8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: Jovial June

Chapter List

  • Linked Out

    There is a flavour of professional writing which I find myself trying to avoid veering into.

    If you’ve ever been on that professional networking social media platform you know exactly what I’m talking about, those articles that talk about leadership, career growth and always seem to find a new way to write an article called what I learned about insert-business-trope-here from insert-random-life-experience-there.

    On site, those articles get lots of likes and reshares, but off site many assume it is all a lot of performative mugging, a bit vapid, and almost certainly driven by a lot of generative AI.

    So when a guy like me sits down to write a daily article on creative motivation or skill development or artistic niche hunting, it would be real easy to drift into the lane where all those aforementioned articles persist.

    That’s not my goal.  Far from it, in fact. It’s the reason I don’t pepper this site with advertising. I want to be more than that. Better than that. And in fact if I were to suggest that what I’m doing here is writing articles with that similar flavour but also with a lot more homespun sincerity and (what I’m hoping is) experiential insight then you might be closer to understanding where I’m coming from with this writing project.

    Still, the problem remains: writing optimistic micro-essays about creative pursuits is a genuine niche and one that has drawn the ire and ridicule of many who see it, when poorly or hastily done, as an disingenuous to the spirits of voice and purpose and method.

    It becomes just more slop.

    But I think I can avoid that.

    After all, just because fast food commodified and ruined the hamburger, doesn’t mean you won’t find a delicious example of one somewhere else, right?

  • Gaps Spaces

    It’s a sad reality of the modern age that art (usually) doesn’t pay very well.

    Artists at the top of their game can, of course, find great fame and wealth in creative practice, but the reality is that most of us are struggling to hone skill, practice our crafts, write our fiction, and justify expensive equipment purchases in the gaps and spaces of otherwise busy lives.

    Work schedules. Parenting duties. Trying to eat well. Doing housework. Commuting. Nurturing  relationships. All of it is important and barring some sociopathic commitment to leaving it all behind to focus on watercolour painting or recording a solo album, most of us are working with the leftovers.

    Malcom Gladwell wrote about a famously misinterpreted theory of the ten thousand hour rule in his book Outliers [1], which a lot of people took to mean if you do something for ten thousand hours then you will become an expert, tada, wipes hands, mission complete. But the actual basis of that theory is that the people who became successful simply had access to ten thousand free hours because of the support systems in their lives: someone else was paying the bills, caring for the kids, and washing the dishes—all while they honed their craft.

    Limited free time to pursue creativity is the norm. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I do have some ideas.

    Under the category of Gaps & Spaces, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Photo Flow

    I have been on the socials preaching a little bit on the gospel according to carefree photography.

    I’ll elaborate.

    I go on the various photo sharing feeds and I follow a lot of photographers. A lot.  And after a while it all starts to look the same. Beautiful close ups of animals. Gloriously lit mountain ranges. So many photos of our downtown cityscape with one of our two iconic bridges in the foreground that I start to feel like no one will ever find a way to photograph them in an original way ever again.

    My hot take comes down to the value of skill in combination with something almost more important: flow.

    All these photographers are amazingly skilled: they can meter a scene, frame a shot, and get the balance of colour and shape and tone just perfect—and sometimes super-realistic. I applaud it. Sometimes I even envy it.

    But I also know that those folks are almost certainly leaning into gear and time and technology to find those pictures.

    My challenge has long been this: take the dumbest, most terrible camera you can find—or use your phone—and find great shots while in the flow. I run the trails and pause for literal seconds to snap interesting shots. But there countless ways to replicate this approach in your own way: snap pics in motion or in the moment. Ditch the technology. Leave the expensive gear at home. Give yourself seconds, not minutes or hours to wait out the scene: be in the moment, rather than waiting for the moment.

    That’s where the interesting stuff is. 

    Because if all these amazing photogs could bring that skill and talent to more interesting subjects, tell stories as well as presenting perfection, just imagine the amazing photography that might emerge.

  • Post Conformity

    The funny thing about semi-retirement is that while one is still not completely decoupled from the workforce, I have noticed there is a marked volume of indifference that I am able to cultivate and nurture with regards to the performative creativity that I once did when I was younger.

    I can paint for the sake of painting.

    I can sketch things that are interesting to me.

    I can take photos of curious and interesting things.

    And I can do all these things not worrying that it somehow doesn’t fit perfectly into a portfolio or a personal brand.

    The ironic thing, this dismissal of external validation and approval, this refusal to fit into a box for some generic employer evaluation that might skim through these works in the future to see if I’m a good fit for their open job, means that I am probably producing better—or at least more authentic—art.

    It’s one of those lessons that takes a lifetime of creative output to learn and embrace, and once discovered is probably something that would have benefited me vastly more than I realized at the start of my career.

    Honed skills are great, but voice and authenticity are the work of a lifetime, after all.

  • Green Echoes

    I went to the park to sketch the other day. It was a whim. I wasn’t planning it, but the moment arose and I grabbed onto it. 

    I got there, set up, and pulled my collection of pens from my bag.

    All but one pen was dry.

    And the only pen that was not dry was a thick, green-inked brush pen.

    Let me add to this tale of artistic frustration that my pen of choice is usually a black ink fine-liner. This is pretty much the opposite of that is a clunky green ink shading pen—a pen that I really only brought along because I thought I might get bold enough to add a splash of colour to my spring-inspired sketch, whatever that might have been.

    Yet there I was, sitting in the park having added a few lines of black to the page before the blank ink fully failed and, well, I needed to finish the sketch.

    Art, I truly believe, is as much story as it is product. The best art, the best photos, the best music, and the best anything is threaded through with an artistic narrative that gives it meaning beyond the final product. Polishing a perfect piece of art that has no story behind it may work for adding commercial value, but artistic value?

    Less so. Arguably.

    Admittedly, the story of my dried up pen collection is not the best story, and my minor inconvenience is hardly a tale of hardship worthy of the ages… but the story of why I now have a clunky sketch made with a green-hued felt brush in my sketchbook is arguably better than the sketch itself. 

    That alone is worth it.