Studio Notes

It's been an interesting couple of weeks. I've moved out of my studio at the Third Street Art Explosion and I have been rearranging my cottage to dedicate the downstairs to my new studio. In addition to moving everything from the studio here, I've had to move pretty much every piece of furniture I own either from downstairs to upstairs or from upstairs to down. Let me tell you: moving furniture by myself ain't easy.

It's not easy but it's gone a long way toward showing me that anything is possible given time. I haven't done any of this all at once, it's all been piecemeal. I've done a lot of measuring and imagining and finally the pieces are beginning to come together.

On Fountain Pen Network there is a topic started by the user watch_art (also known as the printmaker Shawn Newton) who called for drawings of coffee mugs. The one rule he stated was that the drawing be done with each person's favorite pen.

Actually, you'd have to go back in time to find the intersection of Kentucky Street and Army Street in San Francisco. Army Street was renamed Cesar Chavez Street in 1995 and Kentucky Street was annexed to Third Street sometime probably around 1920. But the intersection itself is in the same spot, at Third and Cesar Chavez, and that's where my studio is.

As October is the month of Open Studios here in San Francisco, once again I'm opening my studio to the public over the course of the weekend. I'll be at the Third Street Art Explosion at 1661 Tennessee Street (that one is still named after a state. Don't ask me why they changed Kentucky Street's name) starting at 11am and ending at 6pm.

I dislike saying hateful things about other artists or their artwork. I really do. I believe that anyone who puts their time and energy into creating something rather than into idle consumption deserves respect. Even when I am unmoved by the artwork, it is to be lauded for the skill and effort expended even in creating displays of technique with little else to recommend them.

Tonight I spent a few hours making test prints to follow up on my November 1 post Pondering Paper. My last round of tests gave me a lot of information to go on, but under the drawing table lights none of the prints were of satisfactory quality. I had to learn whether this was the fault of the paper, the printer, or the quality of the scan from which I was working.

After careful examination of the test prints, I decided that the most likely culprit was the quality of the scan. The lines were just not as crisp as they should have been; everything looked just slightly blurry or out of focus. So I grabbed the file from which I had another set of prints made to my satisfaction so that I could compare the output from the printer to which I have access and the output from PhotoworksSF's printer.

A few months ago I purchased sample packs of printmaking paper for giclée (French for «inkjet») printing, intending to test the papers out with the printer a client of mine has given me permission to use. I have been getting the prints of my pen & ink work done at Photoworks here in San Francisco, and they generally do good work. Nevertheless, I would like more control over the process. A couple of times miscommunications have led to frustrating delays or wasted prints. My thinking is that if I can move the production «in-house» I'll be able at least to scrap and re-run my prints blaming only myself. At best I can save days on pieces being reprinted.

Here's something I don't think gets mentioned enough in the discussion of speculative (spec) work. Artists like to say «you get what you pay for» and talk down about the quality of the work you get if you get it for free, but it's not true. It's actually really easy to find people with talent who are desperate enough to work for free. The difference is not so much about the illustrator's artistic talent (though I agree that people that work for money will tend to be of higher quality) but about the illustrator's ability to advise and develop solutions on a business level.

I've gotten behind schedule on the «Pens and Inks» series, so tonight after spending a few hours putting down ink I went back to my schedule and refigured the due dates. I'm keeping the same final date, just reducing the number of days I have to finish each of the drawings in the series to give them an even pace starting now. There's no point in sticking to an unrealistic schedule. The new schedule may not be realistic either, but it is more so than one which has deadlines in the past for a drawing I have yet to begin.

Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation puts forward the notion that people love a good story and that many celebrated innovators have told stories that oversimplify or even ignore the truth that innovation requires a lot of work. People love the story of a creator observing an odd confluence of events which causes an epiphany, which thereafter leads to an invention no one had thought of previously.

These stories eliminate the uncomfortable idea that a creator or inventor is somehow better than the rest of us. Anyone could have been sitting under a tree to see an apple fall and discover gravity, right? Anyone could want to help his wife trade knick-knacks online and decide to create a website to make that easier, later becoming the wildly successful eBay.

An installation of Kevin Burkhalter's Journal Comic from the end of last year provides an interesting twist on the idea that constant practice is more important than any other aspect of creative work:

http://kevinsjournalcomic.com/comic12-4-2008.html

There are a lot of ways to express this which encompass a variety of iterations and corollaries. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours to mastery, Kevin Burkhalter's raising of the lower bar, and my old art skool instructor who said, «Everyone's got a certain number of bad drawings in them. Your job is to get them out onto paper as fast as you can.» It all comes down to: keep doing it and never be afraid to make bad work.