4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2023
⏱️ 58 minutes
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This week, we're discussing what it means to be an artist. Renowned music producer Rick Rubin has written a book in which he argues that the artist is a conduit for creativity comes from source energy. Therefore, he says, the artist’s job is to open themselves up as much as possible to receive whatever wants to come through them. His book is "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" and it really is about life as well as about art. In this episode, we pull out four key ideas and offer our own perspectives - but we should stress that the book really needs to be read in it's entirety. We recommend that you do that and then think about your own reaction to his words.
Here are the quotes we discussed:
Number One
“The goal is not to fit in. If anything it is to amplify the differences, what doesn’t fit, the special characteristics unique to how you see the world.
As soon as a convention is established, the most interesting work would likely be the one that doesn’t follow it. The reason to make art is to innovate, to self-express, to show something new, share what’s inside, and communicate your singular perspective.”
Number Two
"If you have just one seed - a very specific vision you want to carry out - that’s fine. There is no right way. You might consider the possibility however that it could end up being a limitation because you are no longer taking advantage of all that you have in you. Being open to possibility gets you to a place that you want to go that you may not know you wanted to get to.
If you know what you want to do and you do it, that is the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of an artist. The surprises along the way can expand your work and even the art form itself.”
Number Three
"You may sometimes wonder ‘why am I doing this? What is it for?... in the end those questions are of little importance. There doesn’t need to be a purpose guiding what we choose to make. When examined more closely we might find this grandiose idea useless. It implies we know more than we can know."
Number Four
“Art made by accident has no more or less weight than art created through sweat and struggle. Whether it took months or minutes does not matter. Quality isn’t based on the amount of time invested. So long as what emerges is pleasing to us, the work has fulfilled it’s purpose….. If you like a result, accept it graciously, whether it arrives in a sudden flash or after long bouts of difficult labour.”
Mentioned
Rick Rubin's book is called "The Creative Act: A Way of Being"
Here is the Johnny Cash video Louise mentioned (tissues required) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI
Rick Rubin interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_szemxPcTI
See Alice Sheridan at:
@alicesheridanstudio
Find more about Louise Fletcher:
@louisefletcher_art
Credits: "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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0:00.0 | Hi and |
0:05.0 | welcome to episode 198 of art juice, |
0:10.0 | this is honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me, Louise Fletcher and me Alice Sheridan. |
0:19.0 | And today we have a little bit of a different topic. We're going to we're going to discuss and maybe argue with apparently one of the |
0:28.3 | world's most influential people so so don't listen to us. But anyway, before we get to that, and it's we're going to talk about creativity, but through the lens of somebody else who's written a book, we'll get to that shortly. What have you been up to, Alice? |
0:45.6 | It's been a bit of a slow week as we've just been discussing. I've had to have a bit of hospital |
0:51.8 | poking around, which was tedious it's nothing worrying don't worry but it you know those kind of things come along and I interrupt your week so I've had that and then I've got to go back. And yeah in between I've just been thinking a little bit more about |
1:08.0 | colour and the way I use colour and you know that addiction that artists have to taking photographs of walls and you know we all wonder |
1:17.0 | like you know why we so obsessed with it and and and it's really interesting how I think that is exactly sort of what I'm doing with the paint, not the peeling element of it, but that visual use of color in that visual color mixing. So I've been digging a little bit more into |
1:36.8 | color theory and I haven't yet found the answer as to why that in itself is so satisfying, but I've been reading a very good book I can't remember who it's by |
1:46.9 | called Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green but it's a different way that makes sense of |
1:58.8 | the way we see colours and how colour mixing works, basically not thinking about colours as mixing two together in order to create a new color but the way that colors actually serve to |
2:05.7 | absorb different light and leave what's left. So I've been playing around with that and |
2:11.7 | we had the meeting for our open studio which I'm doing again in June |
2:16.7 | So that was quite nice to be back in that fold again and that's what I've been up to what about you |
2:26.0 | And I've been up to. What about you? I have been making some terrible paintings. Good. Absolutely awful. |
2:28.0 | So after an initial spur of, yeah, I've got this now, I'm brilliant, I can just make paintings. It's easy. Yeah now. It's just a disaster |
2:37.6 | Not quite sure what I'm going to do about that but actually this book we're going to discuss has given me some food for thought on what I might do to get myself out of it. |
2:47.4 | But so I've done some terrible painting and also been organizing very mundane and boring but I've been |
2:55.1 | organizing some marketing because some people might have heard about the |
2:59.4 | changes coming to Facebook and Instagram and how apparently who knows if it actually happens but they're |
3:06.6 | saying they're going to make people pay to be verified. |
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