My Ellen photo journal
https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/jerry-saltz-how-to-be-an-artist.html
How to be an Artist/Jerry Saltz
Step One: You Are a Total Amateur
- Lesson 1: Dont Be Embarrassed/ reveal things about yourself that others may find appalling, weird, boring, or stupid.
- Lesson 2: Tell your own story and you will be interesting. Louise Bourgeois/ just because its your story, that doesnt mean youre entitled to an audience
- Lesson 3: Feel Free to Imitate
- Lesson 4: Art Is Not About Understanding. Or Mastery./ Forget about making things that are understood.
- Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work/ Every artist and writer I know claims to work in their sleep
- Step Two: How to Actually Begin
Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil/ Dont think good or bad. Think useful, pleasurable, strange.
Any camera
Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice/ For instance, on the subway, while waiting or sitting around, practice drawing looking/seeing your own hands.
Lesson 8: Now, Redefine Skill/ your skill will be whatever it is youre doing differently.
Lesson 9: Embed thought in material. Roberta Smith/ What does this mean? An object should express ideas; art should contain emotions. And these ideas and feelings should be easy to understand complex or not./ No! These are just dumb pictures of clouds and have nothing to do with anything.
Is Duchamps Fountain an artwork or an idea? Both!
Conceptual art
Lesson 10: Find Your Own Voice
Lesson 11: Listen to the Crazy Voices in Your Head
Lesson 12: Know What You Hate
Lesson 13: Scavenge/ I always like to work on things that were discarded
Step Three: Learn How to Think Like an Artist
Lesson 14: Compare Cats and Dogs/ Artists are cats. (And they cant be herded.)
Lesson 15: Understand That Art Is Not Just for Looking At./ Holy relics in churches all over the world are said to heal.
Lesson 16: Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content/ Compare These Eight Nudes
Forget the subject matter what is each of these paintings actually saying?
Lesson 17: See As Much As You Can/ standing back, getting close,
Lesson 18: All Art Is Identity Art! This is because it is made by somebody.
Lesson 19: All Art Was Once Contemporary Art
Step Four: Enter the Art World
Lesson 20: Accept That You Will Likely Be Poor
Lesson 21: Define Success
Lesson 22: It Takes Only a Few People to Make a Career/Dealer, Collectors/Critica/Curators/ Surely your crappy art can fake out 12 stupid people!
Lesson 23: Learn to Write/ Exercise: Artists Statement
Step Five: Survive the Art World
Lesson 24: Artists Must Be Vampires
Stay up late every night with other artists around your age. Show up. Go to openings, events, parties, form small gangs.
Lesson 25: Learn to Deal With Rejection
Lesson 26: Make an Enemy of Envy/Envy looks at others but blinds you.
Lesson 27: Having a Family Is Fine/ being a parent is already very much like being an artist.
Step Six: Attain Galactic Brain
Lesson 28: What You Dont Like Is As Important As What You Do Like/ Dont say, I hate figurative painting.
Lesson 29: Art Is a Form of Knowing Yourself
Lesson 30: Artists do not own the meaning of their work. Roberta Smith
Lesson 31: All Art Is Subjective/ Art is a static, non-changing thing that is never the same.
Lesson 32: You Must Prize Vulnerability/ We all contradict ourselves. We contain multitudes. You must be willing to fail.
Lesson 33: Be Delusional/ Yeah, but Im a fucking genius. Believe in yourself
You are, now. Art is for anyone, it just isnt for everyone.