Make Art Make Money Make Time

A few months ago I finished one of the three best books I've ever read on the work life and business of being an artist, Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens. My other two favorites are Eric Maisel's Making Your Creative Mark: 9 Keys to Achieving Your Artistic Goals, a way to strategize the professional necessities of being a successful artist by looking inward and being honest about the challenges and Alyson B. Stanfield's I'd Rather Be in the Studio, a nuts and bolts guide to navigating the practical requirements of bios, artist statements, working with galleries, etc.  Each of these books fills a special need and has helped me be focused, but Make Art Make Money is one of the few books I've ever been a little sad to have finshed the way I'm sad when a fun event is over.

Steven's's book revolves around the exceptionally successful career of Jim Henson and explores the lessons all artists can learn from how Henson approached both creativity and business.  It is at once permission giving and enlightening.  What could spawning Kermit the Frog and a multimillion dollar puppetry business have to do with one of a kind metalsmithing, teaching, and a one woman small business?  You'd be surprised.  

The book is a very big picture look at Henson's decision making and determination in which the author does an exceptional job of relating those lessons to individuals like me.  How Henson handled copyright, balanced his creative process with cutting edge yet hippy business practices, tremendously evolved a centuries old art form to fit a new medium, and continually pitched his art are all key strategies for anyone who makes, writes, composes, or choreographs anything.  

In my life as an artist I had failed to recognize one hugely important lesson until reading the book.  In the soul sucking junior high and high school I went to, I learned that anything I wanted to learn and anything I wanted to do could only come as a reward aftert all the things I was supposed to do.  At the age of 12 I had 4-1/2 hours of busy work homework every night after 7 hours  and 15 minutes of being in a place I hated with only the occasional respite of an intelligent teacher and an interesting class.  

The Falcon

Eastern repousse bound, one of a kind, long stitch book 

Copper, hand lettered and mixed media over printed 

photo montages of original collages

5-3/8" long x 3-3/8" wide x 1-5/8" high

© 2011, V. Lansford $6200.

Featured in Lark Book's 500 Handmade Books, vol 2,

 juried by Julie Chen

I have long had a difficulty moving from the management side of work to the making side of of the studio before 3:30 in the afternoon. In the days before my son was born and in the days after he was born and I worked late into the night while he slept, it didn't matter so much, but with my ability to work in fine detail increasingly dependent on sunlight, this time divide is dreadful. I never associatd until reading Make Art Make Money that 3:30 was the time I got out of school and felt at least marginally more in control of my own time and life.

In short I learned in school to treat creativity as a reward instead of a way of being.  Bad lesson for someone who earns her living as an artist. (Talk about school not preparing kids for real life!) Doing the work that excites me when it excites me and not when I finally get a chance to squeeze it into the rest of my work is my ongoing goal.  

The Falcon

detail

Since finishing the book, I've made it a habit at least 3 days a week to bypass the email inbox and the mammoth to-do list and head straight to my drawing table or bench as soon as I get into the studio. Some days, often the best days, this happens while I'm still in my pajamas. My overwhelming sense of responsibility and the 46 hats I wear as a small business owner are ever present. For my sanity (and the sanity of those nearby), making things comes first at work, knowing that I always come through on time on all the "have to's" of entrepreneurship the same way a Border Collie will always catch a frisby.

The Falcon

detail

Crazy or Just Creative?

Watching Over Eternity, an illumination
from my soon to be released book,
Giving Voice
Gouache on Arches watercolor paper, ©2014

I grew up with "crazy" creative people, so for most of my life I've sought the answer to that 20th century question: Is it that being creative and having brains that work differently mean being inherently a little crazy, or is it that most of us live in a rigidly puritanical society that seeks to make us all fit the mold in vain? Up until recently, I would have said the answer is C: both. The more I create in this world, the more I'm aware that the answer is more often the expectation of having to fit the mold that makes us feel so out of sorts.

I should clarify what I mean by creative. Being creative is really just being human. It's what we do.  Someone or several someones along the way thought, "Hey, perhaps I can bring home that gazelle if I make a pointy thing to throw at it instead of hoping to wrestle it to the ground. Someone thought that mud over there holds its shape rather well when you squish it. Someone thought that intertwining some grasses together might be useful. Someone - and you might guess this is my favorite - thought, "shiny hard stuff in the ground…plus... fire... Hmmm, might work."

