Category Archives: drawing

The importance of creativity

Adaptation of something I wrote two summers ago, all bitter references to unhygenic assholes removed, for marketing purposes:

Think of a world without creativity.   No music, comedy, repartee, great food; no movies, books or even articles, no television worth watching, no mischief, nothing worth laughing at, no cause for that good cry that is sometimes so needed.

Creativity, much spoken about by educators today, has always been at the heart of learning and good teaching.  

All creativity involves a certain amount of spontaneity.  It is play. The great John Cleese describes the essential conditions for creativity in a wonderful clip, unfortunately no longer available on youTube.  The five factors he talks about are:  place, start time, ending time, confidence and humor.   

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be,  we’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone. If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet for a minute or two, be quiet.

Cleese locates the creativity, you need a space to do it.  How about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames? With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Cleese discusses the importance of a time set aside, a time with a beginning and an end, ideally about two hours.   He points out that it takes up to a half hour to leave the pressures of life outside and begin to play.  With luck you will play for 90 minutes or so.  Then play must end, as play always does, because it doesn’t feel like play forever. 

This is exactly what happens in the animation workshop.  For ninety minutes the kids have all the time in the world.

The other aspect of time is patience, taking your time, having a block of time you can use for play and dreaming up ideas.  You cannot be very creative while watching the clock, just like you can’t productively meditate keeping an eye on time.  You have to let things develop in their time, comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  

Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time.”    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.   What gives a person confidence?  Another one smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.   What takes away confidence?  Critical comments, ridicule, skepticism, indifference to your best efforts.

The last part, humor, happens quite naturally in a room where children are playing, relaxed, involved, having fun, trying out the craziest ideas they can think of, not worried about anyone bothering them.

Interview with an artist

Artist:  I was born with special sensitivities that made me passionate about pursuing my talents.  I was born an artist; special, sensitive, talented and passionate.

Me: Guess what– everyone is special, sensitive, talented and passionate about some things.

Artist:  Yes, but an artist makes it his life’s work to express it in a way that makes people feel– and see and hear– differently.  

Me:  Makes them feel what makes you special, sensitive, talented and passionate?  

Artist:  No, wise-ass.  I speak for the universe, show people its magic. 

Me:  The universe speaks for itself.  

Artist:  Yes, but not in a universally understood language like art  

Me: In a universal language like life, it’s the universe, after all.  

Artist: But life does not take on the aspect of art until an artist filters it through their personality and makes it beautiful

Me: Life doesn’t need art to make it beautiful.  Beauty is taken in all the time by people who never gave a fiddler’s fart about art or artists  

Artist: I disagree, people crave art, vision, creative organization of the noisy chaos to let them step back and contemplate the miraculous  

Me:  Some do, sure.  What people really crave is life, and being heard and appreciated.  Art is something sold to them in place of their own innate creative genius, it’s vicariously gratifying even as it removes people further from their own creative abilities.   Art is for the professionals, you dig, that’s what’s sold to us.

Artist:  so why do you draw?  

Me:  Because I love it, because I can’t go for long without drawing, because I have graphomania

Artist:  Don’t you want appreciation?  

Me: Sure, it’s great to be appreciated.  Everyone wants to be appreciated for what they do.

Artist:  So why are you so down on art?  

Me: Because so much of it is bad and artist/non-artist divides the world along arbitrary and destructive lines as creators and consumers of creativity.  It is, in most cases, a lie, and a lie sold at an expensive and damaging price.   Being a professional artist is largely about packaging and selling your idiosyncratic view as a unique and valuable commodity worthy of a high price.  “Art” is politics and marketing as much as anything else.  

Artist:  but my music is about that vision you were referring to, that everyone is an artist. Some people’s art is appreciation of artists.  

Me:  or we can give the glory to the creator of the universe, whether she actually exists or not

Artist:  I dedicate my art to my own sense of God  

Me: I’m sure your sense of God loves you for it  

Artist:  why must you always be so ironic?  

Me:  I’m not always ironic, irony is but one shade on my many-hued palette    

Artist:  Why do you play music?  

Me:  I love music, I love playing, I love hearing the sounds the instruments make, I love being in the middle of music, splashing in its wonderful possibilities  

Artist: so you are a musician  

Me:  Yes, sure.  But there are many musical people out there who don’t play, believe they don’t have the right to make music because they’re not trained, those who measure themselves against, again, professional recording artists like the brilliant Brittney Spears.  I consider all these non-playing musical types musicians too.  

Artist:  OK, I can see we are going to have to agree to disagree about art  

Me:  No argument here.

Blues for Sammy Worst

two and a half years of mostly iPad images presented in a semi-snappy 3:49

Blues for Sammy 2

sorry, boys and girls, I had to take the link to the movie down.  Too much personal content up there for any unscrupulous content collector to collect and pass off as original.   I will put the soundtrack up for  music collectors to enjoy and for the more unscrupulous to claim as their own odd composition.

The Wages of Futility

The contacts list on my smartphone has bloomed like an eruption of brilliantly colored flowers after a long early spring rain.  Color and shadow all over.  Childish designs in thumbnail, the grey and white face of Baron von Doghead, snips of my own drawings, the brilliant pattern of my favorite Origami paper.  

