The quality of what you do matters to the quality of the whole. You get into production work because one day in your own past you decided that you don’t do what you do without a personal investment. What you do defines who you are.
Read MoreOne Day in Santa Fe
In the era before smart phones or even PDAs, data either resided in your brain or as marks on paper. I obviously hadn’t memorized a stack of numbers, and my notes weren’t with me. Things will happen that even the best plans will not be able to forestall. It’s not that a person can’t allow themselves to feel frustrated or even angry about circumstance. It’s that an experienced person can learn how not to let those feelings completely overshadow everything else.
Read MoreMETEOR
Humans and meteors, we’re both traveling. Most days are just like the day before, essentially traveling through irrelevant void: cold, dark, mostly alone.
Read MoreUNKNOWN SPACES
The thing about creative excellence is that it’s always an undiscovered country. You know it’s out there, you know it’s real, you’ve seen plenty of evidence. Maps to reach it, however, often stop at the edge of the world.
Read MoreMY SOCIAL MEDIA DISAFFECTION
For people who try to live their lives in creative spaces, the trivialization imposed by a steady diet of social media has the effect of dissolving yet one more support in the foundations that enable sustained focus. That’s effectively like allowing thieves inside our mental castles in broad daylight: who can tell the thieves from the masses of other roving thoughts crowding the main hall of our consciousness?
Read MoreLOSS OF MEMORY
Creative works are hardly ballast against the drowning, downward pull of recent events. Art is not “the answer”, especially considering how time and time and time again the human collective seems to eschew creative options in favor of destructive ones. It’s inevitable, perhaps, to wonder: does art really matter in the face of humanity’s often malevolent inclinations?
Read MoreTRANSFORMATIONS (or, Why an Essay about the First Gulf War appears in a Blog about Creativity)
Performers on stage? Soldiers ready for battle? Protesters lining the streets? That’s the thing about moments of transformation. There are usually multiple, simultaneous forces at work. In this month’s blog post at 1AU Global Media, we consider moments of transformation, when real world events intersect with lives pursuing creative expression.
Read MoreIRL (In Real Life)
I don’t want to draw from abstractions about the world to create new realities. I want to draw from the real world in order to create abstractions. My feeling is that this is a thought can apply to everyone, no matter what you do for a living.
Read MoreSHIELDS UP!
Artists and accountants are not always motivated by the same forces, but there are often more crossover forces between artists and accountants than first glance might suggest. Clearly this is a matter more about aesthetics; I cannot fathom a life in accounting, but I’m sure glad I know a good one when I need her to sort things out. Success for artists, accountants, and everyone else too, is often a function of figuring out how to get something completely done.
Read MoreA FEW WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Where a picture maybe worth a thousand words, a few well-placed words can make all the difference to giving that picture lift and heft and context all at the same time.
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