to work on, the stacks of zip disks he carried around everywhere to store content, and Metacrawler. (a search engine that was around before Google!)

Nowhere has this been more prominent than in my work on Artprof.org. I had to literally learn everything on the go.  I couldn’t even take a tripod apart without knocking something else over at the same time, (ask my husband, who still gets irritated when I touch or hold a tripod the wrong way) and I had never so much as even opened Premiere or Audition.

Although the process was really hard for me, my husband likes to remind me that 20 years ago, the same quality of content that we produce on Artprof.org would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and not been possible with the lean production staff (myself and him) we have.

Video editing and sound design was in such a totally different universe that to be honest, prior to Art Prof, I could never understand why anyone would want to shut themselves in an editing room for hours on end. Now, I look at raw video footage and I practically salivate thinking about the creative possibilities.  I have days where I have to rip myself away from my laptop while editing video.

When we decided to switch over from Instagram live streams to live critique streams on YouTube, I did all of the research to figure out how to make it happen:  I watched video tutorials, read instructions and forums online, Googled tons of phrases, etc. so I could figure out how to use OBS studio in order to custom design a system for our live critiques.

A few days later, there I was, typing up step-by-step instructions for how to set up to do a live critique on YouTube for my staff, tailored in such a way to suit our specific needs. Goes to show that unlike art school which ends after 4 years, learning never stops.

Artprof.org is a free website for learning visual arts which features video tutorials, art critiques, and more.