Art Flows in Cultural Pittsfield – Yankee Magazine
Nice article in Yankee Magazine blogsite about the Jump In! art show at the Lichtenstein in Pittsfield, opening Friday 9/4 at 5.30pm. I’m honored to be selected and included and pleased that Yankee managed to get that this is a photomontage and NOT the Colonial underwater, which was not my attempt to make political commentary back in 2006 but just something that came together that I thought was lovely and cool and was part of a show called “Tidal Forces” that I did back then, just a couple of months before Katrina hit!
Mari Provencher’s Circus Photos
Mari Provencher (www.mariprovencher.com) did a short internship at
Studio Two some years back and helped us out with shooting theatre in
the summer at Shakespeare & Co. She’s gone on to other things and is
roaming (apparently) around the country in and around circus culture.
She has a great gallery of photos taken of performers and performances
here http://www.mariprovencher.com/circus/# which is really
interesting and unusual. The image I’ve attached to this post is just
a knockout. Clearly, these are two performers taking a break, chatting
backstage, but their look is almost 19th century, and the lighting and
expression of the woman on the left is cinematic. This feels like it
would be at home in high-concept fashion book with its tension between
the mundane and the extraordinary. It makes we want to know more,
which is really (for me) the mark of an interesting photograph, a
moment in time that connects to a story. Great work Mari! I hope many
more people see this.
Word x Word
Third thursday in Pittsfield has a whole new dimension with wordxword festival. Thumbs up to Jim Benson, Jay P. Elling and all the other unsung heros behind this great move. I sat in on Hope Sullivan, Carrie Saldo and Juliane Hiam as they worked with a small group doing improv on their play in progress, which was a lot of fun. I don’t know if it will stick, but I think the Ben is going to get everything he wants and deserves! Great job Pittsfield. Creativity Lives Here.
Sienna Gallery – Innovative Modern Art and Craft
Sienna is a long-time client and friend of mine and Studio Two (www.studiotwo.com) and as a fellow small business entrepreneur, we talk a lot about the state of the universe that we work in. I’m hoping that we’ll be seeing big changes in Sienna’s web presence in the weeks and months ahead as we migrate aspects of her site from the elegant custom CMS that we built for her some time ago into the open framework of Wordpress. I’m encouraging her to build her strategy going forward around posterous as well (www.posterous.com) as I think that it is a terrific tool for integrating the communications that a business, institution or individual needs to make across the many different social networks, sharing sites and rich media sites. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and it is changing my habits around posting and communicating in big way.
One of the interesting aspects about the revolution taking place on the web today, the transition from technology to language, is that it rewards experimentation and participation like nothing else. You have to “play” within this space to learn it. Businesses like mine, that were formerly the gate-keepers to the web, have to learn to not only throw open the gates by building frameworks and foundations where our clients can play, but much like bringing up children, we have to encourage them to go outside and make their own mistakes.
The internet is a language now. Not a technology. Fluency comes with practice, experimentation, and making mistakes and learning by listening. We’re learning new words every day. Good Luck Sienna!
“Summer” by Edith Wharton – A film project.
My brother Carl has adapted Edith Wharton’s novel “Summer” into a screenplay and we are playing around with shooting trailers to demonstrate the locations, talent, and story for potential investors. I’ve set up a small site for the production here. It’s been a lot of fun playing cinematographer the last two weekends with the lovely and talented Ardis Barrow and good-looking Tom Frelinghuysen as well as a star turn with Chief Wilcox of Stockbridge playing Royall. Here’s some production stills.
Doing what I do
I recently returned from my 25th high school reunion. I went to the Hotchkiss school in Lakeville, CT. It’s a prep school, which implies a kind of privilege and pampering, but my experience was very different from that – an incessant 4-year grind of relentless deadlines, crushing pressures, and other unpleasantness that I won’t go into. In any case, it was interesting to compare notes with my old classmates, the “where do you live, what do you do, how many kids, etc.” type of conversation that one has at these events.
