“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide whether it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make even more art.”
process
What are you looking for?
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”
Hourly Comic Day
Tomorrow is Hourly Comic Day, when artists the world over will make one comic per hour of wakefullness.
I intend to participate in this, although Sundays are usually hectic at my place.
Will let you know how it goes.
Norman McLaren: Pen Point Percussion
Norman McLaren explains how he makes synthetic sound on film. With an oscilloscope he first demonstrates what familiar sounds look like on the screen; next, how sound shapes up on a film’s sound track; and then what synthetic sounds sound like when drawn directly on film. This technique is also demonstrated in Dots and Loops.
Happy Birthday Mr. Lynch
image via
Yesterday, as well as being New President Day, it was the birthday of illustrious film maker David Lynch.
I recently finished reading his book “Catching the Big Fish“, a very personal account of his approach to creativity, and the role that meditation plays in it.
I have often felt that techniques like meditation may result in bland art, due to lack of “pain”, a deluded idea partly inspired by Captain Kirk (I’ll explain another time). Mr Lynch is a very good example of how this is not the case.
In the book he writes:
“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a a story, but they’re like poison for the film maker or artist. They’re like a vice grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”
Here is a little seen, very short film by Mr Lynch:
movie via Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
Belated birthday greetings to you, Mr Lynch.
Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven”
Five Resolutions for 2009
- Maintain self-maintenance
- Be Kind
- Simplify
- Make more stuff
- Integrate
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
‘stay with the things that draw you like a magnet’
“Fail early and get it all over with. If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers. You can abide in intimate relationships. And you can have a worthwhile career. You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life.”
Paul Greer 