I made this hideous collage a few days ago, and made it a reminder that attempting “ugly” art or making “bad” art is a fine strategy for avoiding doomscrolling.
Sally Mann’s Hold Still
My October pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Sally Mann’s Hold Still. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.
Here’s my intro:
Sally Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. (While best known for her photography, Mann holds a BA in literature and an MA in creative writing.) This book covers her long, interesting life and career, including her friendship with the painter Cy Twombly (there’s a surprising scene of him people-watching outside of a Walmart) and her struggle to make art while being a mother to three children. It’s not often that an artist can tell their own story in prose that sings, and that’s what makes this book so special to me.
This book was on my list of 5 great books about art and motherhood, and a portion of the book also reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art:
Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral…
On this subject, the story has a sad afterword, which I will leave readers to discover for themselves.
To join our discussion, sign up for the club!
Spontaneity is learning and browsing is research
After being open for browsing by the public for over a hundred years, the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library will be soon archived and visitors will have to request specific items in order to gain access.
Many NYC artists and designers I know are upset about this development, arguing that by essentially switching from a browsing model to a request/search model the collection will lose its creative magic. (Learn more about how you can get involved at Friends of the Picture Collection.)
“You see the people go through it and touch it and have the spontaneity of discovery,” said Taryn Simon, the Conceptual artist who has been photographing the Picture Collection’s treasures for nine years, making collages that can currently be seen at Gagosian. “It’s so multidimensional. It just keeps swirling. I think of it as a performance piece or an installation.”
The most beautiful and convincing case for I’ve read so far is Leanne Shapton’s “In Defense of Browsing,” in which she discusses visual literacy vs. verbal literacy, argues for the role of spontaneity in creative research, and explains how different it is to browse materials vs. requesting materials with words:
The feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced — that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level…. If the library’s plan succeeds, people looking for pictures they have never seen will have to spell out what they think they want, and wait, possibly for hours, while that one thing — but nothing alongside it or related to it — is retrieved by someone else. There will be no time or quiet space to look, sift, think.
In summary, she writes, “Spontaneity is learning. Browsing is research.”
The longer I write books and the longer I research the more I believe in the power of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for. A search box gets you what you asked for, but that’s rarely enough.
As more and more collections go digital and bookstores switch to on-demand models, we will have to deal with what is lost when browsing is lost.
As I wrote ten years ago in Steal Like an Artist of the “serendipity of the stacks”: “There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to.”
Trying to Teach Your Kids the Kind of Math They Teach in School Now
I made this blackout after observing my wife teach my kids math out of a workbook that uses techniques that confuse our Elder Millennial brains. Here’s a decent explanation for why Common Core math problems look so weird:
What does a seed look like?
Here is a zine inspired by my friend Steven Tomlinson. (Steven also inspired one of my favorite bits in Steal Like an Artist.) Most of what I learned was from The Book of Seeds. (If you scroll to the end of this post, there’s a PDF you can print out with a video tutorial to make your own!)
Here is a PDF of the zine that’s free to download and print so you can make it into your own booklet:
Here is a video showing how to fold and cut and fold and glue it into a booklet:
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