How to Build an Artists' Studio

As a writer who has written a lot about houses and home and how wallboard and wood can define us, I have a particular interest in artists' studios. I LOVE peeking inside and always want to take up residence and do whatever it is they do in that space. I had no idea that Pam Brisse, the jewelery artist I blogged about last week, has an entire feature story on her website devoted to how she desiged and built her bead studio in Edmonds Washington, but she does. You can see how she hammered, how she plastered, how she arranged her beads on a shelf in beautiful glass jars. I defy you to read it an not be inspired. You will want to build a little house, move in and start making beads, break out in song. Check it out at http://bluebetween.com/studio.htm.

Requiem for John Updike

John Updike died today. I have kept a quote of his in my "Favorites" file for 30 years, just because it said so much about how to write and how to love and how to live. It was from the story, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth." I wrote it out in blue ballpoint pen on the back of my mother's business stationary when I was about 13 years old."

"And about love. `Love' is one of those words that illustrate what happens to an old, overworked langauge. These days, with movie stars and crooners and preachers and psychiatrists all pronoiuncing the word, it's come to mean nothing but a vague fondness for something. In this sense, I lvoe the rain, this blackboard, these desks, you. It means nothing, you see, whereas once the word signified a quite explicit thing -- a desire to share all you own and are with someone else. It is time we coined a new word to mean that, and when you think up the word you want to use, I suggest that you be economical with it. Treat it as something you can spend only once -- if not for your own sake, for the good of the language."

How to Write a Song

My sister sent me a link to a blog at The New York Times called Measure for Measure: How to Write a Song and Other Mysteries. I whipped over there, thinking I would scan whatever it was and go make dinner, but then I got to the welcome box:

"With music now available with a single, offhand click, it's easy to forget that songs are not born whole, polished and ready to play. They are created by artists who draw on some combination of craft, skill and inspiration. In the coming weeks, the contributors to this blog -- all accomplished songwriters -- will pull back the curtain on the creative process as they write about their work on a songs in the making."

Whoa, right? If you are a creator of anything that takes craft, skill and inspiration, you've got to feel gratutide for The New York Times taking the energy and space to devote to such a thing.

I continued to read the particular post, which was written by Roseanne Cash, daughter of the legendary Johnnie Cash. It's a really lovely tribute of a daughter to a father, and a musician to a musician, and it also manages to capture the poignancy of the recent inaugurantion. Here is a tiny piece of what she says:

He looked back at me over his shoulder and gave me a little self-satisfied smile. He started tapping his foot, swinging his ankle back and forth, in a way that was so iconic, so him: the sultry internal rhythm of a boy from the Mississippi Delta. He was grooving with the band. He let another 8 bars go by as he settled in, and then he sang the first line of the song. After the show, Dennis, the drummer, came up to me. “I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget the way he tapped his foot,” he said. I never will, either.

Further down on the blog is another amazing post by Suzanne Vega, where she chronicles the thought process behind the writing of a song about her Puerto Rican roots.

The whole thing reminded me what a very personal thing it is to make art.

Give a Little to Get a Little

I stumbled upon the coolest website, called 29gifts.org. It's a community of people who have committed to giving something to someone for 29 days in a row. The "something" could be time or money or talent or advice or opportunity. It turns out to be an incredibly inspirational site. I mean, they have Refigerator Poetry contests on there! And the whole idea of giving is so key for artists. The book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde talks at length about this idea -- that making art falls more in the realm of gift giving than it does in the realm of commerce. I signed onto 29gifts.org and started giving away books. Three weeks before my novel comes out, I am so trapped in this "sell, sell, sell" mode of thinking that I forget the simple pleasure of just having a reader. Giving them away is my antidote.

