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creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public.
Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
Unfortunately, I am a coward. As much as I would like the existential euphoria that comes with it, I don’t really want a near-death experience.
Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these
these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.
“Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist—finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons.
Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you
do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.
If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community.
Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world. As far as I know, no one has ever died from a bad review. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes. (Consider practicing meditation—it works for me.)
thoughtful answers that I then post so anyone can see. You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done.
