Moms and Dads out there: Show your babies art. If they want to be artists, let them be artists. More art = more joy.
Peaceful holidays, everyone.
Sunday In the Park With George: An Appreciation
Update: The videos linked from this post have been removed from YouTube. (Yay, lawyers! Happy now?) But the original production of Sunday is available on DVD from Netflix and Amazon.
Sunday In The Park With George is a musical play written by Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd) and James Lapine (Into the Woods). It's a largely fictional retelling of the life of French post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat (1859 - 1891). George is played by Mandy Patinkin. Bernadette Peters plays the other principal character: in Act I, the model Dot, and in Act II, the elderly Marie. Other standout cast members include Brent Spiner, Charles Kimbrough, Barbara Bryne, and Dana Ivey.
(For those of you who saw the word "musical" and felt your stomach turn, let me be the first to say that Sunday is not that kind of musical. No chorus lines, no men in tights, no 'nother op'ning for a-nother show.)
The bulk of the story takes place during 1884-86, the years in which Seurat worked on his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Seurat's light burned very brightly, but not for long. He created some of the most important works of modern art and died suddenly at the age of 31. La Grande Jatte hangs in the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I first saw Sunday In The Park With George in 1986, the summer after I finished kindergarten. My Dad and I were vacationing with his parents on the lovely Vancouver Island in British Columbia. One evening in our cabin, Dad and I were watching television when we came across Sunday showing on PBS.
Video removed.
Sunday excerpt via YouTube, about 8 minutes.
I was immediately enraptured by Bernadette Peters "concentrating" out of that heavy dress (a visual metaphor for letting her mind wander). Being five, I didn't sit through much more of the show after that. (I recall we flipped channels between Sunday and Grease.)
When we got home to Albuquerque after our trip, I was so excited to tell my Mom about the lady that thought her way out of her dress. Not only had my clever Mom seen the broadcast, she'd taped it. Over the next ten years I watched that tape so much I nearly wore it out.
Act I of the play takes place during the two years that Seurat spent painting La Grande Jatte. The principal state setting of Act I mirrors the composition of the painting, presenting the story as it unfolds in the mind of the artist. In the opening sequence, scenery slides into place as George sketches their shapes on his pad. (When he says , "Hmm. I hate this tree," one tree is pulled back into the wings. Another character soon wonders where "our tree" has gone.) All of the play's characters, except for the artist, appear in the painting. Their relationships unfold as the painting's composition falls into place. The costumes shimmer with subtle color variations, recalling Seurat's pointillist technique.
Video removed.
Sunday excerpt, "Color and Light," via YouTube, about 9 minutes.
Act II finds Seurat's great-grandson, also named George (also played by Mandy Patinkin), presenting his own work of art to a contemporary audience. Afterward George takes us through a (stereo-) typical art gallery reception. All the familiar faces are there: the critic, the family members, the fellow and/or rival artists, the collaborators, the museum board member, the guy who doesn't get it, the art administrator and his colleague who comes to court the artist to his next opportunity. Having now seen Sunday as a professional artist, this is the scene that resonates most with me. Just as the George of Act I constructed his painting one dot at a time, the present-day George explains that "The art of making art / is putting it together / bit by bit."
Video removed.
Sunday excerpt, "Putting it Together," via YouTube, about 15 minutes.
A recurring theme in Sunday is the loneliness of an artist's life. Most creative work requires prolonged retreat into one's interior. We see George alienate others, accidentally or intentionally, resulting in isolation. George's art is a break from convention, widening the gap between his community and himself. This separation from others may allow him the objectivity to comment on society through his art, but his solitude is not a happy one. He tells himself, "Connect, George. Connect."
Sunday is available on DVD from Netflix and for purchase from PBS or Amazon.
Self-Improvement On My Mind
Hamburger Heaven, photograph by Flickr user Dystopos. Click image to visit its Flickr page.
