For the Hungry Artist
Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Pinterest.
There’s a lot of social media out there…and I like to consume and get ideas from all of them.
This infographic from Confused.com is hilarious–and true. I might be (happily) guilty of one of these… Continue reading “Social Media Zombie?”
Facebook. Twitter. Linked In. Google+. Its a social media perfect storm out there isn’t it? Even outside the ever increasing social media realm, it seems there’s something new every day. The new technology. The new procedure. The new method. The new ideology. The new initiative. The new leader. The new diet. The new relationship.
The new .
I love ‘the new.’ I love discovering and exploring and asking ‘what if.’ Yet, in my line of work, I’m continually teaching and encouraging a ‘back-to-the-basics’ approach. As creatives, it’s easy for us to get gaught up ‘the new,’ sometimes to our detriment.
Enter Jon Steel via Ideasicle, one of my favorite think-tanks on creativity and the creative process. Steel is a British advertising giant and all-around creative thinker, creative doer type.
He’s one of my new creative heroes. Chew on this from Mr. Steel:
“It seems to me that we’re absolutely obsessed as an industry with the stuff that’s new and all the stuff we can do. . . I bet there were people shopping in Pompeii who shopped at the places they did to buy their bread or whatever they were buying because they were treated the way customers get treated in the Apple store today. We have got to remember that there are fundamental principles of human nature, of human instinct, the things that make us happy, the things that piss us off, the things that make us excited. Those are the same today as they’ve always been.”
And…
“The great communicators, the great books, the great movies, and the great advertising campaigns are all based on those human truths. It’s why you can take Romeo and Juliet and shoot it in the modern day with Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s why you can take classic Greek literature and make modern versions of it. Because the themes that they’re talking about are timeless. I just hope that people will remember with all this change [technology] going on there are still some fundamentals and things that remain the same.”
What do you think about Jon Steel’s approach to creativity? How do we blend the new with the old in our creative process?
Here’s some good food for your creativity from this past week (and leave your favorite link in the comments for all of us to enjoy!)…
What are some of your favorite links that fed your creativity from this past week? Share them with all of us in the comments below! (one link per comment or it might get spammed).
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There are multiple mediums of artistic expression: oil on canvas, word on paper, film on screen, status update on Facebook.
Regardless of the medium, at times our initial vision may get distorted by a glitch (or two) during the creative process. The clay is too dry. The paint is low quality. Writer block. Fear. In the case of a Facebook update intending to be clever, the distortion emerges because of not proofreading.
A simple example, and yet it proved a point to me:
Our blunders often create something unexpected.
Isn’t that what we want as creatives? We love the unexpected. Something new. Something fresh. Something surprising and refreshing. Sometimes we must allow ourselves the grace to make mistakes during the process. If we don’t, we will never create. We will never share. Others will never enjoy our work.
Conversely, when we do give ourselves grace in the process, we enjoy the immense satisfaction of creating and sharing our work. It’s very refreshing. Very rewarding.
Isn’t it time to dive in? Time to make some mistakes? Time to blunder?
Who knows, the end result may be more interesting, beautiful, and unique with the mistakes than without them.
The ear, nose, and throat doctor-guy informed my talking parts that they got to get the vacation they wanted: two weeks of no talking while they rested and I learned to communicate with no phonation. It was odd being at the checkout in Wal-Mart, trying to communicate with the cashier that (using gestures and read-my-lips word-mouthing) “I’m not talking.” Like an English-speaking American in a foreign land, I was treated like a non-native right there in my local Wal-Mart. She proceeded to talk louder and slower, assuming I was deaf or didn’t speak Wal-Mart-ese.
As creatives, haven’t we all been there?
We’re standing at the checkout line in life with insights and ideas we want to share, yet we can’t seem to find our voice. We stumble around, make a few mistakes, and start to feel emotionally flooded. We don’t often know how to get our creations into the world.
Do I blog? Should I tweet more? What about making a video? I gotta get an agent…
Welcome to the land of Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed-land takes us on a journey similar to a roller coaster ride: quick thrills, getting nowhere, back to where we began, no real progress.
Too many choices often leads to no choice at all. I think the glory of all this social media stuff is that we have multiple ways to express our ideas, rants, and opinions. At times, our intense desire to express them amounts to sitting in front of a television as one show bleeds into another; we watch other people’s handiwork rather than creating our own.
If you’re reading this, you are a creative. You have something to express. The only way to so it is to dive in. Right now.
Make all the mistakes you want. And keep making them. Maybe your blog posts will stink. Maybe your next ten auditions will get you nothing but rejection. Maybe your painting will never be in a gallery.
But what if your writing didn’t stink, you got the job, and your art changed how someone saw the world? What if you moved forward? What if you got off that roller coaster and took a step in a new direction? What if your movement created momentum?
“Half of the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” Thank you Mr. Robert Frost.
What do you have to share with someone today? How are you going to express it?
The sky is not the limit.
Were those really the ‘good old days?’
