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
To warm up for the past couple mornings I’ve pulled out my trusty ol’ Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and filled a page in my diary before writing. (Hard not to be influenced when reading Lynda Barry!) The pen is probably half a decade old, and still works like new. Something magical about drawing with this thing…
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.
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