Vol 1 April

BREAKINGTHE BLOCK

PricingYOUR

work

7 CRAFT ACTSrea

sons to go to

ARTSchool

DISCOVER THE POSSIBILITIES

Artist spotlightDALE CHILHULY

BLOW HARD

FINDING THE LIGHT:Making it in Theater

DISCOVER THE POSSIBILITIES

Vol 1 April

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7 Brea

king t

he Bl

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Price

your

work

19 Find

ing th

e ligh

t- mak

ing it

in the

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33 Craft A

cts- G

etting

hired

Redesi

gn your lif

e: Med

itatio

n 2

Prose

& Passi

on: Book o

f the M

onth 13

On tour: b

est City

for yo

ung Artist

s 17

Breakin

g the B

locks- A

rtist B

lock 25

Building Br

idges: Im

portant o

f Men

tors 29

TRY IT

! - Tools o

f the T

rade 39

CONTENTS

45 Blow

Hard Ar

tist s

potlig

ht: Dale

Chihuly

2

Artist

Block:

Overco

ming Adver

sity

Even though the academic research on mindfulness meditation isn’t as robust as, say, nutrition or exercise, there is a reason why it’s been around for literally thousands of years. And we’re starting to get a better understanding of why it seems to be beneficial for so many aspects of life, from disease and pain management, to sleep, to control of emotions. For starters, let’s define what mindfulness is: A Perspectives on Psychological Science study described it as “the nonjudgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment.” With that in mind, here are 20 reasons why you might want to consider incorporating mindfulness meditation into your daily life. And for our full coverage on the topic, click over to our Mindfulness Meditation page.

REDESIGN YOUR LIFE20 Benefits of Meditation

1. It lowers stress -- literally. Research published just last month in the journal Health Psychology shows that mindfulness is not only associated with feeling less stressed, it’s also linked with decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

2. It lets us get to know our true selves. Mindfulness can help us see beyond those rose-colored glasses when we need to really objectively analyze ourselves. A study in the journal Psycho-logical Science shows that mindfulness can help us conquer common “blind spots,” which can amplify or diminish our own flaws beyond reality.

3. It can make your grades better. Researchers from the Univer-sity of California, Santa Barbara, found that college students who were trained in mindfulness performed better on the verbal reasoning section of the GRE, and also experienced improvements in their working memory. “Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with widereaching consequenc-es,” the researchers wrote in the Psycho-logical Science study.

4. It could help our troops. The U.S. Marine Corps is in the process of seeing how mindfulness meditation training can improve troops’ performance and ability to handle -- and recover from -- stress.

5. It could help people with arthritis better handle stress. A 2011 study in the journal An-nals of Rheumatic Disease shows that even though mindfulness training may not help to lessen pain for people with rheumatoid arthritis, it could help to lower their stress and fatigue.

6. It changes the brain in a protective way. University of Oregon researchers found that integrative body-mind training -- which is a med-itation technique -- can actually result in brain changes that may be protective against mental illness. The meditation practice was linked with increased signal-ing connections in the brain, something called axonal density, as well as increased protective tissue (myelin) around the ax-ons in the anterior cingulate brain region.

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Amanda L. Chan

7. It works as the brain's "volume knob." Ever wondered why mindfulness meditation can make you feel more focused and zen? It's because it helps the brain to have better control over processing pain and emotions, specifically through the control of cortical alpha rhythms (which play a role in what senses our minds are attentive to), according to a study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

8. It makes music sound better. Mind-fulness meditation improves our focused engagement in music, helping us to truly enjoy and experience what we're listening to, according to a study in the journal Psychology of Music.

9. It helps us even when we're not ac-tively practicing it. You don't have to actually be meditating for it to still benefit your brain's emotional processing. That's the finding of a study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, which shows that the amygdala brain region's response to emotional stimuli is changed by meditation, and this effect occurs even when a person isn't actively meditating.

10. It has four elements that help us in different ways. The health benefits of mind-fulness can be boiled down to four elements, according to a Perspectives on Psychological Science study: body aware-ness, self-awareness, regulation of emotion and regulation of attention.

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11. It could help your doctor be better at his/her job. Doctors, listen up: Mindfulness medi-tation could help you better care for your patients. Research from the University of Rochester Medical Center shows that doctors who are trained in mindfulness meditation are less judgmental, more self-aware and better listeners when it comes to interacting with patients.

12. It makes you a better person. Sure, we love all the things meditation does for us. But it could also benefit people we interact with, by making us more compas-sionate, according to a study in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers from Northeastern and Harvard uni-versities found that meditation is linked with more virtuous, "do-good" behavior.

13. It could make going through can-cer just a little less stressful. Research from the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine shows that mindfulness coupled with art therapy can successfully decrease stress symptoms among women with breast cancer. And not only that, but imaging tests show that it is actually linked with brain changes related to stress, emotions and reward.

14. It could help the elderly feel less lonely. Loneliness among seniors can be dangerous, in that it's known to raise risks for a number of health con-ditions. But researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that mindfulness meditation helped to decrease these feelings of loneliness among the elderly, and boost their health by reducing the expression of genes linked with inflammation.

15. It could make your health care bill a little lower. Not only will your health benefit from mindfulness meditation training, but your wallet might, too. Research in the American Journal of Health Promotion shows that practicing Transcendental Meditation is linked with lower yearly doctor costs, compared with people who don't practice the meditation technique.

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16. It comes in handy during cold season. Aside from practicing good hygiene, mindful-ness meditation and exercise could lessen the nasty effects of colds. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Health found that people who engage in the practices miss fewer days of work from acute respiratory infections, and also experience a shortened duration and severity of symptoms.

17. It lowers depression risk among pregnant women. As many as one in five pregnant women will experience depression, but those who are at especially high risk for depression may benefit from some mindfulness yoga. "Research on the impact of mindfulness yoga on pregnant women is limited but encouraging," study researcher Dr. Maria Muzik, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. "This study builds the foundation for further research on how yoga may lead to an empowered and positive feeling toward pregnancy."

18. It also lowers depression risk among teens. Teaching teens how to practice mind-fulness through school programs could help them experi-ence less stress, anxiety and depression, according to a study from the University of Leuven.

19. It supports your weight-loss goals. Trying to shed a few pounds to get to a healthier weight? Mindfulness could be your best friend, according to a survey of psychologists conducted by Consumer Reports and the American Psychological Association. Mindfulness training was considered an "excellent" or "good" strategy for weight loss by seven out of 10 psychologists in the survey.

20. It helps you sleep better. We saved the best for last! A University of Utah study found that mind-fulness training can not only help us better control our emotions and moods, but it can also help us sleep better at night. “People who reported higher levels of mindfulness described better control over their emotions and behav-iors during the day. In addition, higher mindfulness was associated with lower activation at bedtime, which could have benefits for sleep quality and future ability to manage stress," study researcher Holly Rau said in a statement.

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How Any Artist Can Price Their Art for Sale

Alan Bamberger

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Pricing your art is different from making art; it's something you do with your art after it's made, when it's ready to leave your studio and get sold either by you personally or through a gallery, at an art fair, online, at open studios, through an agent or rep-resentative, wherever. Making art is about the individual personal creative process, experiences that come from within; pricing art for sale is about what's happening on the outside, in the real world where things are bought and sold for money, and where market forces dictate in large part how much those things are worth.The better you understand how the art market works and where your art fits into the big picture of all the art by all the artists that's for sale at all the places where art is being sold, the better prepared you are to price and sell your art. Just like any other product, art is priced according to certain criteria-- art criteria-- and these criteria have more to do with what's going on in the marketplace than they do with you as an artist. They're about how people in the art world-- people like dealers, galleries, agents, publishers, auction houses, appraisers and experienced collectors-- put dol-lar values on art. You have an idea of what your art is worth, the market has an idea of what your art is worth, and somehow the two of you have to get together on a price structure that makes sense.

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Let's take a non-art example of how market forces dictate prices. Suppose you see a 2001 used Toyota Corolla with 180,000 miles on it advertised for sale and priced at $45,000. The owner is probably not going to sell that car. In order to sell a used Toyota Corolla with lots of miles on it, you have to price it according to certain criteria, used car criteria. In the same way, in order to sell art, you have to price it according to art criteria. Learning what these art criteria are and understanding how they apply to you is essential to pricing your art success-fully.Art prices are not pulled out of thin air. When you price your art, you must be able to show

that your prices make sense, that they're fair and justified with respect to certain art criteria such as the depth of your resume, your previous sales history and the particulars of the market where you sell. People who know something about art and who are interested in either buying, selling or representing your work are going to figure out one way or another, not nec-essarily by asking you, whether your art is worth what you're selling it for. In order to sell, you have to demonstrate and convince them that your prices are fair and reasonable. If you can't do this, you'll have a hard time selling art.So how do you start? If you don't have a consistent history of selling your art in a particular price range or in a par-ticular market or your sales are erratic

or you're making a change or you're just plain not sure how much to charge for whatever reason, a good first step is to use techniques similar to those that real estate agents use to price houses. The selling price of a house that's just coming onto the market is based on what are called "comparables" or "comps" or prices that similar houses in the same neigh-borhood sell for-- real estate criteria.

For example, let's take a nice big mansion and plop it down the good part of Beverly Hills. It'll be worth maybe five, maybe ten, maybe forty million bucks. Now, let's plop it onto the plains of North Dakota. It'll be worth maybe $500,000, maybe $1,000,000 or maybe a little more... max. Same mansion; different neighborhood; different criteria. Get it?You see, you can't price your art in a vacuum; you have to consider its "neighborhood," its context, the "art criteria" that connect it to the rest of the art world. You'll find that no matter what market you sell in, whether local, regional, national or international, that for the most part, every type of art by every type of artist has its own price structure, and that includes yours. "But my art is unique. You can't price art like that." You may be thinking this, and you're right, your art is unique, but so is every house in any given neighborhood. No matter how unique your art is, it's also similar in certain ways to art by other artists-- just like one house is similar to another (they both have bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, roofs, and so on).Here are some of the ways your art may be similar to other art-- it may be similar in size, shape, medium, weight, subject matter, colors, the time it takes you to make it, when it was made, how long you've been making that type of art, how many you've made, what type of

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art it is (abstract, representational, conceptual, etc.), who your audience is, and so on. Your job is to explore your market, keep an open mind, find that similar art, find the artists who make it, focus on those who have similar experience and qualifications to yours, and see what they charge for it and why.

