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Kindle Notes & Highlights
No two gusts of wind feel quite the same.
It’s helpful to view currents in the culture without feeling obligated to follow the direction of their flow. Instead, notice them in the same connected, detached way you might notice a warm wind. Let yourself move within it, yet not be of it.
It’s worth remembering that we are blessed to get to create. It’s a privilege.
Distraction is not procrastination. Procrastination consistently undermines our ability to make things. Distraction is a strategy in service of the work.
The purpose of the work is to awaken something in you first, and then allow something to be awakened in others. And it’s fine if they’re not the same thing. We can only hope that the magnitude of the charge we experience reverberates as powerfully for others as it does for us.
Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to.
Formulating an opinion is not listening. Neither is preparing a response, or defending our position or attacking another’s. To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all.
Patience is developed much like awareness. Through an acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality. The desire for something to be different from what we are experiencing in the here and now. A wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes then open them and find yourself in another place.
If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress. Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.
If you’re holding a center puzzle piece in your hand and staring at an empty tabletop, it’s difficult to determine where to place it. If all of the puzzle is complete except for that one piece, then you know exactly where it goes. The same is generally true of art. The more of the work you can see, the easier it becomes to gracefully place the final details clearly where they belong.
If we write an essay and give it to a friend, before even hearing their perspective, our relationship to the work changes. Give it to a mentor and our perspective shifts in a different way. We interrogate ourselves when we offer our work up to others. We ask the questions we didn’t ask ourselves when we were making it. Sharing it in this limited capacity brings our underlying doubts to light.
If someone chooses to share feedback, listen to understand the person, not the work. People will tell you more about themselves than about the art when giving feedback. We each see a unique world.
HIS WRITING IS THIS FIRE??
If you think, “I don’t like it but someone else will,” you are not making art for yourself. You’ve found yourself in the business of commerce, which is fine; it just may not be art.
Be aware of strong responses. If you’re immediately turned off by an experience, it’s worth examining why. Powerful reactions often indicate deeper wells of meaning. And perhaps by exploring them, you’ll be led to the next step on your creative path.
Art is about the maker. Its aim: to be an expression of who we are. This makes competition absurd. Every artist’s playing field is specific to them. You are creating the work that best represents you. Another artist is making the work that best represents them. The two cannot be measured against one another. Art relates to the artist making it, and the unique contribution they are bringing to the culture.
You may sometimes wonder: Why am I doing this? What’s it all for? Questions such as these come early and often for some. Others seem to go their whole lives without ever troubling themselves with these thoughts. Maybe they know that the maker and the explainer are always two different people, even when they’re the same person.
Deciding what to say in advance doesn’t allow whatever’s best to come. Meaning is assigned once an inspired idea is followed through.
The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be.
As Arn Anderson once noted: “I’m both a professor and student, because if you’re no longer a student, you don’t have the right to call yourself a professor.”
At the same time, there’s no need to fear learning too much theory. It won’t undermine the pure expression of your voice. If you don’t let it. Having the knowledge won’t hurt the work. How you use the knowledge may. You have new tools. You don’t have to use them.
One of the skills an artist develops is the ability to recognize when either they or the work have nothing left to give each other.
Seriousness saddles the work with a burden. It misses the playful side of being human. The chaotic exuberance of being present in the world. The lightness of pure enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake.
Think back to when you were a hopeful beginner, when the tools of your craft were exotic and new. Remember the fascination of learning, the joys of your first steps forward.
If you’re looking for the work to support you, you may be asking too much of it. We create in service to art, not for what we can get from art.
Sometimes the most valuable touch a collaborator can have is no touch at all.
If one collaborator likes Choice A and another prefers Choice B, then the solution is not to choose A or B. It’s to keep working until a Choice C is developed that both artists feel is superior.
Healthy tension in a collaboration is not uncommon. Friction allows the fire to come.
When a work presents itself as sincere, it can be seen as saccharine. Sweetness made small. A hollow rhyme in a greeting card.
We like to think of ourselves as consistent, rational beings, possessing certain attributes and not others. Yet a person who is completely consistent, who possesses no contradictions, comes across as less real. Wooden. Plastic.
Avoid confusing the editor’s cold detachment with the inner critic. The critic doubts the work, undermines it, zooms in and picks it apart. The editor steps back, views the work holistically, and supports its full potential. The editor is the professional in the poet.
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace,” Charles Mingus once said. “Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
As human beings, we come and go quickly, and we get to make works that stand as monuments to our time here. Enduring affirmations of existence. Michelangelo’s David, the first cave paintings, a child’s finger-paint landscapes—they all echo the same human cry, like graffiti scrawled in a bathroom stall: I was here.
