“Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success.”
via notational
“…keep drawing, make A LOT of drawings, and don’t worry about making bad drawings.”
reblogging samspratt:
“I graduated from art school 2 years ago, here are some things I think I’ve learned. In the words of my current client, Donald Glover: “I’m not saying this thing is true or not, I’m just saying it’s what I learned.”
“Creativity Is Recession Proof” were the words plastered over the novelty T-shirt I bought in college, and it turned out to be the most honest piece of clothing I have ever, and likely will ever own. Sadly… it also shows my nipples.
The Internet is the world’s most powerful tool. With great power, comes… you know the rest… or maybe you don’t, since you’re scrolling through facebook or tumblr. The way you share creations is almost as important as the creations themselves.
Advertising is worth the shame. My first illustration job out of college paid 20 dollars an image – a feeling not unlike getting mugged by a paraplegic sloth – yet every time those 20 dollars filled an empty wallet, my name and sites were sent off into the ether to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. Now some of those people pay me 100x-1000x that for illustrations. Why? Maybe because I make nice things, but more likely? Because with every underpaid image I made, I made someone, somewhere, remember my name.
Don’t “fuck the haters”, embrace the hivemind. The “haters” will come in many forms: sometimes with criticism based on personal preference, sometimes with nonsensical attacks that seem like youtube commenter vomit, and sometimes with actual advice disguised as “hate”, saying what you’re doing wrong and what you could be doing better. Not everyone is a sage, not everyone is right, but they areworth listening to, if only to put a pin in to see if you hear something like that again. You will literally never be above improvement. There is no plateau, keep climbing, and pay attention to what’s around you, even the guy shouting through a megaphone while jackhammering directly underneath a potential avalanche.
Waiting for inspiration is like waiting at the DMV: It lasts forever and if you don’t know enough, you’ll probably still fail at the end. Nike your problems away by just doing it… “it” being something. You can wait and wait for good ideas, you can consume books, magazines, websites, and music by the truckload, desperate for something to trigger some sort of eureka moment, but if you just write your shitty lyric down, lay your shitty brush stroke down, or take your shitty photo, you’re on the right to track to actually making something good. I have made many terrible things, some of which remain terrible but served as stepping stones to better things, some I transformed into rather nice things, and I learned more about myself, the world, my work, technique, appeal, and a million other tiny factors from simply doing something, even when it failed.
Work to play. Be an idiot when you’re young, like… college-young. I was quite an idiot in college but I could have been even more of one and probably have been just fine. However, when you leave… leave the party there. If you give up a lot when you leave your childhood behind, and put your all into boring grown-up things like “work”, “money”, and “responsibility”, it genuinely doesn’t take much time to get the freedom you had in college back. The only difference is that instead of keeping the party going to distract yourself from a job you hate and rent you can barely pay, you can kick back and enjoy the party when you choose to on your own terms, if you even care about doing so at all. In other words: Stop it with this YOLO nonsense, why you are taking a filthy-rich, diamond-selling recording artist who was on a Canadian TV show’s acronym of wisdom to mean: “be an idiot always and forever because fuck it, I’m young”, is beyond me. He worked hard to be able to wear $6000 socks, he didn’t “You Only Live Once” his way to them.
There are a lot of people more talented than you, that’s something you should know, but never accept. I’m regularly embarrassed by the quality of my work when I look at the hordes of artists superior to me, but you have time to spend, knowledge to gain, and skills to practice for the rest of your life. Your place amongst the world has no finality to it, you can always be more.
A friend who will stab you with a knife in the front is worth your weight in unicorn blood. Friends will back pat and backstab, occasionally becoming bloat and baggage, but if you should be so lucky as to find a person who cares about your success enough that they will outwardly knock you down a peg or ten with the truth so that you can better yourself, don’t toss them for the easier friend. Even lone-wolf-alpha-dog-max-payne-type people need a little help along the way.
Karma is a pretty damn good business model. I have hunted for clients before. I have barked up their trees, aggressive and hungry for work, failing to get it every time. I have also done a lot of personal work, just for fun, but executed seriously. Many of these would be labelled as “fan art” – depictions of pop-culture icons with my own odd twist that I put out into the world – some of which I pour dozens of hours into. Traditionally, when I finish work with a client, I ask: “So, how did you find me?” almost every time the answer is: work of mine they saw on the web that I did for shits and giggles. I put good in, and in time (thanks to item #2), I get good out. There is no science or stability to this beyond the notion that if you work hard enough and if you can make your work seen, you will be rewarded. These are the naive musings of a 23 year-old, remember?
“Art” is a shitty word that people will tack on to anything these days. Just focus on creating, whatever that may be, however that may be, do it well, and do it because you love it.”
(Source: samspratt)
via adullblog
“DRAW FROM LIFE. All the time. Draw naked people. Draw clothed people. Draw pets and buildings and teacups and trees and draw all of it all the time. Put it in a book that you keep in your pocket. Steal life from the realm of the living so that the worlds you create might also live.”
“Never, ever, ever be without a notebook and something to write with. Phones are great for lots of things, but nothing beats paper and pen for complex thoughts, notes and sketches. I wrote an entire issue of PLANETARY in a notebook on a long three-leg train journey once.”
“I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”
via BrainPickings
“A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.
But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.
Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”
And I say to them, “Fuck you!”
One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.
When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.”
via austinkleon
reblogging nevver:
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” — James Joyce
“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire
“Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anaïs Nin
“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller
“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet
“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” — Samuel Beckett
“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” — Michel Houellebecq
“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” — Kurt Vonnegut
“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” — Julio Cortázar
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka
“Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño
“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound
“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.” — David Foster Wallace
“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov
“…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman
“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” — Samuel Beckett
“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. ” — J.D. Salinger
“Unfortunately the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That’s our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn’t go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves… The artistic impulses inside of us are suppressed but not gone.
They can often reveal themselves negatively in the form of jealously. You know the song, “I Would Love to be on TV”? Why would we love it?
TV is full of people who do what we wished to do but never got to. They dance, they act, the more they do the more they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. “He just can’t act.” “You call that singing?” “She can’t hit the notes.”We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous not because we are evil but because we have little artists pent up inside of us. That’s what I think. What should we do? Right now we need to start our own art. Right this minute. Turn off the TV. Log off the internet. Get up and start to do something….
… In my writing class I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class, many who don’t major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can’t write so I give them a blank sheet of paper and a theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There’s one condition. You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them. “Come on! Come on!” They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly lots of thoughts cross your mind. The artistic devil creeps in. The devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can’t write. “People will laugh at you. This is not good writing. What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!” It will say a lot of things. You have to run so fast the devil can’t catch up.
The really good writing I’ve seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline but from the 40 to 60 minutes they write without knowing what they are writing. And at this moment the nagging devil disappears.
So I can say this: It’s not the hundreds of reasons why one can’t be an artist, but rather the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists become artists because of the one reason.
When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art enemies appear on the outside. Mostly they have the faces of our parents or our spouses. But they are devils. Devils. They come to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question: “What for?”
But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold: “Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry to have fun without you.” that’s what you should say.
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
Paul Greer 