For those of you who have little or no sales experience, who haven't sold much art, a good starting point for you is to price your work based on time, labor, and cost of materials. Pay yourself a reasonable hourly wage, add the cost of materials and make that your asking price. For example, if materials cost $50, you take 20 hours to make the art, and you pay yourself $20 an hour to make it, then you price the art at $450 ($20 X 20 hours + $50 cost of materials). Don't forget the comparables, though. If you use this formula and your art turns out to be more expensive than what other artists in your area charge for similar art, you may have to rethink your pricing, pay yourself a little less per hour perhaps.So in summary, here are the basic art pricing fundamentals:Step 1: Define your market. Where do you sell your art? Do you sell locally, regionally, nation-ally or internationally? The art, artists and prices in your market are the ones you should pay the most attention to.Step 2: Define your type of art. What kind of art do you make? What are its physical charac-teristics? In what ways is it similar to other art? How do you categorize it? If you paint ab-stracts, for example, what kind of abstracts, how would you describe them? This is the type of art that you want to generally focus on for comparison purposes.Step 3: Determine which artists make art similar to yours either by researching online or visiting galleries, open studios or other venues and seeing their work in per-son. Pay particular attention to those artists who also have career accom-plishments similar to yours, who've been making art about as long as you have, showing about as long as you have, selling about as long as you have and so on.Step 4: See how much these similar art-ists charge for their art. Their prices will be good initial estimates of the prices you should charge for your art.

More About Price Comparison TechniquesAt the same time that you’re zeroing in on specific similarities to your art, you also want to keep an eye on what’s going on with other artists in your area, even if their art isn’t that much like yours. If you focus too much attention on too narrow a slice of the art world and too little attention on the rest, or even worse, you dismiss the rest as irrelevant, your prices may make sense to you and a few people around you, but not to anybody else. The more aware you are of the big picture, of what other artists make, how much they charge for it, who buys it for how much and why, the better prepared you are to price your art so that it has a chance to sell in a broad range of settings.Pricing by comparison works in the great majority of cases, but you can get even more ac-

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curate with your pricing to really make sure that your prices make sense, AND that they can be justified to anyone who asks. In case you’re thinking this is all nonsense, I appraise art. Sometimes, I have to justify or defend my appraisals to entities like the IRS, insurance compa-nies, estate executors, and the legal system-- and sometimes those appraisals and justifica-tions are subject to penalty of law. My point is that people place dollar values on art all the time, that proven methods and techniques exist for doing so. I’m showing you some of those techniques here, ones that you can use to value your art. So let’s get pricing. The following factors aren’t in any particular order, and may or may not apply to you. You decide what works best.

To begin with, be objective about your art and your experience. At every step along the way, in order for your prices to make sense, you have to fairly, honestly and objectively evaluate how your art measures up to other art that’s out there. In order to make valid comparisons, you need a good ballpark idea how the quality of your art and the extent of your accom-plishments stack up to those of other artists, particularly the ones who you’ll be comparing yourself to. In other words, you can’t pad your resume. If you’ve been making art for three years, for example, don’t compare yourself to artists who’ve been making it for twenty. This is not necessarily easy and it’s not necessarily pleasant, but it’s essential if you want to make it as an artist.

The key word here is “objective.” Don’t confuse your own personal subjective opinion of your art, or what you think the art world should be like, or how you think it should respond to your

art, with how things actually are. If you find yourself saying stuff like “People don’t understand my work” or “People don’t appreciate me” or “I’m just as good as Vincent Picasso even though he’s famous and I’m not” or “Sooner or later I’ll find the perfect dealer or collector or whatever and live happily ever after,” you may be making some errors in judgment. If this is happening, invite a few people to look at your art and tell you what they think-- prefer-ably people who know something about art, not your best friends, not your biggest fans, not necessarily Simon Cowell, but people who’ll be direct. Encourage them to be truthful because that’s what you need. And don’t get defensive; doing this will help you. When you’re objective about your

art, you maximize your chances of succeeding as an artist.

If it’s any consolation, and I know you want your art to sell for as much money as possible, your art is still the same art, it’s still just as good, you’re still the same artist and you’re still just as good, no matter how you price it. Don’t use dollar values to validate yourself as an artist; use them to sell your art. Just because you price something at $20,000 does not mean it’s worth $20,000 or that you stand a ghost of a chance of selling it. Nothing is worth anything

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until it actually sells, which means the following-- that someone places their money in the palm of your hand and accepts your art in exchange.

While we’re on the topic of expensive art and objectivity, here’s a bit more about compar-ing yourself to other artists. If you think you’re as good as Damien Hirst, for example, or some other famous artist, and I’ve met artists who do, and you may well be, that does not mean you price like those artists. Your art may indeed by as good as that of a well-known or even famous artist who sells for lots of money, but many other factors go into pricing, and must also be considered AND compare favorably between the two of you before your selling prices can come anywhere close to theirs-- not the least of which are your resumes. If they’re dead and you’re alive, if they’ve had a one-person show at the Tate and you’ve had a one-person show at Biff’s Soup & Sandwich, if your qualifications and credentials don’t approximate their qualifications, if their resume is 10 books long and yours is half a page, don’t make comparisons between their prices and yours. If this was al-lowed in the art market rulebook, then any artist could sell any work of art for any amount of money at any time based solely on how they believe their art compares to the art of any other artist, without taking any additional factors into consideration. And we all know that doesn’t happen.

This next point I already made, but because it’s so important I’m going to make it again this time from a different angle. Don’t think that your art is so unique that you can price it without regard to what’s happening elsewhere in your art community or in the art world in general. All art is unique. Every artist is unique. Uniqueness, however, is not and never will be the sole criteria for pricing art. But wait. Let’s say, for the sake of argument that your art is unique and that it’s unlike any object, art or otherwise, ever created in any manner since the beginning of time.

Now let’s do a quick switch and consider that art from the perspective of informed experi-enced dealers, curators, critics or collectors. These people almost always compare art from artist to artist and from gallery to gallery before they decide what to buy, sell, collect, write about, exhibit or represent, no matter what kind of art they’re looking at or how unique it is. They rarely, if ever, find themselves with only one choice. Can you imagine any knowledge-able art person looking at an artist’s art and saying things like, “I have never seen anything like this! I must have it. I don’t care how much it costs. I don’t care who you are. Give me everything. This is unbelievable.” Not going to happen. Even if your art is notably unique, peo-ple who know art will find some way to compare it, categorize it and relate it to other art by other artists in order to assess its significance, its dollar value, and ultimately its institutional or marketplace viability. You have to do the same.

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PG #

This is the third book in an ongoing series where we’ll be talking about a small collection of books that deal with art and the creative process. These particular books were chosen because they have dramatically changed my own perspective as both a writer and as a human beingI really believe that any of the books in this series would be relevant for any type of artist including writers, musicians, visual artists, photographers, or anyone else who’s work is creatively inspired.I hope that you will enjoy them as much as I have . . .

If the book “Art & Fear” is intended to get your head on straight about creating your art, and “The Creative Habit” is intended to give you the work habits and self-discipline that you’ll need to succeed, Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” will offer to give you the courage and confidence to live your art in our often overly materialistic society.

This was the book that first validated for me the inherent value of the individual artist/writer in a culture that seemed to value safety, security, and conformity above all. This was the book that allowed me to diverge from the expectations that had been handed down to me, and gave me the courage to pursue my own path.

Like many struggling writers, I was first drawn to Julia Cameron’s book almost 15 years ago looking for answers to the most basic questions about the nature creativity and how to harness its power consistently. At the time, I was desper-ately looking for reasons not to abandon my writing completely as I began a new teaching career, a new marriage, and the prospect of starting a new family.

As I faced the grim prospect of college graduation, I was led to believe that it was time to let go of my foolish childhood dreams and “grow up” as I begin my career as a responsible adult. While no one actually said any of this out loud, the expectations were clear — It was time to move on. . .This is not necessarily a book for those who are already on the creative path. This is a book for those who are on the edge of giving up, for those who may be consumed with fears and doubts of their creative ability, or for those who have

already let go of their artistic dreams long ago. This is not a book about the creative process, but a book about “creativity recovery”. It was written for those of us who have temporarily lost our way, or those who have somehow buried that creative spark that lives deep within us.

It’s not surprising then that the content of this book was modeled after a tradi-tional 12-step recovery program.

Critics often complain that this book is sometimes a bit “hokey” and filled with vague feel-good exercises, quotes, and sentiments that really don’t teach you anything about how-to be a creative artist. I have no doubt that this book might seem simplistic and perhaps a bit naïve to someone who has been on their cre-ative journey for some time. Then again, maybe they’ve simply forgotten what it was like for them in the beginning.

Somehow they have forgotten all of the fears and doubts that haunt every new creative soul starting off on this path. And although I believe that this book has something to offer every creative writer or visual artist no matter what their current level of experience may be, this book is primarily intended for those of us who may be either starting from the beginning or simply starting over.

In other words, these are the first tentative steps of a journey that never ends. . .

PROSE AND PASSIONBook of the Month

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Jeremy P. Tarcher

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Here are just a few of the themes and excerpts from this amazing book:

“Remember , your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow and there will be falls.” ~Julia Cameron

“Many of us wish we were more creative. Many of us sense we are more creative, but unable to effectively tap that creativity. Our dreams elude us. Our lives feel somehow flat. Often, we have great ideas, wonderful dreams, but are unable to actualize them for ourselves. Sometimes we have specific creative longings we would love to be able to ful-fill — learning to play the piano, painting, taking an acting class, or writing. Sometimes our goal is more diffuse. We hunger for what might be called creative living — an expanded sense of creativity in our business lives, in sharing with our children, our spouse, our friends.” ~Julia Cameron

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Making a piece of

art may feel a lot like telling

a family secret. Secret telling, by its very na-ture, involves

shame and fear. It asks the question, “What will they think

of me once they know this?

Working with this process, I see a certain amount of defiance and giddiness in the first few weeks. This entry stage is followed closely by explosive anger in the course’s midsection. The

anger is followed by grief, then alternating waves of resistance and hope. This peaks-and-valleys phase of growth becomes a series of expansions and contractions, a birthing process in which stu-

dents experience intense elation and defensive skepticism.

It is my expe-rience both

as an artist and as a teacher

that when we move out on faith into the

act of creation, the universe is

able to advance. It is a little like

opening the gate at the top of a field irri-

gation system. Once we remove

the blocks, the flow moves in.

Artistic growing pains. . .

As you learn to recog-

nize, nurture, and protect your inner

artist, you will be able to move

beyond pain and creative

constric-tion. You will learn ways to recognize and

resolve fear, re-move emotion-al scar tissue,

and strengthen your confi-

dence.

~Julia Cameron

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Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward.

It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

The per-fectionist

writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. In-stead of enjoy-ing the process, the perfection-ist is constantly grading the results.

To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect

script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audience monologue.

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,’ said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished, but at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity—let-ting go.

Perfectionism is a creativity killer. . .