Some people have found success, some have found failure. Some have found within success a kind of failure. It was fascinating to see. One thing I carried away from it was a sense that the act of “doing” is ultimately more powerful than talking about it or paying other people to do it. I do things. I take photographs that do work for my clients, I build websites, I design brochures and ads (I should say “we” do that, at Studio Two, but I also “do” these things individually). I have a portfolio of 15 years of professional work that is uninterrupted, which turns out to be fairly unusual. Almost everyone else has had multiple careers, gone back to school, started and stopped businesses, lost and won. I’ve done some of that but there’s been a constant drum of producing work under the same flag throughout the duration.
Which has me asking what I actually “do”. I am good at most of these things, sometime very good. But I don’t specialize. I get taken places by the requests of my clients, who more than anything else define my path, which seems odd. I like to figure things out. I like challenges – doing something I haven’t ever done before. I like getting ahead of the curve.
The trouble is that while this is going on, I myself don’t progress towards a goal with the kind of focus that my clients do. I used to believe that the work itself would be its own self-fulfilling path, that if I did good work that it would lead down a path of ever-improving opportunity and development. To some degree this is true, but really it comes down to what direction I want to go in. My clients, for the most part, are happy to have me be there where I am, accessible and ready to work.
So I am examining what I do. This consulting work I am doing is part of that. I’m exploring a different type of relationship with the work and with people. It’s interesting, but also frustrating, as much of the time I think it would be easier to just do the work myself…which isn’t the point. It’s about showing the way, and doing some teaching, and seeing where it leads, and discovering new things that I didn’t know before.
I’m a lucky one. I know that much. Creativity comes easily to me, I’ve trained for it. I think that I would like to help more people find out what that feels like. To my old classmates, I wish the best – health, happiness, and fulfilling lives. I think that maybe if more of them were able to find the creativity that is inherently inside them that they might find that more readily.
Where creativity lives and where it doesn’t…
So we’re on this family trip around NY state to celebrate the end of August and the last gasp of summer. We drove out to Syracuse, Rochester, on to Niagara Falls, into Canada and I’m writing from East Aurora, NY, at the Roycroft Inn which has got to be one of the nicest places I have ever been. More on that later.
What this is about is my observations on how the creative economy works, and what happens to communities where it doesn’t.
Upper/Western NY State is a rough place. Rough weather, long distances, sketchy economy, wasted industrial landscapes. But it is also lovely, beautiful, and fantastic. I went to school at Cornell, in Ithaca, NY, about midway across the state, so I’ve been here before.
We stopped in Rochester and visited the Eastman house museum, home of Kodak founder George Eastman and a mecca for photographers. A great estate, a wonderful exhibit, and a truly living museum (the organ player on the full-size pipe organ in the house was a breath of fresh air). Eastman BUILT photography as we know it and it is amazing to see the impact, scale and scope of his works. All along I was thinking that he was really the first true information age entrepreneur, for what is a photograph but simply a record of a moment in time? A stunning achievement. Creativity in action. The city and the company have both faltered in recent decades as Kodak tries to grasp its role in the digital age. Will they come out the other side? Hard to say.