While problem solving that starts in our brains and comes out our bodies and hands is not unique to humans - there are elephants and birds that paint - we seem to produce a lot of cool stuff as a result. Why then would that be threatening to anyone? Why would anyone want to stop us and tell us to get nice "secure" jobs (I really have no idea what job fits that description nowadays) and lead "normal" lives (normal in our house is merely a setting on the washing machine) or to be more practical about life, as if doing all those things only to freak out around age 40 in the typical Western existential mid-life crisis is really a good idea.

The answer to why that would be threatening is expression. Expression is what drives us to try new and innovative ideas to push beyond the craft kits from the craft store and put our ideas into form. Despite this drive existing in all of us, not everone grows up having these areas of their brains developed or is encouraged by their families and friends.  

If no one else around you understands what you want to do with that mud that holds its shape, bizarrely, they may think that's a good enough reason to tell you to stop "playing" with it. Change is threatening. It might not work. After all that gazell might not like having the pointy thing thrown at it.  It might throw it back at you, right? Of course not. That's why fear of ingenuity is so stupid.

The sad reality is many of us have taught ourselves not to value creativity in everyone, that it's not merely a human trait but is somehow reserved for the Leonardos, Mozarts, and Edisons of the worlds. I say those names in the plural as if they could be, but you get that negative message, yes? There's only one of each, ever in all of human history, and none of us is he.

We've ceased to see just how creative good doctors and lawyers are at solving problems, closing or finding loopholes to achieve justice or discovering new treatments. We don't value the obvious need for vast creativity in solving environmental problems in easy to implement ways or how outside the box someone has to think to invent a new type of video game. We've substituted the self expression that drives this type of creativity with notions of security in the form of larger paychecks and a silly pride that comes with acceptability from ones more vocal piers.

As my friend, Bruce Baker describes it, those of us who are still still in touch with those primal hand and earth materials instincts are viewed by the rest of society as having run away to join the circus. There are no veneers of money and security to make people say the acceped social niceties about us. I can promise you that none of my grandparents ever bragged to their friends at church, "Victoria is studying to become an artist." Instead they had a great deal of trouble figuring out why anyone would take up time in college taking art courses.

So why does it make us feel crazy? Because even if we've figured all that it, we still have those voices in our heads, and these are the kinds of voices that tin foil just can't keep out. We have to recognize that disconnect between being praised as children who brought clay ashtrays home from 3rd grade art class and being criticized for not abandoning the desire of making for more acceptable paths by people who've lost touch with what it means to be human.

Perhaps the solution lies not only in championing the arts for their own sake but also in correlating being creative with all kinds of career paths. There is plenty of data and no end of books that proclaim this concept. We hear all the time that creativity is not something that is so easily outsourced. That would mean that developing creativity is a kind of (gasp) job security.

We could start by championing our kids, grandchildren, nieces, nephews and, friends' kids by not giving into the meaningless banter about their "doing well in school" then perhaps we can work up to answering these types of questions for ourselves. Maybe instead of answering the inevitable useless questions about how business is for us artists, we can talk about what's really interesting: our shared drive to express ideas and create new things.

Flying but Not Too Deep

Postcards from Hell

Mixed media on wood; 10" x 12"

The eye in this collage is printed with a hand carved, partial self portrait, rubber stamp.

My teenage son, Skyler, and I have been having frank and open conversations about drugs for years.  Somewhat ironically, this outside the box, live and let live, hippy child of ours has been about as intollerant of drugs and drug use as Nancy Regan.  In fact, he's expressed such adamant opions that his dad and I worry, afraid when he's older that he'll backlash like a conservative politician or fundamentalist religious leader, who ends up indicted for the very sin against which s/he preached.

A few years ago after Skyler watched an episode of Deadliest Catch in which Captain Phil Harris's son confessed to being an addict and stealing his dad's prescription pain killers, I spent more than an hour explaining to my son that in taking 2 Advil for tendonitis I wasn't abusing pain meds or in danger of becoming addicted to anything.  Like I said, intollerant in the extreme.

Maybe he's heard us tell one too many times the story of when he was five and was given morphine after surgery for a broken arm.  When my ex-husband kept nagging and sniping at the poor kid for breaking his arm by jumping off the deck while trying to fly (literally, fly) my son turned and gave him the biggest rasberries ever in the history of wagging tongues and sprayed saliva.  (I was a seriously proud parent in that moment!)

I guess he gets his aversion to drugs, both legal and not, from me.  Being a canary in the proverbial coal mine, I avoid taking medications until they are absolutely necessary because I'm so suseptable to side effects.  Not the "may cause" list at the top of the pharmacy print out, I'm talking the fine print at the bottom, the ".02% of people experienced" list with the really weird stuff.  Certain synthetic antibiotics make me hallucinate.  Seriously, 12" milipeded type insects crawing on the walls kinds of hallucinations. Not my idea of a good time.