~Julia Cameron

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Amanda V. Wagner, Art AttackIt was at the University of Georgia this past April that art critic Paddy Johnson from Art F City boldly told young artists not to move to New York City. Johnson, originally from Canada, but now a New Yorker herself, is not the first person to encourage young artists to shield their eyes from the glare of the city of lights.

We have seen similar transitions in our own backyard. Entire neighborhoods have been revamped and restored because of the young and struggling that have migrated to them. Look at Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital area that ab-sorbed the slurry of college graduates and young professionals from bordering areas. Next to what the neighborhood was just a decade ago the region is nearly unrecognizable. Between 2000 and 2010 the average household income in that area rose by 56 percent from an estimated $43,000 to $67,000.

Kensington is undergoing preliminary stages of a comparable conversion. Located in between the lower Northeast and North Philadelphia, Kensington has been one of Philadelphia’s up and coming areas, and much of its progress can be accredited to artists. According to the New Kensington Community De-velopment Corporation (NKCDC), “Today, because of the rising costs of living in Center City, artists and new homeowners are pushing northward and reviving that great heritage.” Venues like, Crane Arts, Walking Fish Theater, and Little Berlin have surfaced as major cultural contributors to the city, and as a result the surrounding area is evolving.

We can see that, based on the attention the community has received, the housing market is being effected and at a rapid pace. “The median sales price for homes in Kensington, Philadelphia for Feb 13 to Apr 13 was $120,000 based on 135 sales. Compared to the same period one year ago, the median sales price increased 37.9%, or $33,000, and the number of sales increased 31.1%. Average price per square foot for Kensington was $111, an increase of 9.9% compared to the same period last year,” reported by Trulia

Patti Smith made headlines in 2011, for her remark to writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, saying “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Artists have always flocked to New York City. In the 60s Soho seized the vitality that coursed through Paris in the 20s. The surge that clenched the city fostered a kinetic creativity captured in places, like Pop artist Andy Warhol’s studio, The Factory. Soho, amongst many other parts of the city, became a hub for artists, where art movements expanded, and where people felt inspired.

New York City was a muse for the artists who inhabited it, providing those yearning to create with quintessential New York stamina. For some, NYC re-mains to be that very source of stimulus; yet, in the past decade, whether from art critics or artists, attitudes have been changing towards New York and cities like our very own are becoming the new New York for artists.

Why? Mainly the cost. But where Patti Smith would suggest that the city was taken from artists, Paddy Johnson would argue that it is partially because of the artists that the cost of living is so high. “Where artists go, rents will rise—that’s a story told over and over in New York,” Johnson writes in an article, titled Are Artists Gentrifying Sunset Park?, in The L Magazine. The article con-tinues to describe personal accounts of people in south Brooklyn’s Sunset Park who witnessed the section’s transition from a “working-class neighborhood” to a community that was experiencing the effects of gentrification.

The idea is that artists are attracted to these low-cost neighborhoods because, in them, they can afford studio spaces. However this flux of artists renting out studios inevitably draws attention to these decaying urban enclaves, and after the artists it is not too long before bars, cafes, shops, and apartment complexes pop up.

ON TOURWhy to AVOID New York

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Amanda V. Wagner

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Leaving at the “right time” was critical for Musson, as well as it is for the artists that are hoping to survive in NYC. “You get a job to pay for your exorbitant rent, and then on top of that you most likely live in a space that you don’t have room to work in, so you have to get a studio on top of your rent, utilities, insurance, health insurance, and food. It’s really difficult, where during my time here [in Philadelphia] I was able to work out of my kitchen.”

Musson accredits his success to the time he was able to develop as an artist in Philadelphia, but continues to flourish in Brooklyn. In fall of this year, Musson hopes to be releasing a graphic, not-so-kid friendly children’s e-book with publishing house Badland Unlimited entitled “The American.”

Artists know that “making it” in the big apple is not what it used be. It’s possible that without the momentum that hoisted artists like Musson into prominence, by the Internet and the places nurture their talents, they would never have become successful. “I wasn’t rushed to anything living in Philly, I could work at my own place, but New York is more challenging because there is all this pressure,” says Musson. If you can meet the challenge of New York City then by all means do so but, if not, there are plenty of open armed alternatives for artists in search of space to create.

Artists flourish in Philly because of neighborhoods like Kensington that offer artists the space to create. Yet Philadelphia is far from the only city that artists have been moving to as an alternative to the hustle and bustle of NYC. Phoenix, Arizona, Atlanta, Georgia, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have all top lists of the best cities for young artists.So artists have discovered and populated new cities and the cities are feeling the influence. But is this a quiet sendoff from artists to New York? Are they slowly severing their ties in a solemn, “it’s not you, it’s my wallet.” Perhaps in this way New York has been taken from them, and from all of us.

Major television networks have caught on to the love-hate relationship between the youth and the city, and have capitalized on it. HBO’s current hit series Girls—a show that follows a group of twenty-something friends, depicts a New York City that’s very different from the city portrayed by the previous HBO series that ended in 2004, Sex and the City. Many parallels have been drawn between the two shows, however Sex and the City’s NYC was glamorous, decadent, and full of opportunity, where Girls’ NYC has filled the role of an antagonist that incessantly reminds it’s characters of the difficulty of “making it” there.

Of course, one can still find success in the NYC but the soil that lies beneath the concrete jungle is undeniably dry without the connections and money needed to fuel that growth. The alternative to possessing those resources: obtain them somewhere else.

Artist Jayson Musson moved from Philadelphia to Brooklyn after spending a decade and a half in the city of brotherly love. “When I moved to New York, I moved in a time when there were a lot of opportunities opening up for me because of the Hennessy videos, so I moved at the right time in my career,” says Musson. His work gained popularity after his ART THOUGHTZ videos captured the attention of thousands of online viewers, where Musson teaches art theory under the guise of adroit, farcical art critic, Hennessy Youngman.

ARTISTS KNOW THAT “MAKING IT” IN THE BIG APPLE IS NOT WHAT IT USED BE.

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How Do We Make It? Directors and the New Theater Landscape Michael Rau, Will Davis

Theater is an intrinsically collaborative form in which work is often made in siloed divisions of labor. The word “collaboration” seems to have lost all meaning even as it pops up on grant applications, mission statements, résumés, and in the mouths of hip administrators. Yet it has always been true that in the theater we make meaning together as a group. We make meaning as a production team, as an ensemble of performers, and as an audience. The theater requires dialogue both written and spo-ken, observed, and shown. A performance is a sum of its parts, it is an articulation of the vision and desire and curiosity of a large group of people. In essence that’s what we want to talk about, making meaning together, and how we might shift our prac-tices to invoke this core idea.

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The Bleak Situation and Redefining RiskWe’ve all heard playwrights, directors, and actors complain about a new work getting stuck in development hell. Reading after reading yields yet another reading. In each of these cases the written text of the play is being transmitted to you over the top of a music stand without any marker or artifact of the many other aspects of theater (light, sound, object, gesture, space) that will ulti-mately form the performance text and cre-ate it’s own dialogue with the written word. We’ve also heard and experienced the plight of playwrights and directors working through development processes together only to have their work or their partnership changed by an institution as a condition to taking a chance on a new play. As a result, playwrights labor to make their plays “di-rector-proof” after enduring a series of un-der-rehearsed and disheartening readings to ensure that their work isn’t compromised.

We’ve all been alerted to the issues of declin-ing attendance, the increasing age of our audience, and the dilemma of attracting a younger audience to the theater. Administra-tors and artistic directors across the board are looking around for new ideas to fill their

with a written text, but not with a director who can be largely responsible for authoring the performance text.

Defining the Director’s RoleLast summer, we ran a week-long workshop for directors as part of the National New Play Network (NNPN) MFA Playwrights Work-shop hosted by the Kennedy Center and one of the American theater’s patron saints, Gregg Henry. The topic was collaborating with playwrights and developing new plays. As we began getting to know our workshop directors, we found time and time again that these directors were waiting for an invitation to begin their work. This waiting game ran the spectrum between assuming any vision they might have for the work depended on the

houses and some of them are increasingly pinning their hopes for a younger, “fresher” audience on new plays. These new play pro-gramming efforts often hinge on the hiring of directors, designers, and actors that are “known quantities” in order to minimize the risk of an “untested” script. Often theaters agree to take one “risky” choice in program-ming a new work and then make fifty safe choices to frame that choice.

Why Do We Make It This Way?We want to shift the question and ask: not what is the new play, but how do we make it?

We are both new work directors. We’re folks who seek out new projects to develop, and we cherish the experience of building that new work with a playwright. We are two folks committed to new American plays. But we want to look at our assumptions regarding the way a play is made and reconsider our traditional models of programming. At a time where many theaters define risk as the mo-ment they offer a job to emerging or early career artists, we see many institutionalized ways a company will take this leap of faith

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playwright’s blessing, to feeling they couldn’t go out into the world and make their own thing for fear of never finding a home for the work or a company that would support their vision.

We work with young directors all the time who tell us that the job of a new play theater director is “to be a midwife, a conduit, or a facilitator.” They tell us the play (the written text) is a baby and they don’t want to hurt the baby, they want to encourage it to grow and to cultivate its development, but they’re afraid that as it grows they might teach it the wrong set of ethics or values. When we ask these directors about their vision as artists: the way they will work, the ideas they have, they tell us it depends on the script. And of course it does, like any collaborative form,

but the work of a director or of any artist is not to wait calmly for the instructions, but rather to create, support, and be supported by the other visions in the room. Words like “conduit” and “midwife” define the direc-tor as a person or thing that helps to bring something into being or assists its develop-ment. The way our directors were talking, we got the feeling that the role of a director is someone who gets out of the way of the art. This paradigm assumes there is an ultimate answer you can unlock on the page, and that you just need to be smart enough to excavate it and lucky enough to get it into three dimensional space without destroying it. Locating yourself as a facilitator/midwife means that there is a text in the room with one possible interpretation that a director must interpret in the right way or fail at the job. It means the play is yours to fuck up. We disagree with this idea. If there is only one interpretation of a play then the role of a director is superfluous.

Trusting Your CollaboratorsRather than rely on a production model where the script has all the answers, what if we assumed the script was a powerful tool among many powerful tools? What if we believed that the most important work was about how a group of people, including the playwright, interpreted the words on the page to create the performance text, rather than the playwright’s words being the sole arbiter of quality, and then interpretation as a secondary, less important aspect. That the text is there to make strong proposals to the other artists in the room? What if we believed that the most important work was about how a group of people, including the playwright, interpreted the words on the page to create the performance text?