On to Niagara Falls. What a disaster. Never in my life did I imagine that you could visit a place so dysfunctional, so corrupted by its own potential as this one (at least in the USA). The falls themselves are magnificent, and your state of mind improves logarithmically as you come closer and closer to them. We went in, under and around them on the Maid of the Mist (great!) and the Cave of the Winds tour (also super great!). But the city. Oh my. Nothing but rape and pillage. No imagination, no creativity, no intention, no design has been applied to this poverty-stricken mistake in generations. The carcasses of discarded tchotke super-malls litters the main road. Actual barkers, on megaphones, yell at you through your car windows trying to sucker confused tourists into paid parking lots and souvenir joints. The state of NY is almost the most to blame, with amateurish attempts at crowd control aimed at delivering the maximum tourist load to the scheming concessionaires within the borders of the state park itself. My favorite was the crowd control barriers erected in such a way as to force you to NOT use the perfectly good public walkways but instead jam you through a cheesy “welcome center” of cacophony. Horrible. The saddest part is that probably 90% of the crowd are true foreigners, Chinese and Indian families with little grasp of English in many cases and even less ability to navigate this intentionally confusing situation. Why? Why is this? The falls are a metaphor for renewal, and purity, and all good things, and yet every effort is made to marginalize and hide them. Could a “creative economy” help this community? Probably not, because it is clearly in the hands of some powerful crooks. Don’t even get started on the Uber-horribleness of the Casinos. Deval Patrick should maybe make a trip out to Niagara Falls to see what we have in store for Massachusetts if we go that road.
Anyway, on to the good parts. We went up into Canada to Niagara on the Lake, a town so picturesque it makes Stockbridge and Lenox look dowdy and down-at-heels. This is the home of the Shaw Festival, a top-notch theater company that is threaded into the fabric of the town like you cannot believe. Three theaters, one in the town hall, encompass the place, and the brand is throughout. You GO to theatre in this town. Clearly. In addition, the town is landscaped beyond perfection, a side effect of the close proximity to the School of Horticulture down the road, which, with the participation of the Canadian Parks Service, keeps things coiffed beyond belief. Oh, and did I mention the 100+ vineyards that line the Niagara Gorge nearby? What is wine but value-added agriculture anyway? Creativity in action, this place is. I took a lot of notes.
On to East Aurora, home of the Roycrofters, a prime mover in the turn of the last century (1900) era Arts and Crafts movement. You can read their site, which lays it all out, but two things sprang to mind. The first was the extraordinary way that these people created a new economy for themselves based around a new aesthetic. It encompasses everything from printing, type design, graphic design, publishing, furniture design, lifestyle, and on and on. Could it be reproduced today? It may already be in some communities, but this broad-based approach seems unique at first glance. The second part is the revitalization of the community around the Roycroft assets late in the 20th century. This town woke up and smelled the coffee, and has poured every cent into bringing back the movement and what it created. It’s an interesting case of investing in that thing which makes a community unique, and special and I think it is working. The Arts and Crafts movement has established itself strongly in the American design space, and for this town to work to own the movement I think is a great idea. Again, creativity in action. Is there a way to design a chair? Sure, 4 legs and a back. Is there a way to design an Arts and Crafts chair? Absolutely, and for the right market, that chair is worth ten times as much.
I think that coming back from this trip that I can say that North Adams and Pittsfield and the Berkshires are certainly on the right track. Driving through these many blighted post-industrial communities in NY, you can see that the seeds of revitilization have to come from within. A community that doesn’t care for itself, its landscape, its people, and its assets, will not be cared for in turn by others. If you can bring some spark to your world, some color and vitality, and in turn you can create a will in the people around you to clean up, fix up and begin to think creatively about their own futures, everything starts to look brighter.
Small Treasures
In the midst of all the discussions I have been having for the last few months relating to Berkshire Creative and the development of the creative economy concept in the region and the state, it’s easy to overlook the fact that all of these ventures, whether they be Tanglewood, Shakespeare & Company, Interprint, or any other business in the Berkshires is always the result of an act of vision.
In business, we talk about entrepreneurship as something that can be fostered, learned and nurtured. We don’t often talk about vision: that idea of something that does not yet exist, and yet is worth pursuing. Tina Packer’s vision of a Shakespeare theatre in the trees at The Mount became over 30 years later this wonderful, expanding institution. Vision is a very distinct thing, an event of clarity that creates a series of goals ahead. In my life, I’ve always tried to set goals, and just about every goal I have set for myself I have achieved, but before I can set new goals for myself I need to have a vision of what can be and what will be, and sometimes when I try to look ahead the way seems cloudy. That fog is risk, the chances that we need to take, the obstacles we need to overcome to achieve our goals.