'Tis the season, I think, even if I'm a bit early, to concern myself with the self I really wish to be. (I tend to skip the holidays and go straight to January out of self-defense.)
I'm with Merlin. Browser tabs I seem unable to close this week are:
Andrea Zittel An artist concerned with optimizing personal space. You can see a film about her from Season 1 of the PBS series Art21. I'm quite intrigued by the smockshop.
How to Lose 20 lbs of Fat in 30 Days by Tim Ferriss (author of The Four Hour Workweek)
Self-Discipline by Steve Pavlina
Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state. ...Imagine what you could accomplish if you could simply get yourself to follow through on your best intentions no matter what.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp (free excerpt)
I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it. In these pages a philosophical tug of war will periodically rear its head. It is the perennial debate, born in the Romantic era, between the beliefs that all creative acts are born of (a) some transcendent, inexplicable Dionysian act of inspiration, a kiss from God on your brow that allows you to give the world The Magic Flute, or (b) hard work.
If it isn't obvious already, I come down on the side of hard work. That's why this book is called The Creative Habit. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell.
On Being Good by Leslie Harpold I feel like I wrote this:
I'm asleep by ten and up by six, I drink eight to ten glasses of water a day. I get 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise four times a week and I rigidly adhere to the food pyramid guidelines. I just had a serving of fruit.
Read more about the extraordinary Leslie Harpold here.
For dessert, also by Leslie: Possible Scenarios for Heaven
Get up around sunrise, because sunrise is always five minutes after you wake up in heaven, and seeing a different and more magnificent one each day, simultaneously thinking "Wow, earth was beautiful" and also "This is pretty great too."
Artists as Entrepreneurs
Suit (9 to 5), by Flickr user Ben Murphy. Click image to visit the artist's Flickr page.
Via Cory Miller, a fellow Oklahoman who designs premium Wordpress themes for people like you and me.
Small Business Trends on Entrepreneurial Artists
Steve King, a member of our Small Business Trends Expert network, has been profiling the trend toward artists combining entrepreneurship with art. He points out how people are choosing art as their life’s passion and learning how to make a business of it, too, to support themselves and their families.
Click to read the whole article.
New York Times on Making Artistic Careers Lucrative
Rather than seeing art as something to pursue in the hours when they are not earning a living, these artists are developing businesses around their talents. These artists are part of a growing movement that has caught the attention of business experts and is being nudged along by both art and business schools.
Click to read the whole article.
Cory Miller also mentions the rise of sites like Etsy, a boon to artists and shoppers alike. Sparrowtracks and Red Plum Pottery are two of my favorite Etsy sellers.
The Artist Survivial Kit workshops from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC) are a tremendous way for Oklahoma artists to learn more about the business of making and distributing art. Related: Sarah's del.icio.us items tagged "art" and "business"
How and Why to Title Your Work
Julia Kirt, the director of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, published a post today about labelling your work when you deliver it to a gallery. Snip:
I recently organized an exhibition with 18 artists in it. Several pieces had no name on the back, much less a title or contact information. Of those pieces, a few were delivered when I was not in the office, so could easily have not known which was which.
I had a similar experience in 2003 when I was an intern at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. We were mounting a fundraising show called Inside [8*3], an open call for works less than 8 inches on a side. We had hundreds. Can you guess how many of those pieces were called Untitled? Answer: waaay too many. We even had a few mixups in which buyers got incorrect pieces delivered to them because the works of art were indistinguishable on paper. This brings me to the crux of today's post.
Title Your Work
Please, do this. "Untitled" is a cop-out, unless you have created a work that is intentionally formal (that is, concerned mainly with forms), and/or you wish for the piece to reflect as little context as possible. For my part, I'm incapable of making paintings that don't reference visual culture in a thousand little ways, so I might as well create titles that provide additional content.
(I began actively titling my work under the instruction of Martin Facey at the University of New Mexico. It was one of the lessons that stuck.)
