Stylus Gadget

Just ordered the X Sty­lus Touch to help me explore art/drawing/whatever else I can dis­cover on my iPad. Excited to use it — Back­o­rdered until June (boo).

Art in itself or art of message?

Saw this video the other day and I so much iden­tify with it.  In 5 min­utes, this guy give advise to me as an adult, as an artist who strug­gles with cre­ative blocks, as a leader, and as a human.  In those respects, I’ll let the video speak for itself, but in regards to the art, I’m in the process of deter­min­ing what it takes to cre­ate art that stands on its own or art that is sup­ported by the mes­sage.  For exam­ple, Beethovens “Moon­light Sonata” is a bril­liant piece of art that stands on its own.  It’s not overly com­pli­cated musi­cally, its not long and tech­ni­cal, it’s just right.  The song illic­its a response from a huge major­ity with­out know­ing the mean­ing of the song, with­out know the title or any­thing about it.  If you really just lis­ten to the song it speaks for itself.  On the other hand there are pieces of art like Jeremy Cowart’s Por­trait of Christ which you could argue stands on its own (I, for exam­ple, have 4/100 of this print hang­ing on my office wall) but if you watch the video, the mes­sage of the art piece means so much more.  Almost like the com­bi­na­tion of the art and the mes­sage makes it even bet­ter, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I love to take pic­tures but often find myself tak­ing pic­tures of peo­ple.  The response I get make me a lit­tle sad from an art per­spec­tive.  If I take a per­fect photo from per­spec­tive of light­ing, com­po­si­tion, color, white bal­ance, etc… what mat­ters to the per­son view­ing the por­trait is how do I (or my kids, etc…) look.  A “good” image  is really one that the pur­chaser likes as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a per­son­al­ity (which is unseen to a stranger).

Some think that a good pho­tog­ra­pher is one who brings the sub­jects per­son­al­ity out, and I’m not dis­agree­ing, but I think I have decided that I’m going to go out and shoot with two dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties.  I  enjoy shoot­ing fam­i­lies, etc… so I’ll con­tinue pur­su­ing the “bring out the per­son­al­ity thing” but I enjoy even more cre­at­ing art that has mean­ing.  I mean this from a pho­tog­ra­phy per­spec­tive as well as a design perspective.

Bot­tom line, I want to cre­ate art that has mean­ing, not just mean­ing to moms and dads by bring­ing out their child’s per­son­al­ity in a por­trait, but I want it to mat­ter to the world.  To some­how improve ones under­stand­ing of life, of Christ, of rela­tion­ships, or what­ever really mat­ters in life would be the great­est accom­plish­ment to me.

At the Dal­las Lifefinder tour lead by Jeremy Cow­art I got a sec­ond alone with Cow­art and asked him how I can move for­ward in shoot­ing or cre­at­ing art that mat­ters, his advise to me was to just get out and do it, to just be there.  I’ve taken that to heart since then and con­tin­ued to process it.  Guess I need to fol­low his advise and Chuck Close who says “Inspi­ra­tion is for ama­tures, the rest of us just show up and get to work.  Every great idea I’ve ever had grew out of work itself.” “Never let any­one define you with para­me­ters that don’t apply to you.” And “when you have a prob­lem, break it down into tiny pieces.”

Thanks Chuck Close and Jeremy Cow­art for help­ing me work this out.

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