8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

A
BLOG
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NOWHERE

  • Patient Portals 

    As I write this I’m preparing for a little end of summer vacation. We’re jetting off for a week for a family adventure. And I’m bringing my sketchbook, of course.

    I came back from Japan last year with a dozen urban sketches in a notebook, and it has become one of my favourite souvenirs. And yet, invariably, when I show anyone their first question is always: how long do these take you?

    Sketching isn’t a camera, obviously.

    It’s not fast, and so saying that I can draw pretty fast is a relative expression of time investment. I can draw pretty fast, but that means I usually spend less than thirty minutes with my pen sketching out the details of a scene.

    Again, it’s not a click and go. It’s find a place to sit, out of the way of the bustle, and then work through the scene, chewing out the shapes and shadows, poking in the details, and trying to get as much as I can before either I attract an audience or annoy my ever-patient wife.

    Urban sketching is the opposite of urgency.

    I may have enjoyed it in my youth, and maybe even been pretty good at such forms, but I think my patience would have been less available to the pages.  Sitting somewhere with no pressure to keep exploring the bigger place but instead soaking in the details of just one spot, one scene, one moment… that’s the persistence of maturity, I think.

  • Success Blindness

    Do you remember why you started chasing your art?

    Do you remember why you started taking photos, painting landscapes, composing music, or scratching out short stories in a dimly lit cafe?

    I’m sure a few people have stumbled across this blog and consider it a bit of navel gazing, culture-vibing, self-help sludge from a procrastinating wannabe, and maybe they’re right.

    I spend a small chunk of my day, nearly every day, doing some reflective writing on my hobbies and interests, and I do it for a very specific reason: I want to rekindle the memory of why.

    I want to keep the fire lit under the reasons I do any of this at all.

    I’ve felt burnout. I’ve encountered the darkness upon a long and lonely path and I know what it feels like to forget why you bother doing interesting things. Burnout cares not for strength of spirit or power of will. It only knows of despair and indifference. It wants you to forget the why. It wants you to overlook the origins of your passion and limit your recollection of the reasons you started out on the adventure in the first place.

    I stave of the darkness by writing these little short essays, often to remind even just myself of the answers to all those questions. I recall the beauty of a sketch gallery I wandered into in Dublin. I remember the vibe of yearning to play the violin whilst watching the symphony one winter evening. I recall listening to a beloved children’s author speak of the transcendent joy of the written word. 

    All of it lights against the darkness. All of it reminds me of successes lost to my own blindness.

  • Hobby Hope

    One piece of retirement advice I have been hearing for years—even though I am more than a decade away from officially hanging up my work hat—is get a hobby.

    My grandparents were knitters. My grandfather spent his life as a mail carrier working for the the postal service here in Canada. Then he retired and bought a whole lot of cheap yarn and made mittens for the neighbourhood kids. So. Many. Mittens.

    We spend our working years being productive for other people, for our employers, and suddenly it seems as if the default is keeping productive for ourselves and our sanity.

    I write in a similar overlapping topic about being Late & Ready, the ideas of picking up new skills late in life as a creative pursuit, what that means about our expectations, and what it contributes to the output. 

    But also I find myself thinking a lot about nurturing hobbies and creative life skills that will keep me active, happy and interesting when I’m the old grey-haired guy, it’s me, with his laptop in a cafe.

    I certainly won’t be running marathons anymore, so planning on having skills and interests that fit with my age, health capacity, and the demands of the craft is a two-sided coin of figuring out what works as age creeps in—and learning to start letting go of everything that doesn’t work.

    I’m just here pondering this stuff now, thinking aloud because I know it’s inevitable, but then maybe I don’t have a clue what’s really in store for me.

    Under the category of Hobby & Hope I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Duty Bound 

    Reactive sharing killed my motivation for a while. 

    I was making art through a prolific period of newness. I was amped about sketching anything and everything. I was painting daily, though so little of it was anything but practice art and rough drafts.  But I was damn proud of it, and after I’d finish a piece I’d lay it out on a table and snap a pic with my phone and upload it to Instagram.

    Reactive.

    Oh sure, I got likes. Mostly from impressed family members or friends who were easily impressed by student-grade art attempts by someone they knew.

    None of of it was terrible, of course, but none of it was gallery grade either.

    I wasn’t sharing my best. 

    I was sharing everything.

    Reactive sharing.

    Draw, paint, dry, pic, post. (And sometimes I barely even waited for the dry.)

    It killed my motivation.

    Posting became performance.

    Performance became duty. 

    Passion became obligation to feed the algorithm.

    I remember going for a long walk one chilly winter evening because the pressure had built up in my heart around this sense of responsibility I felt to the dozen or so people who were liking everything I posted, and it was driving me nuts. I wasn’t even enjoying it anymore. I was walking and thinking, thinking and walking, and I decided there in the snowy streets that I was going to break the thread. I was going to stop posting art.

    I wasn’t going to stop making art, but I wasn’t going to push it out into social media because doing that part of the creative process had gotten out of hand and was ruining the joy for me.

    I still draw. I still paint. I still make something that I’m excessively proud of and I’ll post it, but I do it for the right reasons, I think, and skip the duty to perform almost entirely these days.

  • Publish Owner

    Publish on your Own Site…

    …Syndicate Everywhere.

    Leave it to Cory Doctorow to drop mention[1] of a content phenomenon that has been haunting my efforts for over a decade. 

    Among the most insidious of things that social media does to creators (and that’s a long list) is fool people who write words and make—shudder—content to share online, is to quietly neglect to remind any of us that we lose ownership the second we click the post button on any those sites.

    No really.

    They’ll pretend like you can edit and curate and delete and archive, but if you post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of a thousand other smaller platforms, they will hand wave around your ownership and rights, but in reality you have few.

    I call these places corporate social media for a reason: you are handing over your content not to a community of users but to the corporation that owns the software, server, and algorithms. They can show people what you created if and when they choose, they can censor you, and (as I have witnessed in the outrage rant by many creators over the years who have suffered because of it) they can delete your entire account for vague reasons that they may or may not choose to explain.

    We’re not going to change that.

    But Doctorow has an acronym for an idea I’ve been screaming from my blogs for years: POSSE or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

    Or simply, as a creator, it is incumbent upon you to figure out how to make your own central place to keep the things you make—a website, basically—and then syndicate, promote, link, cast, or otherwise surface from there, if for no other reason than you should keep control of ownership of it with every ounce of your digital strength.

    This is a cross-post from of Poets & Processors.