Cross Pollination: Jewelry from Poetry

This is a picture of a bead. Isn't it spectacular? It was made by jeweler Pam Brisse, who is often inspired by words. Here's what she says:

"Inspiration is the easy part, it’s everywhere! I find it in the obvious places, of course, like nature and other art works, but I also find a lot of inspiration in words and books. Children’s books speak to me the most - my son and I read a lot and there is always a story or illustration that says “make me into a bead!” For example, Dav Pilkey’s Dragon’s Halloween inspired my Spooky Halloween Tree beads last year. Charms for Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons inspired a line of bead charms a few years ago that were very popular – I thought, `wouldn’t it be great to have a charm for an easy life; everyone should have one' – and so that was that. And then there is the name of my business which was inspired by a poem of the same name by Kristine George – The Blue Between. I’d been searching for the perfect name for awhile. I wanted something not-too-specific, because I like to change directions every once in awhile, and I wanted something that spoke to living artistically. Kristine’s poem was exactly it, and it serves as a reminder of how I want to live my life as well. Movies too, have power to inspire my art. A couple of weeks ago I saw the Imax movie Mysteries of the Nile and the next day a whole batch of tribal/African beads were created. Currently, I’m back to one of my main themes, which is the ocean – starfish, octopus, sea urchins, sand and sea -- but it could change any time, because as I said, inspiration is the easy part; it’s the staying focused long enough to create something from it that takes work!"

Go visit Pam's site. She makes amazing stuff!

The Best Gift

My friend Beth Kephart, the novelist, whose blog at Beth-Kephart@blogspotcom is pure poerty, wrote the following post about my new novel. I asked her if I could re-print it here because it speaks so beautifully about the way that writing works in a reader's world. The fact thats she's writing about me is so lovely and humbling that it's just frosting on the cake. The gorgeous photo of the stormy ocean is by Beth, as well.

The morning after my mother passed away, the sky was every color—cranberry, orange zest, azalea pink, lemon peel. I told my dearest friends that this was proof of my mother's lingering presence, a peace offering after a terrible time. Several weeks later, a package arrived in the mail—a perfect knitted purse of sunrise colors. It was small, an ornament, to be hung not used, to be filled with nothing more than the essence it already contained, which was the love of my friend, Jennie Nash. Her time. Her thoughtfulness. It is a work of art that hangs here, in my office. I note its brilliance every day.

This morning I rose early to read Jennie's second novel, The Only True Genius in the Family. I was for many reasons feeling blue and not at all convinced that I could be lifted from the closed shell of myself. On a day I needed elevation (transformation), Jennie was once more there. I love this novel of hers—so quintessentially Jennie, which is to say honest, deeply felt, smartly paced, and highly relevant. Genius is the story of a woman named Claire (another Claire, I smiled to discover) whose daughter is an exceptionally gifted painter and whose father was a renowned photographer. Claire stands in the middle—a bridge, yes, a facilitator, maybe, and perhaps an artist, too, though she doubts herself, questions the career she's forged in food photography.Jennie's book is due out in February. I quote a passage here that reminds me of my own last Thursday, when I got out to the beach too late to catch the pink that I'd been chasing. Claire, like me, is a photographer, stalking the perfect picture of a sun-touched sea.

The sky gets light by small degrees. It is night, and then there is a moment when it is something else. I wanted to catch the sun itself, emerging over the houses, so I waited while the light rose. But when the sun peeked over the roofs, I questioned the moment. I waited one beat, then two. And then the sun was there, glaring bright in the sky. "Take it, take it," I told myself, but the sun kept creeping higher and I kept stalling and then it was too late.

Font Inspiration

I receive a monthy newsletter from a website called My Fonts, and it's one of the coolest things I read. It highlights new fonts that are being made, and profiles the people who make them, and shows interesting ways that fonts are being used in the world. You get a whole new level of undersanding about how the way that words look can impact their meaning. I am not an artist, and if I were an artist, I think the last thing I would choose to do would be to draw entire alphabets by hand, but this stuff is fascinating! Every month, the editors profile a different font designer, and the profiles always have a great sense of history and energy. I love them. The newest edition of the newsletter, which you can read by clicking here -- My Fonts -- highlights the top ten fonts of 2008.

