Posts from the ‘For Artists’ Category

Good Read: Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

I recently finished reading the book entitled, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind by Jocelyn K. Glei and Scott Belsky.

This book explores a few facets of the creative life — increasing your idea generation; dealing with perfectionism; managing procrastination; and working through creative blocks, which are all common themes that artists face regularly.  Most of all, there are many insights from Seth Godin; Dan Ariely; Gretchen Rubin; and Steven Pressfield, among others who share their expertise.

Some of my favorite quotes from this book are shown below.

“It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility.  While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal.  Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen….Only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact in what matters most to you.  I urge you to build a better routine by stepping outside of it, find your focus by rising above the constant cacophony, and sharpen your creative prowess by analyzing what really matters most when it comes to making your ideas happen.” -Scott Belsky

“Everybody who does creative work has figured out how to deal with their own demons to get their work done.  There is no evidence that setting up your easel like Van Gogh makes you paint better.  Tactics are idiosyncratic.  But strategies are universal, and there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken.

The strategy is simple, I think.  The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.

There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice.  For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place — in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art.”  -Seth Godin

“Step by step, you make your way forward.  That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful.  You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work.  Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day.  One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future.” -Gretchen Rubin

“Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project.  When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.” -Gretchen Rubin

If you are a creative, I highly recommend reading this book — there are many great insights and words of wisdom!  The biggest take away for me, from this book, is to maintain a regular daily art practice in order to keep moving forward and staying inspired.

Good Read: Art Inc. by Lisa Congdon

I recently finished reading Art, Inc.: The Essential Guide for Building Your Career as an Artist by Lisa Congdon.  This was a good read!  This book offers a concise guide for anyone seeking to start or enhance their career in art, with actionable tasks and helpful tools.  Lisa Congdon’s writing is clear, easy to understand, and inspiring.  I especially enjoyed the interviews with other artists that appeared throughout the book.  I also enjoyed reading the information relating to exhibitions and gallery representation.  The information contained in this book was very helpful.

So, if you are a creative, I highly recommend reading this book!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the word.” ~Albert Einstein

Good Read: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

During our vacation, I read a few books and I also reread Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.  I always enjoy Anne Lamott’s books.  Although this is book is mainly for writers, I found that her words are transferable to any creative discipline.  Below are some of my favorite quotes from her book, and perhaps you will find her words inspiring, too.

“E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’  You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way.  You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.  This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.  You need to start somewhere.   Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.  A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down.  The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up.  You try to say what you have to say more accurately.  And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or eve, God help us, healthy.”

“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop.  You can’t — and, in fact, you’re not supposed to — know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.”

“You may need someone else to bounce your material off of, probably a friend or a mate, someone who can tell you if the seams show, or if you’ve lurched off track, or even that it is not as bad as you thought … But by all means let someone else take a look at your work.  It’s too hard always to have to be the executioner.”

“That’s how real life works, in our daily lives as well as in the convalescent home and even at the deathbed, and this is what good writing allows us to notice sometimes.  You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear.”

“So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push up our sleeves, and begin again.”

“Writers tend to be so paranoid about talking about their work because no one, including us, really understands how it works.  But it can help a great deal if you have someone you can call when you need a pep talk, someone you have learned to trust, someone who is honest and generous and who won’t jinx you.”

“And I don’t think you have that kind of time either.  I don’t think you have the time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.”

“If you look around, I think you will find the person you need.  Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic.  You’ll know when the person is right for you and when you are right for that person.  It’s not unlike finding a mate, where little by little you begin to feel that you’ve stepped into a share that was waiting there all along.”

“Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems.  Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer.”

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”

“You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time.  You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when  you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.”

“The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madam or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work.”