In our workshops we try to get down to what makes up the functioning mechanics of a highly effective, highly collaborative rehears-al room. What we inevitably see is a group of people from the actor to the playwright to the lighting designer who walk into the room with a strong vision for the work. Hav-ing a strong vision does not make you an art tyrant, but having a strong vision requires

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have the space or time to consider anything else.

We propose a model that aligns with the val-ues of workshops mentioned above, where the development process is longer, and the team is working to craft an interpretation that is meaningful to the people in that particular room. It’s a model built around the premise that there is not one interpretation of a play, but hundreds, and that everyone (the ac-tors, designers, directors, and playwrights) is responsible for creating an interpretation that is unique to the circumstance of their particular audience. In this way, the process of a rehearsal is about creating consen-sus and finding ways to authentically get everyone onboard by igniting creativity in each collaborator. If there is any way that a director could be a facilitator, it is here; not to find the one “true” interpretation of a play, but instead to investigate the expression of twenty-plus interpretations of the playwright’s words and cohere those ideas into some-thing that is comprehensible, dynamic, and theatrically vivid.

that you also have the flexibility and interest in absorbing similar strong or even oppos-ing visions from your collaborators. This is all about showing up with ideas and proposals that are steeped in your understanding of the work and inviting a similar set of ideas and proposals to live in your collaborator. The best idea is usually in the room and not in your notebook. The best idea is the alche-my of multiple points of interpretation and understanding, which can only exist in the room with other artists.

In a highly effective, highly collaborative room dozens upon dozens upon dozens of choices and proposals from all sides of the collaboration will fall away, while others will become stronger and more deeply ground-ed in the work. All of this is only possible because each artist is brave enough and confident enough to make a statement of meaning about the work and then able to listen to the ways those statements are transformed by the other equally brave statements in the room. If we train artists to believe they should hang back and protect their vision from the room, then we’ve forgot-ten the heart of collaboration. The theater is a perfect space for the collision of ideas in

search of a cohesive shared vision.

This eco-system becomes less and less possible when a director puts themselves “in service,” which we see as another way to talk about working as a mid-wife/facilitator. If you work “in service” of the text, the play becomes an exercise in limitation instead of illumination. Most readings are thrown to-gether in a few hours where the director and actors are hastily rehearsed right up to the edge of performance. There’s often very little time to accomplish much of anything aside from a read through, and this process allows for only the broadest and most basic choic-es that must “serve” the text. The actors and directors are doing their best to ensure that the script sounds correct (rather than ex-plore potential meanings), they simply don’t

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A more holistic model of playmaking asks the industry to trust in all collaborators and a multiplicity of interpretations. Rather than taking one risk on a playwright, take a risk on the team, give them time and space and let them create something bigger than them-selves. We need to stop thinking that new plays will be the salvation of our declining attendance issues, and instead recognize that it is not only the work that’s being made, but also the way that we’re making work that is the problem.

A Proposal for the FutureWhat if you commissioned groups of artists, as well as playwrights? What if you gave these develop-mental teams the space to build a new work and in-cluded this commission in your season? What if the brick and mortar buildings of the regional theater housed collaborative efforts by established compa-nies and opened their resources to emerging artists working together to launch new plays? Rather than placing all the pressure on a single new play or a lone playwright to bring in audiences, theaters might instead commission groups of collaborators (playwright, director, designers, actors, others) to make work, and put those people at the center of the creative process. Let’s privilege the drafts and the drafting process of all the artists in the room, let’s continue to ask; “How will we make it?”

Multiple Drafts, Multiple PossibilitiesSome folks say put the play in the center of the room. We say put the play in the center of yourself and respect that it lives in the center of each of your collaborators as well. Allow the possibility that your interpretation, your proposal for the performance text will yield if not an answer suitable for the final draft of the show, a totally valuable exper-iment in the search for that final draft, one that will inspire similar proposals from your collaborators. Instead of fearing that you’ll “get the play wrong,” start from a place of adventure, a place of possibility, let the work on the page inspire your creativity instead of minimizing it.

Here’s why this is important:Good plays are ones that support multiple interpretations. We keep coming back to the Greeks, Molière, Shakespeare because they’re plays that speak to us in different ways, in different situations throughout time. If we try to “director-proof” a play to insure only one interpretation, it shuts down a play’s ability to support a multiplicity of meaning. If we make the play too finite, it can only exist

for one group of people at one point in his-tory (and that is of course fine, if that’s what you’re after), but if we want plays that ex-pand the form and invite in new audiences, then we need plays that are built for interpre-tation. We need collaborators and theaters that support this very theater-centric practice of making meaning together.

If we are teaching playwrights to “direc-tor-proof” their plays by minimizing the pos-sibility of interpretation, then collaborative teams can never do their best work. If direc-tors are only given two hours to rehearse a reading, then the game is to simply execute the terms laid out on the page. If institutions hire new plays, but not new directors, we are short-circuiting the development of fresh and innovative voices.

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1

ARTIST BLOCKOvercoming Adversity

In any case, your subconscious is an exact machine, deciding--based on past experience and animal intuition--precisely what will benefit you, and what won’t, faster than you can think about it consciously. This was an important development in human psychology, because it freed up top-level consciousness to process increasingly complex social structures.

We may consider art-block to be a form of subconscious decision. We don’t want to draw, because it is suddenly in some way not beneficial to us. Our job, as the top-level consciousness, is to figure out what triggered the subconscious to make this decision.

IN PROCESS

Because each case is unique, it will be up to you. But let’s examine some sample cases.

1. “I can’t draw because I don’t feel like it. My art doesn’t look good any longer.” This is a common form of art-block: suddenly, work which we might have felt proud about is now giving us the doldrums. As a third party, I have witnessed some of my friends’ art-blocks of this type, and I can say with convic-tion that I was not able to notice any change in their works from before or after the art-block. The change must then be in their own perception of their works. What has changed, exactly?

I could also call this the “beginner’s luck” art-block, since it seems to work off of the same function. Perhaps you have played a video game and have been doing well, when suddenly you reach a point where your game ends. You try again and now, the game ends before you even reach the point you had previ-ously gotten up to. This doesn’t make sense! We have memory of this earlier, easier place already.

Let’s start by removing the term “art-block” from our vocabularies for a moment. It is too vague and only describes its effect, not what it is. This doesn’t help us except when we want to commiserate.

Now let’s start to take apart the artistic process. If we can understand why we draw in the first place, it will help us to understand why we stop drawing.

The artistic process developed and culminated in homo sapiens sapiens, who had mutated large brains that were able to support complex social networks. Art serves as a tool not only for communication, but for solidarity. Art can be defined as the process of reaching outside ourselves, to make another self out of something that is not.

We probably have an audience or an effect on an audience in mind when we are spending hours creating a piece of work. Hour after hour of crafting detail and examining potential flaws will be put to the test when we present our work. When it is well-received, it is one of the better feelings in life. Conversely, a rejection of our work can leave us devastated. These two aspects of acceptance and rejection permeate the human social experience to its core. Will we form a group, or be denied one? Can we create something that other people can enjoy and use for themselves? Or will our work be too distant and unaccessible?

WHY DOES IT EXIST?

The term “art-block” hides psychological twists and turns. The subconscious is a very efficient place, working quickly and effortlessly to analyze what is worth spending energy on, and what is not. Take this news article for example. Perhaps you have already closed this window due to my excessive use of the collective pronouns “us”, “we”, or “our.” This might have irked you but you are not quite sure why (it’s my assumption of our collective state when this has not been firmly established beforehand--a “hostile takeover”, if you will, of your so-cial relationship to me). Or maybe you are suddenly paying attention because I have mentioned the word “psychology” and you are having a psychology exam later in the week (a subtle nod to upcoming threats and the strategies used to meet them).

ART-BLOCKWe all get art-blocked at one point. “I don’t want to draw” or “I don’t feel like drawing this...” By understanding what art-block is, we can take steps to avoid it in the future, and possibly even control its presence.

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By: Zack -sr

THE TERM “ART-BLOCK” HIDES PSYCHOLOGICAL TWISTS AND TURNS. THE SUBCONSCIOUS IS A VERY EFFICIENT PLACE, WORKING QUICKLY AND EFFORTLESSLY TO ANALYZE WHAT IS WORTH SPENDING

As stated in the beginning, art is a communal process. We make art to share and to bring together. When that which we have brought together falls apart, it’s natural that the vehicle for that community will also fall apart, creating this form of art-block. The cure is to find another group to draw for, or rather, another group to bring together. Finding a new audience receptive to your art will abolish this art-block in short order. However, this social scouting process alone may take some time. It might be sped up by using our art as a lure to attract those like us. That is, if we didn’t have art-block in the first place. Some older art might be in order here: post the older art and let it do the scouting for you. Do you think it represents the current “you” well enough? Or perhaps there may be a way to bring your old group back together. Some art might be in order there.

PLAYING DIRTY

We’ve analyzed art-block a bit and now have an inclination as to how it works. But sometimes, the technique that our art-block is using to keep us from expending energy on art can be elusive. It may be obscured by something we don’t want to acknowledge, or simply too inextricable from the grasp of the subconscious. In such a case, we can employ some down-and-dirty psychology to use our bodies against themselves in order to take back control!

As such, art-block in this instance will be a process of repetition and explora-tion for the artist. Just like in the video game, the “mistakes” that the artist is making are an exploration of the artist’s limits in order to examine technique and procedure. It is a growth process: When faced with new, elaborate chal-lenges, our intuition can only take us so far. When we can finally accept our technique as sufficient for beating that game, this art-block can be dissolved.

This process of internal critique may last quite a while. It can possibly be sped up or denied by acknowledging how it works. If we can’t get a good feeling about our art because suddenly, it doesn’t seem so good when compared to other artists, then step back. Take a breath. “It’s okay. I think my skill is good, at least for now. Especially for now, when I have this big project to do... I can improve later. Right now, I have to be me: my skill, my technique.” Saying this and believing it are two different things, but in synthesis it will help to eradicate this art-block.

2. “I don’t feel like drawing any longer... [because the group of friends I was drawing with has gotten into a big fight] [because I’m moving away to college and I won’t see my old drawing buddies again for quite a while] [etc.]” I’ve also experienced this art-block, quite more prominently than our first example.

Why did we make a mistake? Again and again you attempt to reach the part where you had first gotten up to with “beginner’s luck”. Occassionally you do reach it, but perhaps, the game ends a little beyond that point. Eventually, the game is conquered, but only after an intense memorization experience.

This process is analogous to the art-block mechanism. The “mistakes” we start-ed to make were in actuality limits being tested. We got far the first time on our “beginner’s luck” intuition--the ability to intuit a problem when meeting it for the first time; we got far the last time on our strategy and technique, a process borne of repetition and exploration.