So after 2 weeks of acute bronchitis, followed by 3 days of an edless barking sounding cough that went on so long as to make me toss my cookies repeatedly, I showed Skyler the bottle of hydrocodone cough syrup my doctor prescribed (I can't take codeine) and said, "This is your mother... This is your mother about to be on drugs..."

"That's nice dear," said my son in his best Donna Reid/June Cleaver voice.  Immediately he went back to playing Grand Theft Auto, a video game in which players can buy marijuana for "medical use." Maybe he's mellowed a touch though hopefully not too much.

Wary of the side effects, I took half the instructed dose, and I was flying within 6 minutes.  For a workaholic creative like me, few things are as boring as being sick and laid up in bed for days on end.  So soaring or not, I grabbed my lifeline (my iPad), and the app, Sage, caught my eye.  Sage, a truly brilliant cross between a game of Memory and the I-Ching, is an oracle of divination except it's totally made up by my favorite trickster, Nick Bantock. Think Jungian metaphor meets a Magic 8 Ball, now that's my idea of a good time.

I hadn't played the game in a while.  Perhaps the app icon caught my eye because I've been reeading Nick's recent facebook entries.  What fun, I thought, to play it while "in flight."  I couldn't have been more wrong.

Sage's ability to answer life's heavy questions relies on the player to delve into metaphor.  Nick describes it as "sense within nonsense."  Normally, I marvel at the synchronicity of that "nonsense" to be quite thought provoking. Being stoned, however, made my brain quite incapable of reading meaning into anything.  I was lightheaded and blissfully not coughing for a whole 20 minutes, but I was in a dull, flat, literal mode.  I gave up and started reading the news instead (something I normally avoid at all costs).

I guess I'm not cut out to be a Coleridge, inspired by opium or it's synthetic cousin.  Inspiration for me may depend on altered states, but these states require things like music, perfect mochas in just the right coffee bar, and something blue and something shiny like ground pigments, mica, Koroit opals, or non ferrous metals.

"You need to be in control," my husband said with a smirk.

"No, Rush Limbaugh is a scrip junky, who needs to be in control.  Please don't compare me with an idiot like that."

"No, not in control of other people, in control of your faculties."

"Hmm, true."  He has a point. 

Ironically, the next morning I finished a murder mystery in which one victim was done in by cough syrup. Alas though, to appease everyone who insisted I needed sleep without waking every 15 minutes to cough up a lung (and they were right), I took another 1/2 dose of the stuff that night.  I now save metaphors and creativity for different altered states, ones that involve chocolate.

At a recent detal appointment, Skyler tried nitrous oxide before the tooth filling began.  He freaked out.  "Nothing sounds right!  Nothing feels right!"  He opted to skip the gas and coped just fine with all the drilling, which, I fully admit, is more than I could have withstood.

It wouldn't be the first time my son has intuitively understood something important that is beyond his years of experience.

The Pa-Chiz-si Strategy of Art Creation: Which way does your art play?

My ideas are endless.  My time is finite. As a one woman show, how to get it all done is my quest in life, so I'm forever taking a step back to look at and better understand my own trends as a creator and savvy art making business woman.  Lately I've realized my working style is not so different from my playing strategies.

Pa-Chz-isi, Sennet, Sorry, Trouble.  Odds are you played one of these games as a kid (or now play them with your kids).  The pieces and colors may be different, but the object is the same: Be the first to get all your pieces around the board and back home.  So which do you prefer? Do you mostly focus on one piece to zip it into the safe zone and home before spending your rolls of the dice on the other pieces, or do you leave your pieces close together and bring them home slowly a little at a time?

Whenever I start a new work of art, be it on paper, board, screen, or in metal, I delude myself into believing that I'll dive in and submerge myself in it's gestation and birth, ignoring all the other half finished pieces calling for my attention.  Alas, as soon as I toss a freshly soldered pieced into the pickle to remove oxidation, or check email, or just see something shiny I'm distracted into another realm of possibilities and soon working on another piece.

When I play those childhood games with my son, I marvel at how our differing strategies are indicative of our personalities and no easier to change than our shared compulsion for chocolate. Skyler obsesses over one piece and gets it home before focusing on the next one, and I get into a zone of slowly getting all the pieces around safely in their herd.  Must be my inner Shetland sheepdog at work again.