Metroscript -- the font featured in the baseball design, above, and the number one font on MyFont's top ten list -- was designed by New York lettering artist Michael Doret who owns the digital foundary Alphabet Soup. Here's what MyFont says about Doret's inspiration: "Other than the Coney Island midway, the inspiration for his work has come from such diverse sources as matchbook covers, theater marquees, enamel signs, early and mid-20th century packaging, and various other American artifacts." See what I mean? There's something about that that is just cool.

What is Beauty?

Yesterday I received an email, forwarded to me by one of my best friends, about a world famous violinist who played for 45 minutes at a Washington D.C. metro stop. For his efforts, he got $32 worth of donations, some of it in pennies. Most passersby didn't stop, didn't appear to listen, didn't care. I was astounded by this little piece because it's an idea that's been in my head for a long time -- this actual idea about a famous musician playing in a subway station -- and here it was written out and being passed around the Internet. I learned that the email snippet originated in an article in The Washington Post . It was written by Gene Weingarten, a Times staff writer, and to my utter chagrin, I learned tht it had won a Pulitzer Prize. How could I have missed a Pulitzer-Prize winning article on a topic that had already captured my imagination? I have no idea. At any rate, it's a spectacular piece of writing about an amazing experiment. It all happened more than a year ago; I obviously missed it then. Thanks to Internet forwarding, I got it now -- and I'm not letting it go! There are so many fascinating things to say about this idea, this article and this experiment, and I will be trying to say some of them over my next few posts.

First....the basic question. IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD? Here's how Weingarten frames it near the start of his piece:

"It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?"

So...what do you think? If you're someone invovled in a creative act of any kind -- knitting, sewing, beading, writing, movie-making -- what is your definition of beauty?

Revolutionary Creativity

Listen to what Kim Hermanson, author of Getting Messy: Awakening Creativity in the Classroom, says about creativity and passion, and then visit her website at http://www.aestheticspace.com/:

"I've been pondering the wisdom of the heart lately. Rather sheepishly, the activist Che Guevara once said, `...at the risk of sounding ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.' While we all may not wish to become revolutionaries, we can't create anything without the heart and its passion. We have to care about something to create art, or anything else of real value.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where left-brain, rational intelligence is much more likely to dominate over the wisdom of the heart. Why? Because the heart doesn't operate in the realm of slick words and explanations. It doesn't have words ready and available to explain or win arguments. The heart's terrain is much deeper; it operates below the level of words. Its realm is that of images, metaphor, and sensory impressions and it speaks to us only when we make space for it, and when we immerse ourselves in beauty."

The artwork, above, is a paper sculpture by artist Jen Stark. Go to her website at www.jenstark.com and be prepared to be AMAZED.

Inspiration Improvisation

There's an Improv group at my kid's high school, and even though neither of my chidren are involved in it, I love to go and watch them perform. It's so much fun to see what happens when a scene or a story unfolds in real time, right before your eyes. It's also fascinating to try to understand why it works. The actors aren't following a script that's been written on a page, but their actions are still very controlled. They achieve that control by accepting whatever happens on stage as the truth of the moment. It's spontaneous, in other words, but it's not an accident.

Improvisation plays a role in many different creative acts. Today, painter Michael Sorgatz describes the process of how he goes from nothing to a painted canvas as series of insprovisational steps. Check out his work at http://www.michaelsorgatz.com/ and you'll immediately understand what he's talking about. His paintings buzz with energy and color. You can feel exactly what he means when he says that he likes to leave room for spontaneous acts and happy accidents -- but his process is hardly accidental:

"Inspiration is a direct result of working. I'm hardly ever inspired by just lounging around the apartment. I paint cityscapes, so as I'm walking around the city doing my daily errands I'm always scouting for interesting subjects. I've got a mental catalog of places that have a unique character and every few weeks I go on a picture safari to document these locations. While shooting pictures I stay open to whatever activity is happening and just keep clicking away.

