Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
Make a mini Kusama light installation to get this out of your system.
bathroom Kusama exhibit
You are now in possession of ancient secret knowledge.
DAY 27 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
• Make one hokey Dalí-like painting
Here’s an article about Dali.
Of course I always start with grandiose ideas and then at 10pm when I still haven’t done it, I have to find something easier.
DAY 26 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
• Make a lithograph, etching, or woodblock print.
Here are some that I like. And I’ve done this before…
Hugo Guiness
Hokusai
DAY 25 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
• Make a wooden bowl on a lathe, by carving.
Here’s a video, it’s long enough I FEEL like I learned how to use a lathe.
DAY 24 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
• Prune a tree.
Here’s a video on pruning a tree.
https://youtu.be/RStePe5lU7o
DAY 23 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
• Sew pieces of fabric together.
This is something I already know ;)
DAY 22 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Exercise: Forget Being a Genius and Develop Some Skills
I think all artists should:
• Build a clay pot.
Once upon a time, I made a clay pot…
This is my son’s ceramic plate. He’s better at ceramics than I am.
DAY 21 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice
For instance, on the subway, while waiting or sitting around, practice drawing your own hands. Lots of hands on the same page, hands over other hands. Other people’s hands, if you want to. You can draw other parts of your body that you can see, too. But you have to look and then describe with your pencil or pen what you see. Don’t make it up! Mirrors are fine, even if you want to draw only where your cheek turns into your mouth. Play with different scales, make things bigger, smaller, twisted.
At first I was just going to draw my mouth, but then I kept going with this ugly but fairly accurate no makeup drawing of me the the mirror.
DAY 20 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice
For instance, on the subway, while waiting or sitting around, practice drawing your own hands. Lots of hands on the same page, hands over other hands. Other people’s hands, if you want to. You can draw other parts of your body that you can see, too. But you have to look and then describe with your pencil or pen what you see. Don’t make it up! Mirrors are fine, even if you want to draw only where your cheek turns into your mouth. Play with different scales, make things bigger, smaller, twisted.
Matty’s hands.
Evidently this is the only shape my left hand can make.
DAY 19 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
Negroni 5pm
DAY 18 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
Empty cappuccino cup with milk froth marks. Really one of the worst things i’ve ever done. Looks like a globe.
DAY 17 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
reflection in mirror
DAY 16 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
DAY 15 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
No drawing today. Cleaning out a box of postcards, I found these…
Corita Kent
Matty’s postcard from Scotland that kind of reminds my of Corita Kent verbiage. “What sense is responsibl(e)” “all or Nut’n” and “what is responsible for balance”
DAY 14 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
This time I used Procreate, which I’m only just learning to use. This was waiting in the car for M to finish tennis.
DAY 13 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Next, draw the square foot in front of you. This can be tight, loose, abstract, realistic. It’s a way to see how you see objects, textures, surfaces, shapes, light, dark, atmosphere, and patterns. It tells you what you missed seeing. This will be your first masterpiece. Now draw the same square foot from the other side. You are already becoming a much better seeing machine and you don’t even know it.
DAY 12 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Now do this on another surface, any surface, to know what kind of material appeals to you. Draw on rock, metal, foam-core, coffee cups, labels, the sidewalk, walls, plants, fabric, wood, whatever. Just make marks; decorate these surfaces. Don’t worry about doing more. All art is a form of decoration. Now ask someone what ideas they get when they look at what you’ve made. They’ve just told you more about what you’ve already done. If the other person sees it in your work, it’s there.
I asked my husband and kid separately “what ideas they get when they look at (the tomato)”
Both said: Illuminati and Jack o’Lantern
Husband: money, tetris shapes falling into place, mehndi, inadvertent writing.
Kid: Strawberry, llama, Kite, star, angry, surveillance, ambiguity, squishy
DAY 11 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Step Two: How to Actually Begin
An instruction manual for the studio.
Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil
Don’t worry about drawing. Just make marks. Tell yourself you’re simply diagramming, playing, experimenting, seeing what looks like what. If you can write, you already know how to draw; you already have a form of your own, a style of making letters and numbers and special doodles. These are forms of drawing, too. While you’re making marks and drawing, pay attention to all the physical feedback you’re getting from your hand, wrist, arm, ears, your sense of smell and touch. How long can your mark go before you seem to need to lift the pencil and make a different mark? Make those marks shorter or longer. Change the ways you make them at all, wrap your fingers in fabric to change your touch, try your other hand to see what it does. All these things are telling you something. Get very quiet inside yourself and pay attention to everything you’re experiencing. Don’t think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange. Hide secrets in your work. Dance with these experiences, collaborate with them. They’re the leader; you follow. Soon you’ll be making up steps too, doing visual calypsos all your own — ungainly, awkward, or not. Who cares? You’ll be dancing to the music of art.
Carry a sketchbook with you at all times. Cover a one-by-one-foot piece of paper with marks. But don’t just fill the whole page border to border, edge to edge. (Way too easy.) Think about what shapes, forms, structures, configurations, details, sweeps, buildups, dispersals, and compositions appeal to you.
I didn’t like what I was doodling until I happened upon the eye slit looking like another eye, and then seeing how many eyes within eyes I could make. I have to thank the cat for that one ;)
DAY 10 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work
Even in a psychiatric hospital, Yayoi Kusama is prolific.
Sister Corita Kent said, “The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.”
"Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all." Sister Corita Kent
I have tried every way in the world to stop work-block or fear of working, of failure. There is only one method that works: work. And keep working.
Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” How many times have you been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it? It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away.
I do feel like the times I feel most adrift, it’s because I don’t have a project to work on.
I tried doing another copy of a masterpiece, this time the aforementioned Kusama. I definitely felt a meditative mindset doing the repetition. Also I wasn’t worrying specifically about each eye, but “maybe the next one will be better.” Eventually I got tired of doing it and gave up before I really had the full page of eyes.
Yayoi Kusama
my version
DAY 9 - HOW TO BE AN ARTIST /
Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work
Even in a psychiatric hospital, Yayoi Kusama is prolific.
Even in a psychiatric hospital, Yayoi Kusama is prolific.Photo: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Sister Corita Kent said, “The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.”
I have tried every way in the world to stop work-block or fear of working, of failure. There is only one method that works: work. And keep working.
Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep. I do all the time. Jasper Johns famously said, “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” How many times have you been given a whole career in your dreams and not heeded it? It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away.
My friend, photographer Rohina Hoffman, and I went to the Kusama installation at the Marciano. And we were talking about how it’s not that “Even in a psychiatric hospital, Yayoi Kusama is prolific” It’s BECAUSE she’s in a psychiatric hospital that she is prolific! SO MANY women we know who are artistic are basically squelched due to familial obligations. Getting dinner on the table for the family ranks higher than what can be easily diminished or dismissed as playing around with a hobby. If you aren’t being paid for it (yet) it’s seen as goofing off and cannot be prioritized.