In the end, the pieces get around the board just as my pieces of art all get finished at some point too.  The pieces of art jewelry that might only have a few more steps before completion magically get finished all at once like when the three blue plastic pieces are in that safe zone and almost home on the Pa-chiz-si board. It's really only those tough days when I spend 14 hours in the studio, working like a maniac and yet not necessarily finishing anything that make me question my strategy.

Truth be told, Skyler might win a little more often with his strategy, but on those rare occasions with massive deadlines that I'm forced to adopt that method in the studio, I end up almost too exhausted to care that I've finished anything even if completion is what pays the bills. I'm happier to lose myself in the shiny things and bring them home with the herd.

Which way do you like to work/play?

On Writing about Writing

song du jour:I Know There's Something Going On, Frida

mood: oh...whatever...

Yes, my writing has been rather intermittently uploaded of late. I have been writing but only in snippets. You'll have to take my word that they are somewhat brilliant snippets ;-) as I can't paste them in here with no segue whatsoever. I often pop into the studio in the middle of cooking lunch or dinner and write in an unaddressed draft email the sentence or two that just popped into my head, while I was obsessing about some important topic of the moment. (Apple's Mail is easily searchable and always open. I hate Word. In fact, I usually call it 4-Letter-Word, and my beloved Write Now, which even 8 years out of date is the most intuitive user friendly word processing software ever invented, no longer works on my G5.)

The weird reality is that I have so many nearly formed books in my head on such a diverse range of topics (Yeah, don't. I know who this sounds like, but there are no 800 page trilogies in store.) that I'm in some weird limbo of perpetually writing and perpetually feeling stuck where blogging is concerned. In my very recent frustration of wanting to blog and just going on (and on) in private emails instead, I've realized I'm often opting for a second eclair, putting off the dinner of fillet mignon. More importantly, I just realized why.

Books have their own built in motivation for me, but whenever I think of blogging, I have to acknowledge that here in Jeannie's bottle, my desk is a MESS of bills, catalogs, office supply coupons, ancient CD's, and whatever toy Skyler has left behind. This is hardly the clear space some writers crave nor the blank page some fear. There are literally hundreds of books and all too many geeky blogs that discuss the idea of writing as "practice." Ick. Please, it's not weightlifting nor time on the treadmill (both activities that I loathe). This is a creative act. Don't suck the life out of it by relegating it, along with eating plenty of fiber, to the mere list of things to do every day because it's "good for you."

Getting back to my desk, it turns out that it's not the state of this slab of sustainably forrested Scandanavian pine causing me to feel like the words are being leeched out of me via a butter knife to a small vein. It's this little window that is making me gag on my own words. I used to blog on the field of yummy purple that is the background of my website, but Dreamweaver would go all haunted on me for no apparent reason on my old blog pages, and there was no sane way to create the all important RSS feed from there, so my friend, Matthew, graciously set up that which comes to you now, which has also helped to increase my audience. Previously, another friend had almost figured out how to change this boring, white with a little blue, Blogger window also to look like my site, but the blog itself never worked well with WordPress.

Now I know I've already lost most of you guys by now. Good thing I didn't use the word lavender to describe my site's background, or most men would have clicked away in confusion three sentences earlier. - Why is it that so many straight men are actually proud of the fact they don't know the visual correlate to the word mauve? - No, the trouble is that I can't see as much of my entries as a whole. There is instead, endless scrolling and clicking of the button "preview." There is also this persistent feeling that I'm really just on a comments section of some customer no-service website about to exceed the given number of characters allowed.

At this point, if your even still interested, you're probably asking, "Why the hell doesn't she just pop some flowery background on some other program, blog her little brains out, and paste the hopefully decent results in the stupid Blogger box?!? The answer is that when I do that, blogger publishes all the punctuation as $#*$&#*&*@ and vowels with umlauts or those single little doughnuts on top. Who wants to edit that? Oh, and blogger on a Mac means one actually has to type in all style and link codes. Yawn. Where's my butter knife?

If only I could collage on my virtual desktop! I would print my hand carved stamps in the margins and type in intense cobalt blue! I would tear bits of my hand painted rice papers, and glue them down to the edges with fake gold dust splattered across them. Instead, the sum total of my visual awareness looks like this. Does this inspire your inner Angelou? If it does, you're probably not of the feminine persuasion. Might as well give me a steno pad, and order me to write the great American novel. I'm off to make an organic ice cream filled crepe with chocolate gravy on top. Now that's a visual!

P.S.
Thanks to the Holons crew for including my blog in their list!