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27A. Pavlovian Inspiration

1. Take some form of stimulus. Light, environment... Music is good, since it is accessible on command. Whenever you create art, play music, or activate whichever stimulus you have selected. This is especially important at the start of the artistic process.

2. Continue to play music throughout the art. Do this every time the art is attempted. If the music is the same every time, we will get a particularly strong effect from this pairing. (It will be a bit repetitive though. If it is the same type of music throughout, it should be OK.)

3. Continue to repeat this process every time the art is attempted.

4. Over several months, a pairing between art and this stimulus will be estab-lished. During a period of art-block, exposure to this stimulus will bring out the pairing... and instantly suspend art-block! You have to be quick; this is a chemical reaction, and it will go away if you do not respond to the impulse to make art. (Or you may convince yourself that “I kind of want to draw now, but I bet it won’t be worth it...” in such a case, ignore yourself, just sit down, and get to it. As you get into it, you will automatically feel better. Art-block works best as an incipient block; when we’re already into the art, it will be more difficult to stop it!)

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THE EFFICIENT MACHINE

Art-block is a complicated process. It prevents us from feeling like making art, because to put passion into something that we are subconsciously analyzing as ineffective would be a tremendous waste of energy--energy that could be used in gathering food or siring young. It’s our job to undertake a little post-analy-zation and figure out why our art isn’t working for us any longer. Then we can start the repairs in spite of ourselves!

And when all else fails, give it time. The efficient machine will eventually beat that game!

B. Time

It is said that time heals all wounds. We can use the passage of time to decrease the influence of art-block.

If our art-block is stemming from something resembling example 1 (self-cri-tique), it may be best to take a break from others’ art for a while, and to just soak up ourselves. To regain confidence in our own art, about what makes it unique, our time and technique, may be just what the doctor ordered. For this period, do not watch TV or use the internet for the fastest effect. Something in your daily life may re-inspire you during this duration, something you might not have noticed before (because you were too busy paying attention to others’ art!).

C. Money

Money is the greatest motivator, because its potential is practically limitless. By exchanging art for money, we can realize some new possibilities, such as new art supplies or a subtle change in our life that can re-inspire us (like a new pet, or some new furniture). Not to mention cuisine. But business will support us and our art. It is important to indulge it sometimes.

There may be some Marxist concern, that using our art for money will lead to alienation. This is a valid concern, and to be honest, I don’t have an answer to this, as I am currently wrestling with it myself. It may be best to engage in two different forms or venues of art at the same time, with one to contrast the other.

IF OUR ART-BLOCK IS STEMMING FROM SOMETHING RESEMBLING (SELF-CRITIQUE), IT MAY BE BEST TO FROM OTHERS’ ART FOR A WHILE, AND TO JUST SOAK UP OURSELVES.

TAKE A BREAK

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him and his wife to help them out around their home. Little did I know the impact this man would have on my passage into manhood.A few weekends a month throughout high school, I would drive up to Mr. Lester’s home in Guthrie to visit him. Our visits usually began with me doing some chore around the house or in his art studio. This often involved me pulling some weeds or moving the big clay busts around in his studio. He sometimes had me actually work on his busts. I

remember doing some fine tuning to Tom Mixx’s hat and nose with a chisel and some sandpaper.

After I finished my task, Mr. Lester and I would

go to his living room or studio just to talk. He’d share with me stories from his life. I learned how as a teenager in the 1920′s, Mr. Lester hitchhiked all the way from Cheyenne, OK to San Antonio, TX just to see if the Alamo would display a bust of Davy Crockett that he had sculpted. They agreed. The sculpture is still there today.

He shared with me his ex-perience as an art teacher for troubled students in inner city Los Angeles during the 1960s. This was an intense time to be a white guy living in that part of LA. Racial tensions were high and boiled over

in 1965 during the Watts Riot. But despite being a white guy from Oklahoma, Mr. Lester was able to make fast friends with the students in his class. And he quickly became involved with helping the African-American community in the city.

With each story, Mr. Lester would always impart a life lesson. He’d used the story about his trip to San Antonio to teach me about doing whatever it takes to accomplish a goal in life. His experience in Los Angeles conveyed to me the importance of tolerance, respect, and compassion for people who are differ-ent from you and that a real man will stand up for the oppressed and downtrodden.

Mr. Lester would always ask me about what was going on in my life. He’d listen intently and provide some counsel and words of encouragement or sometimes a verbal kick in the butt if I needed it. After each visit with him, I felt uplifted and edified.

But my friend and mentor became sick. He was diagnosed with cancer. Our visits became shorter. It was hard to see this man who was once filled with mischief and vitality become weak from the chemo. But Mr. Lester still shared stories and lessons, and he still gave me

advice and counsel.

Mr. Lester died during my senior year of high

When I was 15, I met a man who would have a profound impact on my life. His name was Andrew Lester. I first encountered Mr. Lester at church. He was the fun old guy that everyone liked being around. Despite being in his 8os, he had this boyish, mischievous look to him. He also made wearing a Breath-right nasal strip look cool. He wore them all the time. Mr. Lester was an artist by trade. His mother was a Cheyenne Indian, so his art focused on Native American motifs. A tribe called him the White Buffalo, and he made a really beautiful painting representing the name bestowed on him. I have print of it hanging up in my office.

While Mr. Lester dabbled in painting, his real skill was in sculpting clay. He sculpted mammoth busts of great people from history like Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Thorpe, and Western movie star Tom Mixx. When he wasn’t working in his studio, he volunteered in various community organizations aimed at helping underprivileged Native and African Americans. Mr. Lester was very active in the African-American community in Oklahoma and founded the Oklahoma African-American Museum Hall of Fame.

When I first saw Mr. Lester at church, I never thought he would become a mentor and good friend to me. But by chance, I was asked to regularly visit

BUILDING BRIDGESWhy Every man should have a Mentor

HE HAD THIS BOYISH, MISCHIEVOUS LOOK TO HIM. HE ALSO MADE WEAR-ING A BREATH-RIGHT NASAL STRIP LOOK COOL.

HE’D LISTEN INTENTLY AND PROVIDE SOME COUNSEL AND WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT OR SOMETIMES A VERBAL KICK IN THE BUTT IF I NEEDED IT.

BRETT & KATE MCKAY

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Why Men Need Man Mentors

There are some lessons and bits of wisdom that only a man can impart to another man. Men and women are different. We view and interact with the world differently. So it makes sense for men to seek out other men for guidance on how to navigate life.

Unfortunately, it seems like a generation of men went without mentors growing up. We hear on the news about absent fathers and

the effect it is having on young men today. Even when a man has a father he can look up to, it takes a village of man mentors to raise a child. Yet men find themselves more and more isolated, without the community ties and relationships that helped previous generations learn the art of manliness. Without good examples of men to emulate, young men often get a bit lost. Studies have shown that

school. I remember driving up to Cheyenne, OK, to see Mr. Lester return to his birthplace. His final rest-ing ground was appropriate; Cheyenne’s wide open skies and desert landscape provided enough room for a spirit as big as Mr. Lester’s to roam.

It’s been almost ten years since Andrew Lester died, but I can still vividly remember the conversations we had and the lessons he presented to me. From Mr. Lester, I learned the importance of being an honorable man. I learned that success in life requires tenacity and enthusiasm. I learned that the strong should look out for the weak. And I learned the value of respect towards all men, no matter their race, creed, or social background.

the lack of a male figure in a boy’s life increases the likelihood that the lad will perform poorly in school or get involved in crime. And beyond the obvious consequences like crime and education, this void can affect a man in a myriad of subtle ways.

In addition to providing some guidance in navi-gating through life as a man, mentors can expand one’s view of what it means to be a man. Every man has had different life experiences and been exposed to different philosophies and worldviews. They’ve been brought to their knees by different trials, been carried away in different joys, and have learned unique bits of wisdom. They can help you see things a different way, inspire you to dare greatly, comfort you when you grieve, and help you become a better man.

I LEARNED THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING AN HONORABLE MAN.

WITHOUT GOOD EXAMPLES OF MEN TO EM-ULATE, YOUNG MEN OFTEN GET A BIT LOST.

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The Older Friend MentorI will always cherish my friendship with Andrew Lester. He was able to pass down his eight decades of wisdom to a young man still trying to find his way in the world. Whether you’re 15 years old or 40, every man ought to have an older friend. Think about how you viewed your life and the world just 5 years ago compared to how you see things now. Now imagine having several more decades of life experience added to that. An older friend has a lifetime of knowledge to pass to you. And most older guys love to share those lessons with others. To find an older man mentor, strike up a conversation with an older man at church, join a fraternal lodge, or start volunteering at a senior center. An older man mentor doesn’t have to be elderly either. If you’re 20, having say, a 40 year old man friend can be quite enriching.

The Professional MentorLearning the ropes of a new job can be pretty nerve-racking. Even when you’ve been on a job for awhile, it can be difficult to understand office politics or how to move-up in your position. This is why finding a professional mentor is so essential. Seek out a guy at work who has been there awhile and who is in a po-sition you eventually want to attain. A professional mentor can give you honest feedback about how you’re doing, warn you about what not to do, introduce you to valuable connections, give you advice about how to get promoted, and put in a good word for you to the higher-ups. Perhaps most importantly, a professional mentor you can truly trust becomes a friend you can go to when you’re having a terrible day at work and need to vent. They’re probably just listen to you, chuck-le at your amateurishness, and point you in the right direction.

4 Man Mentors Every Man Should Seek

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The Spiritual MentorSpirituality is a lifelong journey with incredible ups and downs. It’s a lonely road to walk alone. Every man needs a spiritual mentor to help them along this path. A spiritual mentor should be someone who carries himself in his faith in a way that inspires you to be better and helps your faith become stronger. He is someone who won’t dismiss your doubts and will instead help you grapple with them. He’s someone with which you can discuss and expand your insights. A spiritual mentor holds you accountable when you’re slacking off in your commitments. He’s someone who will impart the spiritual perspective on things when you’re beset with difficulties or dealing with grief.

The Intellectual MentorIf you’re not a religious or spiritual kind of guy(or even if you are), seek out an intellectual mentor. An intellectual mentor can be a particularly valuable resource while you’re in school. They can point you to books that will further your education or challenge you in discussion that will stretch your world view. An intellectual mentor can be used to bounce ideas off of while you’re writing a research paper. An intellectual mentor can be useful even after school. Your education isn’t complete until you die. Seek out men who can help increase your knowledge and ability to think throughout your life.