Wherefore do you cause your phone to be so beautiful, sirrah?  

It can’t be helped.  The minimum and maximum wage of futility are the same.  ‘Tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer, as the Fool told Lear.  I’m preparing to exhale some of that breath in the Bronx Civil Court, alternating that prep with research on pink mucus in stools.  

Please, what are you on about?  

Creativity, man, for its own sake and for the sake of the joy it brings, cannot help but bring.  Drawing cannot be helped, for example.  In a grey, futile and slightly queasy day there is also this: invention, beauty, mastery.   These things are excellent in and of themselves.  

Package and sell them and they are even more excellent, if you can find a way not to make dainty little trollops out of them.

Screenshot_2015-04-21-14-50-27

“No worries of anyone making a dainty trollop out of me, boss”

We take our laughs where we can get them

There was a woman, a very good looking young woman, actually, who had a small business running after-school programs and seemed to grasp the educational and group dynamics potential of the student-run animation workshop.   When I increased the price to about double what the first after-school program was paying, she barely hesitated before agreeing to pay it.   Her assistant was a great and supportive fan of the workshop, she urged me to organize the little mini-animation festival I put on for the kids and their parents.  One day a week or so before the festival the usually cheerful assistant came in and told me her boss had died the previous day.  Cancer she never revealed to anyone she worked with had ended her life at 34.  Her business winked out of existence a few months later.

Fast forward a few challenging months and, temporarily (or permanently) out of public school programming, I am conducting a four session workshop for women with chronic serious diseases.  Some are in recovery from cancer, others show up straight from chemo, some show up once and not again, others make half the sessions.  A core of four is there every week.  These first time animators all produced very cool animation, worked beautifully together, got more and more demanding about seeing the day’s rough cut before they left, high fived each other at the end.   One woman in particular, Liz, was a great innovator.  She came in with brilliant and ingeniously different ideas week after week.  Her animation for the four sessions is here. 

She was excited about assisting at the recent Stevenson workshop, the first I’ve done since last summer.  The day before the workshop she was hit by the flu and couldn’t make it, she expressed her sincere regrets.  I assured her there’d be more sessions, promised she’d be at the next one, whenever I could arrange it.  A few days later I sent her the clip from the Stevenson session, telling her how difficult it had been and that she hadn’t missed much fun.  I didn’t hear back.  I wrote again a few days later, telling her I hoped she was up and around and that I’d be sending her the new website soon.

When the website was done I sent her the link, since she had grasped the idea so well and run with the ball so enthusiastically, once she’d had her head down on the table for the first forty minutes or so of each session.  I emailed her once more after not hearing back, and was beginning to fear the worst for this talented woman I barely know.  I have gleaned that she is living with cancer, and that it is not easy living.

When I got a smart phone I texted her that I’d joined the 21st century, hoped she was over the flu and feeling better and added this picture.

Are You OK ?

Several days passed, and hearing nothing from her, I imagined the worst.  A gloomy thought twisted its way into my head: this workshop is the accursed kiss of death to the rare women who really get its potential and find it compelling.  

Then tonight, at 1:35 a.m. a tiny bell in my pocket sounds, and she’s texted:

Congratulations!  Sorry for the delayed reply.  I’m so so happy flowers are growing (emoticon of red flower) Rain makes it happen (yellow umbrella) Happy Spring!

I wrote back:

Thanks.  Good to hear from you — and happy Spring to you, too!

I hope you don’t have any objection to this wonderful bit of work being here (and I sent her the link)

3:42 a.m.  I’m glad you sent this.  I’m very upset and can’t sleep.  Seeing this animation was uplifting.  Thank you . … (emoticon of girl holding up hand)

3:45 a.m.  I’d share this on my Facebook (emoticon of two people holding hands) except one thing.  If it’s not too much bother, I’d like an edit…

Here I had an actual laugh.  A small one, yes, but genuine (nobody here to impress with a fake laugh) and, like I said up top, I’ll take me larfs where I can get ’em.

3:49  the part with the butterflies has the cat jumping in. (Cat head emoticon)  At one point its head changes to a dog.  That’s not my taste (slightly disgusted looking emoticon)

3:52  I’d post your page without hesitation if that part were eliminated (a series of emoticons animating a round yellow face bursting into a laugh)

3:55  Thanks for replacing maddening thoughts with delightful ones.

She made my day with that one.

4:08  I enjoyed Jesse’s project!  (gold star emoticon)  The patterns in the beginning are well done.  The tumbling guy has fun hair.  (emoticon of a thumb up)

4:14   I will try to sleep and think of (emoticon of rowboat, I think) being inside (angel fish emoticon) animation (some kind of water emoticon).  Thank you. (emoticon of little angel head with halo).

Embedded?

Need to trim this down and send it to a friend I’ve been out of touch with.  Following up on yesterday’s energizing meeting, the guy turned out to be engaged and engaging and had a lot of helpful information, I need to continue the networking.    This cat knows two well-known animators he’s offered to introduce me to.   Let’s see if this embed works.