Here’s a video my friend Dan Roam and I recorded for his Napkin Academy about how to stay creative in good times and bad. Dan is so good at what he does — I remember seeing him give a presentation at SXSW five years ago and 20 minutes later everybody in the room wanted to buy a copy of Show & Tell. We always have fun, and I’m already looking forward to the next time.
I walked past this handicapped spot yesterday and thought of the “Make it art” assignment from Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing:
Think then of some regular walk or drive or ride you experience often, or even that you’re experiencing for the first time. Imagine yourself a curator. Decide what, among the things you notice, you might declare public works of art.
Perhaps a disheveled pylon marking a street flaw that ought to have been fixed by now. Maybe a post that seems to be a lingering remnant of an otherwise departed fence. Possibly even a child with a piercing stare.
Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive.
Art is everywhere, if you say so.
(More in his newsletter.)
Related: “Borrow a kid.”
UPDATE: Alan Jacobs has pointed me to this image from Sarah Hendren’s The Accesible Icon Project:
A trash collage I made last year. (Something to do with all those leftover Halloween candy wrappers.)
Consider it an offshoot of this exercise from The Steal Like An Artist Journal:
Filed under: Sunday collage
I spent yesterday thinking about these words of Wendell Berry, from his 1968 essay, “A Native Hill”:
I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.
My wife and I took a magical little walk (just an hour or so after I had written this post!) in a part of town unknown to us and I thought about happy we were to be back here, in the place that suits us, walking and exploring and just living our lives.
Sometimes when I begin a project, I want to slip my vision of the finish into a fortune cookie, forget about it, then crack it open at the end and see how close I got.
Talking to my friend Dan Roam about the structure of Keep Going, I mentioned that I was thinking a bunch about time when I wrote it, which is why it starts with days and ends with seasons. Time in the micro and a macro sense.
“I didn’t even notice that,” Dan said. “It’s like an Easter Egg!”
We got to talking about things you hide in your work that you know nobody’s ever going to see just to keep the work interesting for you.
Since we both write books, I confessed that with each book I usually have a secret sentence that I write down somewhere but don’t show to anybody. That sentence is sort of my North Star for the project, the thing I can rely on if I get lost.
The sentence usually doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than me. And sometimes it’s pretty dumb. (When I was writing Show Your Work! the sentence was: “What if Brian Eno wrote a content strategy book?”)
I mentioned this to my wife and she pointed out it’s a little like the little messages Reynolds Woodcock sews into his dresses in Phantom Thread. (I’ve seen that movie probably six times since it came out a few years ago.) The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has talked about how close he needs to keep his movies when he’s making them, before the film is exposed.
Which reminds me: Sometimes readers are upset by the idea that I might want to keep secrets. “Aren’t you the guy who said we should share?” Yes, but the message of Show Your Work! was never share everything with everybody. The real message was: Show the scraps and bits and by-products of your process that you think would be useful or interesting to the people you’re trying to reach, and anything you need to hold back, hold it back, and keep it as close as you need it to be, until the work is done.
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