Art advice from Beth Pickens

Art advice with Beth Pickens

Thursday, August 31, 2023

“Artists are people who are profoundly compelled to make their creative work and when they are distanced from their practice, their life quality suffers.”

Last week I had the pleasure to chat with art coach Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Save Your Life. Beth and I share many of the same core messages, but I come at making art from the inside of being a working artist and Beth comes at it from the outside of working with artists, so she picks up things that I miss.

If you have an hour and a half, you can watch or listen to our conversation.

Tiny rare books

Saturday, August 26, 2023

I was charmed by this @nypl post on Instagram:

Miniature items from the Rare Book Division must be three-inches or less to qualify as *mini* and hitch a ride in a repurposed card catalog where they’re snugly stored.

And then I realized I have my own tiny rare books collection in my own card catalog:

The Middle Passage by James Hollis

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Here are some diary doodles I drew from my notes on Jungian analyst James Hollis’s 1993 book, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life. (I included them in my letter about Charlie Bucket’s mid-life crisis, “Quitting The Chocolate Factory.”)

After I shared these it was pointed out to me that Ted Lasso spies the book on the table in his therapist’s apartment (S02E08):

The on-off switch

Friday, August 25, 2023

A couple of collages from today’s newsletter.

Writer’s block is trying to tell you something

Thursday, August 24, 2023

A page from Joe Brainard’s “People of the World: Relax!”

In a terrific mini Q&A, Lauren Groff (author of the wonderful novel Matrix, whose followup I cannot wait for) says she thinks writer’s block is an “umbrella term for a series of very different pains.”

1. The “fear of imperfection, which can be combatted by a writer carefully training herself to let her work be messy and impermanent.” Groff gets over this by writing longhand and not typing on the computer until she has a good sense of the piece.

2. “Being impatient with your work and not allowing it the time it needs to develop.” (Her teacher, Loorie Moore, told her to “relax” and not rush things and know that nothing is ever wasted.)

3. “The canary toppling over in the coalmine, the way that your work is telling you that you’re going down the wrong path and you need to reconsider some larger issues.” For this she suggests what I call the put it in the put it in the drawer and walk out the door strategy. And while you’re letting it sit, read, read, read:

During that time away, be in your chair every day, but be there by reading everything you can get your hands on, and you’ll find a solution in the hundreds of thousands of words you’ve read.

(For me, problems of output are usually problems of input.)

All of this reminded me of Joy Williams, who had my favorite take on writer’s block: “Perhaps more people should have it.”