Be a Man MentorJust as you need man mentors, so too do other men. No one needs guidance in the art of manliness more than boys and young men, who are trying to figure how to become worthy men. Every man should make mentoring a part of his life. Here are just a few ways to do that:

Become a Scout leader. Boy Scout troops always need volunteers who are eager to make a difference in boys’ lives.Become a Big Brother. A lot of young men out there are growing up without a positive father figure in their lives. Be the man these boys can turn to and emulate as they grow up.Volunteer with your church’s youth group. Lucky is the young man can find a man who is both an older friend and a spiritual mentor.Get to know your kids’ friends. I guess some kids try to hide from adults, but I always liked chatting it up with my friends’ parents. Some of my friend’s dads became my friend in their own right. Obviously, you don’t want to be the dorky dad who’s always hanging around, and you should know when to let your son and his friends alone. But if they’re game, it’s okay to hang out with them from time to time. Take you son and his friends fishing or hunting.

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Reasons Why You

SHOULD Go to Art School

One of the most frequently asked questions on Deviant site is the infamous: "Is there a point in going to Art School?" It makes my blood pressure rise every time, not so much the question itself as the fact it is asked to, and answered by, people who have no business giving advice on the matter. This article seeks to answer it once

and for all, and be warned that it may come across as cutting in certain places. There's a link to my CV in my journal for those who might wonder about my own qualifications.

The short answer is: Yes, there is a point. In fact, if you want to make a career out of art, or design, you must go to art school. You can dispense from it if one of the following applies to you:

You're a genius in your chosen field. You have an innate grasp of art/design principles and the ability to impose your ideas in the field so that you don't even need to learn the nitty-gritty.

Unlikely, or you'd be famous by now.You need a formation but you have the vision and discipline necessary to get one as

complete as a school would provide on your own. If that were the case however, you certainly wouldn't be asking The Question.

You have no intention of making a career out of art or design but just want to dabble with either on the side.

If you recognize yourself in one of the above (without lying to yourself; "my friends say I draw amazing fan art without having learned how" or "I

know where to look for tutorials" certainly don't qualify), no need to read on.

Now here are reasons why you should go if you're serious about art. Notice "getting a degree" is not even on the list.

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By: WInthan

1. Learning.Is it actually possible to believe that people get a higher educa-tion just to get a piece of paper that says they know something they could have learned on their own? What kind of hippie re-actionism is that? We go to school to learn, people, not because someone is forcing us to, but because we care about our field, want to know everything we can about it, and actually improve in it! Here are a few things about learning:There is a lot to learn, about many media and within each medi-um, conceptually and technically. And no better place to find it all concentrated than a good art/design school.You will never learn as much on your own as you will learn in school. Never. You are one brain where school offers you many, and you only have one life where school allows you start from the sum of knowledge amassed by many masters over many lives. If you insist on spending 10 years learning something you could have learned in one course in school, that’s your funeral. Other people are more interested in exploring something new than in reinventing the wheel. Moreover, and I see this in every amateur on this site and else-where, in every first year student: you have no idea how little you know until you enter the major. So it’s not like you can look up everything on your own: there are things you don’t even know you should look up. You wouldn’t question the necessity to go to engineering school, yet you can find written material about every aspect of it. Not so with the arts, where much of the teaching is subtle and can be only transmitted indirectly (you can’t be taught to design, you can only be guided towards it). Yet you don’t think a structured training is necessary for a discipline that can’t be pinned on paper?In school you do not only learn. You become. The curriculum deconstructs the way you think and reconstructs your mind for the purpose of art. That is what sets a professional apart from an amateur. An amateur will always be “doing art”. A professional is hardwired for it. It’s not something you can even comprehend until you’ve been through it. That’s what a formation is about.

2. Discipline.Discipline is not self-imposed. It must be imposed from the outside. You’d have to be exceptionally iron-willed to put yourself through what we go through in school: the endless readings, the tight deadlines, the projects you really don’t feel like working on, the redos that drive you nuts, the competition, the overnights, the imposed subjects, etc. I don’t think it’s humanly possible. I’m extremely disciplined and driven, yet after I graduated, and despite really wanting to, I never once re-read the school notes I had promised myself to read. And so one misses out. Self-taught people have the natural tendency to go straight for what they want to learn. They don’t take side-trips. But it is the side-trips that feed your skill and give you an edge. An elective in psychology for instance can inject wonders into your work. I see some very skilled self-taught artists with one large weakness that betrays the fact they received no education: they can only do one thing. They have one style, one medium. They may be very good but it gets boring for everyone, it gets out fashioned quickly, and it’s a dangerous situation on a professional level. An art career, or a freelance design career, is a gamble: you make it safer by being versatile and able to answer any commission. Such versatility comes from being forced to do things you would not choose to do on your own, and exposed to ideas you would normally not be interested in. Think about it next time you turn up your nose at a teacher that forces you to step away from your cherished style...

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3. Mentoring.If you think getting feedback on dA helps you improve, imagine getting monitored and mentored daily by experienced, active professionals who can spot your weaknesses and know how to make you work through them. People who can evaluate your work not based on personal preference, nor even solely against a set of art principles, but in the context of the past and current art scene. Who can train your mind alongside your skills and show you how to marry concept and execution. Whose contacts in the real world can take you far. Who can force you to create a future for yourself with your skills instead of wasting them on something that will never get you anywhere in life. Or did you re-ally think college teachers are just fossils that they keep around to keep anime drawers out?

4. Exchange.Taking classes implies classmates. Setting aside how much more fun it is when you have road companions, think of them as exten-sions to your creativity. They are the ones who will come up with stuff you would never have thought of, and vice-versa. They’re the ones who will look at your work and, empowered by their in-timate acquaintance with it (after the first couple of years, you’ll be able to spot each other’s style a mile off, for life), suggest fixes or give you wild ideas, to complement the more realistic ap-proach of the teachers. They’re the ones who make the learning and experimenting fun and the worst chores (like creating a Munsell solid) bearable. You will learn from their mistakes and from their successes, and you can experiment on them, as well as enroll their help when in dire need of extra arms.

44%

35%57

of school districts increased English and Math while

Decreasing time spent on art by

orMinutes a week

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5. Connections.During your scholarship, you will participate in workshops, attend lectures, go on field trips, be sent on internships, enter depart-ment-wide or nationwide competitions, meet professionals, han-dle small freelance jobs. By the time you graduate, you will have a foot in design circles, a useful list of connections, and enough professionals should have heard your name to give you a start in your career. People in art school typically don’t have to worry about ending up jobless.

7. Equipment.Where else are you going to be able to experiment with so many media without spending a fortune? Our design (not even art) department put at our disposal, to name a few, work spaces, fully equipped etching and silkscreen rooms, a photo lab, a comput-er lab, projectors, digital cameras when they were not so readily available, and, of course, an enormous library. We also got stu-dent discounts on art supplies and printing services.

6. CredibilityPotential employers rarely ask to see a degree. They ***** up their ears, though, at the mention of your school, especially if it’s a reputable one. Here’s what the fact you graduated from art school tells them on the spot:Your skills have been tested and recognized by art professionals, who will vouch for you upon request.You are familiar with the workings of the system and the details it is your job to know.You can make a deadline.You can work under pressure.You have professional standards for quality and pricing.You can do the best job for them their money can buyAnd so on.Someone without an official education is at a disadvantage, because no client wants to invest time into verifying all the above about you, as they would have to do since nobody else can vouch for you (unless you come in with a letter of recom-mendation from someone reputable, but how are you going to reach such a person in the first place if you’re not introduced by the school body?) An amazing portfolio may not be enough, because the other factors (speed, reliability etc) are just as important. They may choose to take the chance, but they won’t pay you the same. Very few people will pay professional rates to someone untrained, because for that amount of money they can hire someone with much more credibility. See the catch? You may end up spending your life doing mediocre jobs for cheap clients. Your chances of breaking into the higher circles, where the best in art and design take place, are slim at best if you’re on your own.

89%

61%

of K-12 schools failed to offer a standard base course in Music, Dance, Theater and Art

Full Timeof K-12 Schools don’t have a

Arts specialist

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“The mask-maker should never have occasion to despair for want of inspiration; his field is limitless, the number and variety of subjects inexhaustible. On the contrary, he runs the danger of being overcrowded with visions of types and characters which beg to be made into masks.”

W.T. Benda 1944

MATERIALS

Clay - I like to use a wax-based like Klean Klay or an oil-based clay to make my masks. You never have to worry about it drying out or shrinking and is easier to remove in the mold-making stage.

Tools – Anything is legal. Fingers, butter knifes, spoons, toothpicks, and of course, the usual array of sculpting tools available at your local art store.

Form – I always use a mannequin head to sculpt my masks. It lets me stand the mask up vertically and sculpt in normal lighting with the same shadows and highlights that the mask will have when worn. This also allows me to view and sculpt from side angles. *Very important, remember the mask has depth. Many beginners create flat 2-dimensional masks because they are always sculpting from one position, looking down from straight overhead. Ouch, my neck!

The clay mask is built on a styrofoam mannequin covered in cheesecloth.For me, these factors far outweigh the negative ones, which are:

Clay won’t stick to a Styrofoam man-nequin. I solve this by adhering a layer of cheesecloth over the surface with a

polyvinyl glue. This creates a thin sculpting surface that the clay will stick to. Your new mannequin sculpting platform can be used over and over again.

It becomes a little more awkward to cast the mold with a mannequin attached to your sculpture. But easily overcome by constructing a frame, as we shall see later.

TRY IT!Slip Casting with David Knee

CHOOSING A CONCEPT

I love Benda’s comment above - it gets to the heart of why we make masks: there is so much inspiration as we look out at the world of human experience; so much that is begging for artistic interpretation and expression. The human face is a limitless source of mystery, intrigue, emotion, and drama. The mask-maker freezes a moment of the inner story and reveals the dignity and timelessness of the human condition.

Have fun finding a character, and keep visual references handy while sculpting in clayOnce you settle on an idea for a concept, collect as many images as you can that might inspire your vision. Photos from magazines, cartoons, and drawings from various angles, if you draw. Sometimes I just go in front of the mirror and do some facial gymnastics to get an idea for a mask. The example used for our

demonstration below was formed this way. I find and paste all the images on a board in front of me to refer to in the sculpting process.

ONCE YOU SETTLE ON AN IDEA FOR A CONCEPT, COLLECT AS MANY IMAGES AS YOU CAN THAT MIGHT INSPIRE YOUR VISION. PHOTOS FROM MAGAZINES, CARTOONS, AND DRAWINGS FROM VARIOUS ANGLES, IF YOU DRAW. SOMETIMES I JUST GO IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR AND DO SOME FACIAL GYMNASTICS TO GET AN IDEA FOR A MASK.

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SCULPTING THE MASK It’s definitely the time to have some fun! Much has been written about the joys of the creative process. But hey, sometimes it’s not hard to imagine what God must feel like as you bring something to life out of a lump of earth. Put on some music and get lost in it. Let time disappear. Make bold choices. Be adventuresome.