I’m working on a bunch of different visions right now, trying to sort out what the next markers will be, what the next goals. But I was inspired last night when I went to Mixed Company, down in Great Barrington to see Joan Ackerman’s “Mixed Company” put on “Indian Blood” directed by Kristine Wold. This tiny theatre has been running for 26 years under Joan’s singular direction and vision. It is a gem, a wonderful, local creative space where all my friends and neighbours get together and put on wonderful plays. It’s distinctly local, but none the less professional for being so.
Before the play we did some fun shots with the cast out on the railroad tracks behind the theatre. Thanks to Stephanie Hedges for putting the impetus for the shoot together. If you hear about Mixed Company and have a free evening, go see them. Creativity is living there.
Reaching the Aha! Moment
So I think that I’ve broken over to the other side. Since the HOW conference back in May, I’ve been focused on transitioning my thinking over to web 2.0. What does that mean? Well, in baby step terms, it means rethinking my relationship to the design, building and managing of websites, and rethinking the function of those sites and the way they communicate. That may not be very 2.0 from the West coast perspective, but it is plenty so from where I sit.
I’ve been full tilt into wordpress for this period. I settled on it as it seemed the most flexible yet WYSIWIG of all the blog and CMS tools I looked at. I’m no programmer, but I’ve been creeping my way in to .CSS and flexing my meager HTML skills.
At the HOW conference, Amy Goto spoke about the “Aha!” moment that she thought everyone needed to have to make that transition into the new web space, that moment when your skills and comprehension come together with your vision and it all starts to work. My “Aha!” moments have been fast and furious the last two weeks. I’ve set up 4 or 5 blogs (check out the new Arcadian site) and really set them up, applied some styles, activated fun plugins, worked around sticky problems. I’ve initiated my second wiki on a project with success and that is really starting to tick. I got all my laptops and miscellaneous machines talking to each other and now I can post and FTP at will from anywhere.
So what? I’m not sure yet. But if feels liberating. It feels like there might be a new pathway opening up here. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I like it. Creativity for me is about creating the shortest possible path between idea and expression. The web used to be a dead-end for me as a creative space because of the gap between those two actions. Now the gap is closing. I’ve always told people that to me using Photoshop is my paintbrush, my creative tool of choice. For most people it’s an esoteric, slightly foreign language, but for me it’s like being a concert pianist and playing the piano: it’s just what I do best. I’m not fluent in this space yet, more like I’m playing “Für Elise” in my ninth grade recital than it is like playing improvisational jazz. But hey, you have to start into the good stuff sooner or later or choose another instrument. Thanks Amy, I’m fully in the “Aha!”
This image is here because it has a piano in it. Oh, and the lovely Natalie. It reinforces my point somehow…
Lost my Muse
So I’ve been thinking about what’s next: what project to do, something creative outside of work. Last year I put two books to bed, at least in so much as they are “done” if still partly works in progress while time goes by. “The Muse” sits here on the shelf, with me not having the time or motivation to seek out a publisher after the first try. And “Imagining Shakespeare” is in legal limbo awaiting some discussions with Actor’s Equity so we can get permission to move forward with it. Boring.
Work is unrelenting and we’re in one of those cycles where the work tends to the mechanical. The creative is temporarily on hold and most of the bold ideas get shot down before they even take flight.
Sometimes you do work because it is in you and just needs to come out, sometimes you do it because of the conversations you have with other people and the spark of inspiration that happens. My personal work has never been very collaborative. I usually don’t understand what I’m doing until I’m doing it, and with work being mostly collaborative, it’s a nice break to do your own thinking.
Inspiration comes in many forms. I’ve had it come to me in the classic form of a person, a muse, in the past. There’s a risk to any new relationship which invigorates and tunes the mind. A muse has to be generous: generous with time, and concentration. A muse is someone who invests in you as you invest in them. A rare kind of relationship.