The second type of inspiration comes in reviewing the photos. There's always some sort of

happy surprise waiting, an odd perspective or some intriguing interaction on the street that managed to get captured in a background. This is really about recognizing a special moment - not passing over a photo that's a little blurred or oddly cropped. Since I use the photos as a rough sketch they can be technically imperfect - I actually prefer the imperfections because they've got more potential.

The third form of inspiration comes when the paint (finally) hits the canvas. I paint in a style that relies on improvisation, so there's plenty of room for unexpected occurances which are also inspiring. I really enjoy exploiting the spontaneous acts that divert me from the planned route. An unexpected color combination or a drawing error can lead to something wonderful. I don't get too attached to my original concept of an artwork; everything is flexible and open to change. A painting never finishes exactly the way I expect, which makes everything much more interesting. Ultimately I'm inspired by the endless possibilities in every artwork."

The painting, above, is Sorgatz's Union Square Farmers Market, Acrylic on Canvas, 16"x20" . See http://www.michaelsorgatz.com/ for purchase information.

Mastering the 15 Second Pitch

Do you love to paint (or writer or draw or knit or sew or take pictures) but hate to TALK about what you do? Do dread cocktail parties where people might ask the quesiton, "So what are you up to?" Many creative people who are amazingly literate on paper or canvas become utterly tongue-tied when forced to talk about their work. I myself have often responded to the question, "What kinds of books do you write?" with a mouthful of babble. If you know what I mean, you need to check out Lauren Allen 's website, The 15 Second Pitch, and try out the widget that lets you devise a simple, easy way to talk about what you do. You can also read the 15 second pitches of 16,000 other folks. Although some of them are from people in decidedly un-creative jobs, it's still incredible cool.

If you happen to live in New York and would like to attend a workshop with Lauren Allen AND get a special discount, scoot on over to http://creativetimes.blogspot.com and sign up.

Music Soothes the Writing Soul

On today's Los Angeles Times music blog, Pop & Hiss, there is a piece by August Brown called "The Noisy Muse." Brown is the editor of an anthology called Noise, which includes work inspired by the New York band, Sonic Youth. Writers have always been inspired by music -- here's a link to a BrainyQuotes pages featuring some great things writers have said on the topic

-- but what about actually listening to music while you write? Brown says he uses music, particularly the instense music of Sonic Youth, to bust out of writing blocks: "You have this idea of the writer in their Parisian garret, but so many of them need something to stir them...When I can't figure out how to get from point A to point B, I always play music, and Sonic Youth is like a puzzle that offers many different routes for an author to travel."

I love that idea -- even though I can't personally do it. I have to "hear" the words I'm writing, and music gets in the way. But it makes me happy to think of a writer sitting there letting the music free his words.

Almost Instant Inspiration

While you're thinking about making New Year's resolutions to become more healthy, fit and organized, why not make a few to become more creative, as well? Perhaps you'd like to carve out a space to make your art, or squeeze a little money from your budget to buy supplies, or maybe it's just a matter of taking the time to slow down enough to let creativity happen. It's hard to be creative, after all, when you're running around checking tasks off a list. For a fantastic example of how to let creativity into your life in 2009, here's mixed media rtist Jane LaFazio of Plain Jane Studios describing one of her favorite paths to inspiration:

"My husband and I like to go camping (just overnight and just right here on the Southern California coast.) We reserve a campsite on one of the beach parks, we pack the car, drive 45 minutes or so to the campsite, pitch the tent and walk across the street to the gourmet grocery store to buy dinner to go. Then we eat it at our campsite while enjoying a glass of wine. Next morning, we get up early and walk the beach……picking up shells and treasures along the way. When we return to our campsite, we spread our findings out on the table and draw them. Totally delightful! We pack up the tent around noon, and come home feeling refreshed and happy."

To hear more of Jane's creative wisdom check out her blog at http://www.janeville.blogspot.com/. If you happen to live in the San Diego area, Jane will be teaching art classes at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2009.