There is no short-cut to art, one has to work hard, be open and flexible in your mind, keep the child alive inside you, and through a whole lifetime be ready to learn new things and – of course – be mentally prepared for a hard punch on your nose – especially when you think you are doing well.
Bente Borsum
Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden
There are artists who will use the right brain argument as an excuse to be irresponsible and flaky. The goal however is to use the whole brain.
Joan Desmond
Ask your work what it needs, not what you need.
From Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland
I love seeing other people’s studios. Everyone’s so different in how they organize their space. Also, I covet flat files in a big bad way.
They were surprisingly affordable, but as I wrote in another post, the drawers stick and had to be sanded down. I guess that’s why they were so inexpensive!
Also, I had the TV set on top of them, but had to rearrange things when I realized the television was bowing the top! I could hardly open the drawers after a few weeks.
Ironically, now I hardly ever watch the TV. The drawing board now faces a big screen computer and I watch movies on that.
On the whole, those flat files were a good deal, they just can’t take heavy weight on top. They were about $500 from Home Decorator Collection where they are sold as map chests.
I ended up removing a lot of furniture and extras from the studio. After a few years, I realized I didn’t need two drawing boards and another table. I try to keep things simple.
I shall have to scout Home Decorator Collection for some! My TV has become one gigantic monitor for DVD-watching. And Hulu-video watching. And my streaming Netflix. TV is so damaging to my productivity, that I never installed it in my new place. There’s something about the constant stream of content, with no break, that sucks me in, and I find myself watching 10 hours of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares before I know it.
We must be on a psychic continuum, because I am an information junkie too, which is why the internet is so seductive! Without timers and other monitoring aids, I can become completely sucked up in news and articles on the web. I had to start forcing myself to turn off the TV news, or I would watch it 8 or 9 hours a day.
And don’t get me started on cleaning shows. Clean House and How Clean is Your House. They’re like crack to me. One whiff of Pine Sol and I am on lost to the world. I never tire of finding out new ways to use lemon juice.
Here was the post with the direct link to the Home Decorator Collection website and info about the map chests.
http://adistantsoil.com/2009/04/04/doctor-strange-fan-art/
So, Pine Sol is your procrastination, is it, Colleen? Heh.
For me, one whiff of a book will do it.
Yeah, see, that’s the thing about the internet. It’s full of books and magazines. I can read Vanity Fair, or Salon, or the New Yorker any time I want. That is boffo.
And there are many rare books I was not able to justify buying for my collection that are now in the public domain and freely available at The Gutenberg Project, or other free book sites. For example, I was never able to find all of Rose O’Neill’s novels at a reasonable price.
Well, I can read them for free, now.
PS: to say nothing of the research I can now do. I was able to do almost all of my research for my new book on the net. The new York Historical Archives, the national immigration records, The US Historical Archives. At my fingertips.
Awesome.
Ever read Rands in Repose? His post on N.A.D.D. (Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder) is painfully funny and true. I’m afflicted with it, myself. That driving, burning need for more information is both good… and really, really bad.