As a child, I had my muses in nature. Just being outside in a field was enough. As an adult, it’s the people in my life. And it gets hard to find those people, and to be with them, and to take the time to know something about what is ticking in them and between you.
So what’s with the pomegranate in the image? I’ve always liked the poetic symbolism of the pomegranate, that ancient fruit so revered in classical times and mostly forgotten now except as an anti-oxidant. It’s a little bizarre, and strange to eat, but so very good. This photo I took a year ago working on the Muse book sticks with me because the fruit has gone over, and is drying out and slightly dessicated, and reminds me of the insides of an old clock. It’s a symbol for the state of mind I find myself in right now.
What’s next? I don’t know. Maybe it will come to me. In the meantime, read this nice post on the creative process from LA artist COOP.
Creativity is a muscle.
I often talk to people about one of my pet-peeves: Talent. Talent is one of those things that when you are a child people say “Oh, he’s got talent” or “You’re so talented!” when really what they are responding to is that you learned a particular skill more quickly than they expected. For years I struggled with this idea that some are “talented” and others are not. I always enjoyed photography growing up and my brothers and I had a darkroom in the bathroom where we made prints and so on, but I was often disappointed by my photos. Around the end of high school I decided I didn’t have the “talent” to be a professional photographer and set my cameras aside.
Some years later, I began to use photoshop 1.0 on scans of images I had made. I quickly realized that it wasn’t a lack of talent that was making my photos less than good, but a lack of skill and access to a high-quality lab! Photoshop was that lab. I could take a mediocre exposure and tweak it a bit and *snap* it would be better.
When I first started my career as a designer and photographer, many of the projects that came our way took me weeks to conceptualize and invent around. Now, I often can see the solution to a project within moments of hearing the client describe what they are trying to do. This transition has convinced me that creative thinking is, like so many things, a “learned” skill. We practice at sports endlessly drilling to learn how to best hit a tennis ball, but we rarely think about practicing at thinking, or creating.
Much like training at sports, training the creative muscle can be painful, can leave you sore, and can take a lot of time. I have found that the best way to keep the creative muscle in shape is by approaching every creative opportunity with a free, open mind. Letting my intuition and experience work on a solution with a free hand always creates good solutions. Sketching is a great way to explore a creative solution. I’m not one for a solid rendering, just a gesture, a scribble to get the idea across and record it. I find that photoshop is my creative space of choice, a place where I can bring together different elements and see how they play. When I’m working a design or a logo I like to work on many versions at once and just see which ones “rise to the top” naturally.
I’m bringing this up because I think I’m finally having an “aha” moment in relation to many things web 2.0 after this last weekend working on my blog and other pages. You need to understand the tools and the workspaces you have before you can use them, and I finally feel like I am getting a handle on these things and that the space is starting to sing.
Creativity is a muscle. You just have to keep working it out.
On that note, Check out Julieanne Kost’s website. She’s the Senior Photoshop Evangelist at Adobe and spoke at the HOW conference we were all at lately.
Getting Unstuck.
So for a little while this blog was down when I blew it up during an update. Working again now but still some bugs to be worked on. I’m hoping to get “unstuck” with this exercise and move into web 2.0 land and beyond. I know that it’s really becoming something that we need to focus on for our clients. I went to this great presentation by Kelly Goto from Gotomedia about this topic. You can read her thoughts about this here.
Great article: 1000 true fans
This article by Kevin Kelly is really something. I hope he writes a book on this topic. It’s been completely refreshing to my brain to have read this. For years I (like many creatives) have struggled with the “blockbuster” barrier to entry, the idea that you need to either write “Harry Potter” or don’t bother. As an artist, I’ve found I make my living on many small hits, not one big one, and that work and creativity is a continuum. The premise of “1,000 true fans” makes so much sense, and makes success as a creative more tangible and possible. I urge you to read it. And watch out for indications that I may be trying to make YOU a true fan soon….Link to Kevin Kelly