Another reason not to rest on "Untitled" is that it makes your work harder to distinguish and identify. As Julia mentioned above, it can be headache-inducing for gallery workers as well (and you want those people on your good side). Imagine you've just delivered 20 paintings to a gallery for a solo show. They have twenty different prices, but they're all called "Untitled: oil on canvas." It would be difficult enough for the gallery staff to properly identify your work, not to mention audiences at large.
Note: A good solution to this is to provide your gallery with a detailed inventory including thumbnails. I'll be talking about this in more detail at an upcoming OVAC workshop; see note below. How To Title Your Work
Language is a frequent trigger of my creative process. In my character-based work, I may start with a name and put a face to it, or vice versa. I keep a file containing my favorite idioms, and another for the almost-correct-but-mistranslated-sounding advertisements that appear in my email spam. Maybe I'll latch onto a song lyric or movie line. Sometimes I'll be working on a painting, and an appropriate phrase will float to the surface of my consciousness. All these can become titles.
If coming up with titles is difficult for you, here are some suggestions for semi-random word generators.
Reader's Digest or any newspaper or magazine. Pick a column. Read the last word of each line in that column. Choose a sequence of 3-5 words that sound interesting. ex. "Teaches how they sip." "Working love had most empathic."
Babelfish. The AltaVista Babelfish translator is a great source of slightly innacurate language. Begin with a common phrase, such as "All roads lead to Rome." Send it through the translator multiple times through multiple languages. I had it translated to Russian, back to English, to Japanese, to English again, to French, then Greek, back to English. "Action of all streets to Rome" is what came out.
Channel surfing. Flip through channels on the boob tube. Write down the first word that you hear each time you turn to a new channel. Repeat as needed.
Diceware and the Beale List. Roll 5d6 (or one six-sided die five times) and write down the six numbers that come up. Repeat two more times, or more if you like. You will have three five-digit numbers. Each of these numbers corresponds to a word on the Beale list. (This is an excellent method for generating memorable but hard-to-break passwords.) ex. "Noun walls fauna." "Feels bozo spire."
Place names. This is how I created the characters of Normal, OK. Use an atlas or actual road signs. ex. Pernell Foster, Guthrie Perkins Cushing, Stillwater Hennessey.
Your birthdate and a book. Say your birthday is April 4 1967. (Mine isn't.) Grab any book off any shelf. Turn to page 4, look at the fourth line, and note the first, ninth, sixth and seventh words. ex. "Writing as is uncertain." "Worthy now as I." Modify this as you see fit, by matching the digits of your birthdate to chapters, pages, lines, or words.
Speaking of books. Look at your bookshelf. Read one word from each consecutive book title, three to five in a row. ex. "Dawn to Modern Ambassador." "Name Visual Working Basics." "Geek Garlic Housekeeping." "Sylvia Companion of Insects."
Phone book acronyms. Open the phone book and choose the first name you see (first or last). Write words that begin with each letter of that name. ex. "Paul" becomes "Please Accept Understanding Limes."
Wikiquote. Use a quote as is, or for extra fun, switch the words around.
The Internet Anagram Server. Begin with a name or phrase, then send it through the anagram generator. For a more concise result, I set the maximum number of words to no more than three, and the minimum number of letters to three or four. Here is such a result for "All roads lead to Rome." That's right, 654 anagrams. That's why I leave this up to a computer. Amoral aloe toddlers, anyone?
Go ye and title.
UPDATE. You can find some more colorful phrases at this page detailing the animal naming scheme for various versions of Ubuntu (a popular distribution of the Linux operating system).
Related: I'm going to be giving a talk about organizing one's art inventory on November 22. It's part of OVAC's workshop series called A.S.K. (Artist's Survival Kit). The Business of Art 101 will be at the Edmond Public Library. Visit OVAC's site to register. I recently attended an OVAC workshop on building your portfolio, and it was a great experience. I came away feeling energized, motivated, and well-informed. Most of these workshops are only $15 for non-OVAC members! You can't not go.