I find it best to take more than one session to finish a mask. There can be a tendency to get infatuated with lines and gestures and lose some objectively with your original concept. For me it’s better to come back the next day with new eyes.

THE MATERIALThe masks are made out of neoprene, an industrial latex compound that cures to a slightly flexible state. The mask holds its form like a leather mask and is equivalent in weight. The advantage to a neoprene mask is that it is an affordable way of achieving an incredibly durable and professional product. And multiple masks can be made from the same mold. Because of their durability, neoprene masks are ideal for classroom use and touring

The casting frame, made of packaging foam and the duct tape left over from protecting your house against terror attacks.CASTING FRAME

In casting anything with plaster you need something to retain the liquid plaster in as it hardens. Since we decided to use a 3-dimensional mannequin as a sculpting form, we now face the challenge of how to cast a plaster mold with it. We could cut the back side half off with a saw and cast the mask on a work-bench using clay for retaining walls, but then we just wasted a perfectly good mannequin. My solution is to construct a casting frame out of packaging foam and duct tape. (The foam is used to pack large appliances and usually disgarded in the garbage dump in back of department stores.) Both repel water and plaster so they make a perfect form. After taping together enough pieces of foam for the depth you need, cut out a hole that has the dimensions of your mannequin to fit in. Then construct your 2” retaining wall with leftover pieces. Seal all the seams with good old duct tape.

SEALING THE SEAMSPlace your sculpture into the frame and seal all seams and undercuts around the piece with leftover clay.

PLUG THE UNDERCUTSPlug undercuts on your sculpture with clay. Especially eye and nose holes, which will be cut out of the finished mask anyway.A deep hole in a positive sculpture will create a tall and unstable column in the negative mold. These will tend to break off as you remove the mask from the mold.

APPLY RELEASE AGENApply a release agent of liquid dish soap over the whole clay sculpture AND frame. with a small brush. Be sure to get into crevices and lines. DO NOT use petroleum jelly as a release agent for making a neoprene mask. It only clogs up the absorbent qualities of the plaster and makes the mold almost unusable.

1MIXING PLASTER

Most hardware store plasters will work for creating a mold but I find it’s best to find a construction supply house and buy your plaster there. For one, the price is about 1⁄2 of what you’ll pay at a hardware store and two, the plaster is much better. For casting a neoprene mask the best plaster is #1 Pottery Plaster, which is designed for slip casting.

The old tried and true method for mixing plaster is to start with the water and add the plaster to it a little at a time. Measure the amount of water in bucket or large container. Figure in that however much water you have, the final plaster mix will be 1/3 again that amount. So if you have 2/3 gallon of water, you’ll end up with approximately 1 gallon of plaster.

Sift the plaster into the water one handful at a time. Do not stir at this point. After many handfuls the water will start to get supersaturated with plaster and no longer absorb it. An island will form at the surface with little damp cracks of wet plaster. This is good. Time to stop adding plaster. Let the mixture steep for about 5 minutes, intermingling and getting acquainted. (During this time is when I usually apply the release agent to the sculp-ture.)

When 5 minutes is up mix the plaster thoroughly. Undermixed plaster is not very strong. I use a mixing bit with an electric drill but a vigorous stir with a paint stick is fine. The mixture should be pourable, about the consistency of pancake batter. But it won’t be poured since our retaining wall is only 2 inches high. We’ll ladle it on slowly. This is where the patience comes in.

APPLYING THE DETAIL COAT

Carefully apply a detail coat of the freshly mixed liquid plaster onto the surfaces of your mask. Use a small brush to very lightly release any trapped air bubbles from deep impressions and crevices. An air bubble will translate into a wart-like bump on the surface of the finished mask. (Which can be easily removed also.)

POURING THE MOLD

As the plaster starts to thicken keep ladling it directly over the detail coat. It will take time for the plaster to harden enough to build up the mold. If you used room temperature water the process will take approximately 20 minutes. (A bit faster for warmer water.)

Soon the plaster will start to really thicken and stay put. Make sure the walls of the mold are uniform in thickness. There is a tendency for the top of the mold (which will soon be the bottom.) to be the thinnest. Scoop plaster from the sides to thicken this area.

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1 42SHAPING THE MOLD

Soon, very soon, the plaster will become so firm that it is no longer workable. Create a level flat spot, or plateau, on top. This will become the bottom of the mold and the more level it is the better it will hold the Neoprene Latex liquid.

It will take about 20-30 minutes for the plaster to cure. This is a great time to clean up your tools and bucket. (And yourself. Wash your arms first. Plaster is a bear at removing arm hair.)

The plaster will get warm as it hardens. This is especially helpful when removing the clay from the mold. Moni-tor the casting with your hands. You’ll feel how hot it actually gets. After about 30 minutes it will start to cool a bit and this is the perfect to remove the clay from the mold.

REMOVING THE CLAY

Flip the whole contraption over and remove the frame from the mold. The outer edges of the mold can be very sharp. It’s a good idea to dull them by scraping a putty knife or chisel across the edge.

Next thing is to free the mannequin from the clay. Grab the neck and work it back and forth to see if it will loosen. Sometimes it will come right out with little effort. Most of the time, however, you will need to remove a little clay from the sides with a wire sculpting tool before you get any play in the mannequin.

Once the mannequin is gone you can start to remove the still warm clay. It should easily peel away with little or no sticking if you applied enough release agent. For some small undercuts you might have to use a small wire tool to assist. Store the clay away for your next project.

Gently wipe any clay or soap residue from the insides of the mold with a warm slightly damp cloth.The plaster mold needs to dry out thoroughly before you can pour Neoprene latex into it, usually 1-2 days is optimal, but using an electric fan can speed up the time to overnight.

POURING THE NEOPRENE CASTING

Neoprene rubber latex is a more rigid and durable cousin of regular latex rubber. It is very easy to use and will enable the mask-maker to easily make multiple copies of a mask from the same mold. Neoprene rubber latex is not a dangerous product to use but some simple precautions are always wise to follow. Ventilation, goggles and rubber gloves are recommended by the manufacturer.

To make a mask using Neoprene latex, you use the age old pottery process called slip casting or absorption cast-ing, where the liquid latex is poured into the a clean DRY plaster mold and allowed to sit for awhile. This plaster mold absorbs the solvent from the liquid leaving behind a skin or thin wall, which clings to the side walls of the mold. Allow it to set in the mold approximately 1 to 3 hours for desired build-up. The liquid level may drop due to absorption. This is normal, just top it off with additional casting compound if necessary. 2 hours will produce a wall thickness of approximately 3/16”. (Cured Neoprene is very tough and durable and it is unlikely that you would want a wall thicker than 3/16”.)

NEOPRENE CURING

The bulk of the liquid is poured back into its container to be reused again. Allow the neoprene latex skin to cure approximately 8-14 hours. (A small fan will again speed up the process.)

REMOVING THE MASK FROM THE MOLD

Here is the mask after the neoprene has dried. Notice that the color has darkened.As the leftover skin dries it turns beige and shrinks a little, allowing the latex mask to be removed quite easily. Slowly peel back an edge and work the skin off gently. In this state the mask is very flexible, much like a regular latex Halloween mask. You can trim away the edges with a scissors and prop up the mask in the shape you want to let it cure and harden for 1-2 days. Then it is ready to receive the finishing work. The mask still contains some solvent at this point and there is a noticeable odor which will disappear in few days once the neoprene is fully cured.

1

TRIMMING THE MASK

Once fully cured the mask is firm like Tupperware. At this point you can cut out the eye and nose holes with a mat knife. (And be careful there.) Or if you have a Dremel tool, drill them out. A Dremel tool with a wire brush attachment also works great to smooth any rough edge or large blemishes that might have formed from a bubble in the casting of the mold.

REMOVING BLEMISHES

You can create a smooth skinlike surface and remove any other small blemishes with a rag dipped in acetone.

ATTACHING THE STRAP

Attach an elastic strap to the mask with hot glue or epoxy. As a guide the best placing for the strap is level with the top of the eye socket.

REMOVING THE SHARP EDGES

The mask is almost ready, but remember - it’s going to be worn. Be sure to sand off the edges where the mask has been trimmed so it is comfortable to wear.

PAINTING THE MASK

All types of paint adhere well to neoprene, lacquer, enamel, and acrylic. I like the ease and clean-up of acrylic so I always apply a coat of gesso to the mask as an undercoat primer for painting.

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Elsa B. Parry

45

ARTIST SPOTLIGHTDale Chihuly

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DaleWell, after getting my MFA in 1968, I studied glass in Venice at Venini, and that reconfirmed my notion that in order to take full advantage of the medium you needed at least one assistant. I don’t think you could find a glass studio anywhere in the world where a glassblower wouldn’t be working without some kind of team or assistants-at least I’ve never seen a workshop where they didn’t work in teams.

When I returned from Italy I began working with my prize student, Jamie Carpenter. We began collaborat-ing on various projects in 1970. We did lots of neon in ice blocks and dry ice, and we also combined blown forms with large pieces of bent commercial glass. Ac-tually, from 1967-1972 most of the concerns were with environmental spaces utilizing glass, ice, neon, and a number of other transparent materials.

AAGQLike what?

DaleVarious forms of lighting, different types of plastics, and translucent films.

AAGQWhen did you finish your collaboration with Jamie?

DaleIn 1975 we went our own ways and I started the Nava-jo Blanket series. Incidentally, Jamie and I are currently collaborating on a large project for St. Luke’s of the Field, one of the oldest churches in New York City….Anyway, at this time I began utilizing a greater number of students on my team. Ben Moore, Therman Statom, Jim Harmon, and Michael Sheiner were assisting me. Some of my former students still work with me. Ben Moore has been blowing for me for eleven years, and Flora Mace has helped me off and on since 1975. Now Billy Morris, on the other hand, was not one of my students-he was hired as a truck driver at Pilchuck six years ago. He’s been working for me on and off ever since.

AAGQIt must be very rewarding to you that so many of your former students and assistants have been successful with their own work.

DaleIt makes us all happy, and it does make me very proud.

AAGQYou compare your methods to that of a film director.

DaleI feel like I move around my studio team during a blowing session as a director might tour a set while shooting a film. Let’s say my master blower is the head

American Art Glass QuarterlyLet’s discuss the dynamics of studio teamwork.

Dale Chihuly:Sure. It’s obviously very important to my glass. I’ve got strong feelings about teamwork although I’m not sure I fully understand it myself. I’ll try and answer your questions and maybe together we can figure out how it works. I do know that the way the team goes togeth-er is unique and that most of the teams are made up of artists that primarily do their own artwork. They blow for me a month or two out of each year (very often in different locations).

AAGQWhy did you start using a team?

