An excellent article in Newsweek describes America’s declining scores in creativity. As I’ve been contemplating a subject for the next post on this blog, I’ve been battling a voice in my head that wants to convince me that making art is pointless. It’s not the first time I’ve run into such battles. Actually, there have been many over the years and yet I keep finding a way to press on.
One experiment described in the Newsweek article echos this battle. Those that have a hard time finding solutions to problems are often full of despair and anxiety. Interestingly, while scientist say some might be born with creative dispositions, there are elements that can be learned (taught). Creativity, to quote the article, “requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).” If you’ve ever chosen any number of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, you’ve possibly come across the one that suggests making an exhaustive list and doing the last thing on it.
Sometimes it seems like making a list with one item and doing the first thing on it is also a good strategy. Talking about creativity can be a lot like dancing about architecture, to paraphrase Steve Marin.
Monday, July 12, 2010 – 3:54 pm
It always surprises people when I tell them I feel more creative and spontaneous using a computer to make art compared to when I made mixed media paintings. While it’s true that it took some time to learn the electronic tools well enough to get to this point, there is an incredible amount of play that takes place when I create images in Photoshop.
All that has a downside, of course, in that it’s important to always have a backup copy or two of everything, because when things disappear digitally, they really disappear. A recent failure to save a version of an artwork before I “saved for web” and closed it resulted in the loss of the high resolution version before it got backed up. What really became interesting about this failure was trying to reproduce what I had done before. There were so many twists and turns, I couldn’t even get close. There was no getting it back, so the only thing to do was create a piece I liked more.
The original:
The replacement:
Well, the replacement might not be an outstanding piece on its own, but at some point, I started seeing it as the right half of a diptych along with the previous piece in the series.
The Diptych:
I really like the results, and am happy I lost the original. I wouldn’t have created this work which is now a landscape with effective contrast of reality and metaphor.
Monday, June 7, 2010 – 4:23 pm
It’s not easy to observe that as I approach 700 in this series of 1000, the way I put images together has not changed fundamentally since I started doing digital work ten years ago. Hopefully there is some noticeable maturity and sophistication in the results of my creative process, but I have to admit it’s a disappointment that there haven’t been major breakthroughs in the way I work. There have been some interesting techniques I’ve developed, and I’m happy to have those in my artistic quiver. I also look forward to more explorations in the time-based work that has come out of this exploration.
But the initial desire I had for the Weekly Press was to find fundamentally new ways of working within the confines of 2 dimensional art-making. My mistake, I believe, was in putting too much faith and focus on the process and technique, and not enough on the thought and philosophy behind the images themselves. The latter is really where the meaning lies in my work. The method of creating this work adds only a little to the overall meaning, even with the references within the imagery to the digital process.
So, learning from that, for the next 300 in the series, I think I’ll try shifting focus to a wider exploration of images; things I avoid, things I don’t like, or do like but haven’t taken the time to do them. I’m finding it easy to be lazy. It’s time to put a little more effort into it.
Are you on auto pilot too?
Monday, May 17, 2010 – 10:44 pm