DaleFrom the beginning, I’ve always liked collaborative ef-forts and teamwork. In 1966 when I was first starting to blow, I asked Fritz Dreisbach and Michael Whitley, who were graduate students, to help me on projects that I felt I couldn’t do on my own. As I recall, I was the only student that sought assistance from my classmates. For example, I asked Fritz to blow a bubble at the same time that I blew one. We stuck the two bubbles togeth-er simultaneously and blew into our blowpipes to form a complicated piece of sculpture. It’s still a part of the University of Wisconsin collection.

AAGQWho else did you work with?

DaleThe following year in 1967 I heard Italo Scanga lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. I befriended him after the talk and began making glass parts for his sculptural pieces. That was a wonderful time for experimenting and trying a lot of wild combinations of materials. I’ll never forget the smell of burning garlic. It was great. That was from trapping garlic bulbs into molten glass. It was about this time that I really started utilizing neon in glass and began building environmen-tal spaces.

DaleThe following year in 1967 I heard Italo Scanga lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. I befriended him after the talk and began making glass parts for his sculptural pieces. That was a wonderful time for experimenting and trying a lot of wild combinations of materials. I’ll never forget the smell of burning garlic. It was great. That was from trapping garlic bulbs into molten glass. It was about this time that I really started utilizing neon in glass and began building environmen-tal spaces.

AAGQDid this encourage your interest in teamwork?

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cameraman and my color person is similar to the lighting or makeup person on a soundstage. Film is so clearly a collaborative team effort that I use it as an obvious comparison. I’m also fond of drawing paral-lels between the way I work and the way an architect relates to his group.

AAGQYou have an artistic idea. How do you communicate the image you want to create to the people that are working with you?

DaleI never have really figured that out. It seems to sort itself out naturally. I’ve worked with most of the gaffers for so long that the lines of communication are difficult to explain…a few words, a gesture, or a drawing and they’re off. The real communication and discussion come the next morning when we take the pieces out of the annealing ovens. For example, on the day you visited Pilchuck to watch a blowing session, I spoke to the gaffer, Ben Moore, and said something like, “This is more like the form I want. Now let’s make it longer.” To the starter, who was David Schwartz that day, “David, I would like a little less color in general and more concentration toward the lip. Or to Lee Koveleski, who applies the surface color, “I want the body wraps to be

thinner,” or to Rich Royal, who prepared the pieces for Benny, “I want more definition from the optical molds and fewer jimmies.”

AAGQHow have you attracted such talented people to con-centrate on your pieces and not on their own? Does their artistic ego interfere?

DaleI don’t know, you might have to ask them. Maybe it’s because none of them are able to work on their own pieces all of the time, and they would rather blow for me than work for somebody else when they’re not doing their own thing. Or maybe they just enjoy it….We do have some good times and travel to some exotic places. Maybe it gives them something they can use in their own work. Most of the teams have been together for a long time and if they didn’t like it I’m sure they wouldn’t continue….It feels right.

AAGQYou said that you used to be the gaffer that finished the pieces and now Billy, Ben, and Flora are the gaf-fers who finish your pieces. How did that change take place?

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DaleUntil a few years ago, I finished the pieces when they went onto the punty. In 1979 or ‘80 I dislocated my shoulder while body surfing during a visit with Italo in La Jolla. I wanted to continue the series I was working on. So I asked Billy if he thought he could do the finish-ing under my direction. Billy had already assisted me for a couple of years and it was obvious he was going to be a great glassblower. He was quick to accept the challenge and the transition wasn’t that tough or difficult, although it was frustrating for me after all those years, not to be on the punty. Finally, after six months and as many doctors, my shoulder mended.

I was anxious to get back on the stick and I finished the pieces for several months. Then I went back to hav-ing Billy finish the pieces. There were several reasons….I found I had better control when I wasn’t on the punty. I can really “see” the piece better when I am a step removed. The gaffer doesn’t get a good view of the piece when he’s on the punty anyway, because he’s looking right at the bottom of the piece while it’s being opened. If I stand back, then I deal with all aspects of the development of the piece, because if you’re finish-ing that’s all you can think about. Then my loss of sight in one eye in 1976 had something to do with it as well. And, finally, because we tend to work on the edge so

much, the gaffer is placed in a very emotional position. He can get very frustrated.

AAGQThen if it’s going badly you can balance the master out?

DaleThat’s right. I can change the music or open a better bottle of wine or talk things over and find out what’s wrong-which can be difficult to correct because it’s so psychological-maybe like sports. It’s a delicate bal-ance out there on the pad.

AAGQYou do a lot of drawings while the teams are working. Do you use drawings to communicate?

DaleIn the beginning when people first started finishing the pieces for me I made working drawings in order to illustrate the forms. Now we usually just look at the actual pieces themselves and talk about them. Today I draw because I enjoy it. Drawing when we are blowing helps me to think….It inspires me and I pass that on to the team. So maybe I do use the drawings to commu-nicate. When we’re starting a new series or a new form

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I use working drawings to help the team. Sometimes when I start a new idea it’s a difficult time. For some reason the team may not like or understand the new concept. It’s an adjustment for them. But they try to bear with me.

AAGQTo communicate your concepts do you have to be on very close terms with the gaffer?

DaleYes, but not just the gaffer-I have to be pretty tight with most of the team, because they are making aesthetic decisions and they have to understand what I want. However, I like to stay off their backs and not say any more than I have to, otherwise I put a damper on their own spontaneity. Spontaneity…the one element I most strive for in my work. I’m good friends with all the team. But I’m tighter with the gaffers, because we’ve worked together longer in many challenging situations and traveled to many strange locations.

AAGQI understand you might be taking the team to Venice in the springtime.

DaleIt looks that way. You never know with the Italians…and with us for that matter. If we go as scheduled, it will be the first time an American team has worked in Italy. It’ll be a lot of fun…very interesting to see how the Italians react, especially at Venini, the most famous of the Italian factories. I plan to take a three-person team and we’ll have an exhibition in Venice in the summer of ‘84 during the Biennale. It’ll be a nice trip for all of us, and a chance for the Italians to see what we’ve learned in the past fifteen years.

AAGQWas it fifteen years ago you studied there?

DaleYes.

AAGQHow do you find new people for your team, and what attributes do you look for?

DaleWhen we travel to a new location to do a workshop at a University or an art school, we will often use a couple of the local students for the simple tasks on the team, like opening and shutting the doors to the glory hole for the gaffer. Seems like a simple job, but it takes a lot of concentration and the gaffer depends upon this person to be at the right place at the right time. If we can find a person who can handle this kind of mun-dane job, is agile, has quick hands and, most impor-tantly, can concentrate, then we’ll begin to use them more often. As they move up in the team they have to

have more organizational ability. Ultimately, the gaffer, in addition to being very skilled, must have the ability to control the rest of the team.

AAGQWhat about personalities?

DaleNo matter how skilled or organized a person might be, if they don’t fit into this road show and aren’t accepted by the rest of the team, it won’t last.

AAGQIn closing I would like to ask you about the Foster/White exhibition. I was very impressed with the ambi-ance. Did you design the exhibition?

DaleYes, with assistance from the gallery people. I’m gen-erally very concerned with the installation, and in the last couple of years I’ve installed a number of shows. I’ve been able to afford to experiment, and to purchase some new lighting systems which I’ve been using, in particular, low-voltage spots which are very bright but, because they don’t use much energy, give off very little extraneous light and keep the overall lighting quite low-more like one’s livingroom.

AAGQHow did the interest in the lighting develop?

DaleSometimes people think it’s because of my education in interior design and interest in architecture. I guess that’s part of it, but more accurately, or more impor-tantly, it came from working with photography. I found that some of the photographs of my work were look-ing better than the real-life pieces being shown in an exhibition, and it was because the glass was not being lit properly. So I began to do lighting research and discovered low-voltage pin spots.

AAGQSo it was your interest in photography that affected your installation more than anything?

DaleYes, photography and I guess my earlier environmental installations….I like it when the installations are really more like environments than a straight exhibition. I’ve also used photography to help me discover the pieces themselves. When we finish with a blowing session I usually spend two or three days photographing glass. Then, no matter where I travel, I have a record of what I did the last time I blew, and that will influence what we do next.

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHTContortionist of CIRQUE DU SOLEIL’S

QUIDAM

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

When one is working on a project there are many steps that one must go through. From finding inspiration, hammering out ones ideas, to putting on the finishing touches. FINDING FORM is dedicated to helping one find inspiration, creativi-ty, and beauty in places that may come by surprise. Much like one has to find the form in a block of clay artist must find truth and understanding in ones ideas and work. Take a chance and try to find form in and beauty in something that starts shapeless and uninspired.

EDITOR BIOKeith is a Senior at Flagler College in St. Augustine Flor-ida and has a love for all things creative. He aspires to change the world one day at a time by believing in the possibilities of others. His Aspirations in life include work-

ing for a major creative corporation like Walt Disney World or Cirque Du Soleil. He also aspires to attend grad school in

Theater and open his own Theatre Company.

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IMAGES CITED

Front page/ Table of ContentsChester Beltowski

Redesign Your LifeMedilfe.com

Breaking the blocksMary Crenshawaib

Prose and PassionShen Yun

On TourScott Allan Wallick

Finding the lightSingapore Dance Theater StepheezyMichelle Dorrance

Creative Block Lizzy Cunliffe Jones

Building Bridges urban surfer

Craft actsKyle Sattler

Try it!David Knee

Blow HardTerry Rishel

ARTICLES CITED

Redesign Your Lifehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/08/mindfulness-meditation-benefits-health_n_3016045.html Breaking the blockshttp://www.artbusiness.com/artists-how-to-price-your-art-for-sale.html Prose and Passionhttp://skinnyartist.com/an-artists-bookshelf-the-artists-way-by-julia-cameron/On Tourhttp://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/art_attack/The-NEW-NYC.html Finding the lighthttp://www.howlround.com/how-do-we-make-it-directors-and-the-new-theater-landscape Creative Block http://zack-sr.deviantart.com/journal/Art-Blocked-The-Anatomy-of-Art-Block-2141601875es4Building Bridges http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/02/15/mentors-for-men/ Craft actshttp://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music-arts/the-importance-of-art-in-child-development/ http://www.edutopia.org/arts-music-curriculum-child-developmentTry it!http://mask-maker.com/process.phpBlow Hardhttp://www.chihuly.com/interview-with-dale-chihuly--by-elsa-b-parry_detail.aspx 2500

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DECISION

The most difficult thing is the

to a

ct, the

rest

is m

erely

TENACITY

. Amelia Earhart

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Its kind of

to do

the

IMPOSSIBLE

FUN

WALT DISNEY

DRE

AM

BIG

DARE

to fa

il

and

NORMAN VAUGHAN