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Harder Than Art

Friday, November 13th, 2009

When I was in school getting my art degree, guest lecturers would speak about how to be a successful professional artist. They made one thing was abundantly clear: being a professional artist is two full time jobs, one as an artist, and one in sales and marketing.

Back then, I always thought to myself, “whatever. Sales and marketing can’t take that long.”

It turns out, I was wrong. The 101 Woodblock series is almost ready for a pre-launch, available for newsletter subscribers. Putting everything in place to start marketing these things has been a lot of work. Far more than I imagined when I heard guest lecturers say this back in college.

Anyhow, the prints I am making for this current project will be available only to Newsletter subscribers, for a cut rate. The pre-release price is just enough to cover my materials and mailing expenses.

I’m doing these as a crash course in fine art printmaking after all, and, well, as a marketing gimmick. The best marketing is done by giving people far more value than you ask in return after all.

Details will be coming out next week on the Insider Newsletter. If you want to get a head start on signing up, click here to get on the newsletter.

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If you have to ask, you don’t get it

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Either that, or I am just f**king around.

This is not an apple or something

This is not an apple or something

Please, imagine that the above is some sort of thought provoking art.

Small posters of this photograph are available for $75 each. Contact me for details.

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I can’t get no satisfaction

Monday, November 9th, 2009

I’m sitting here in my apartment, eating dinner and watching some TV to relax on Sunday night. I’ve been working a lot this weekend. It’s actually been all work. I worked till midnight Friday on a run of prints, woke up Saturday, and headed over to Dan’s house (my former roommate) to work on a new demo for our band.

I had a little powwow with Dr. WordPress afterwards, and we talked business plans and such. Got home Saturday night, printed up another run on my prints, and got to sleep.

I cleaned up my apartment today (it needed it), printed yet another run of prints, just a few today, an additional run on about 10 prints. I’ve been carving a woodblock for a few hours, and that brings me to where I am at the beginning of this post, dinner and TV.

I just looked over at this block I carved this afternoon, and I know I am gonna print it tonight.

And I won’t be satisfied.

I know artists are always self critical. Yesterday, with Dan, we were listening back to one of the takes we recorded. He mentioned that he messed up his drums a few times, but I didn’t hear it. He was far more critical of his craft than I was, because he was closer ot it.

This is a plague that infects a lot of artists, from what I have noyticed. I know I have it.

Pulling that first print off the block is exciting, but once it is hanging to dry, I start to see all the flaws. I see every misstep with my carving knife, how the color would look better if it was a shade different, the uneven pressure I put on the block when I printed it, making the final ink coverage inconsistent, or the lack of balance in the overall image.

I can’t get no satisfaction from my work.

When I say this, I hear the song in my head, except I hear the version by Devo, rather than the original version by the Stones.

Actually, I hear that version now, since I threw on Q: Are We Not Men? onto the speakers.

Usually I would sit around and stew in my dissatisfaction with what I am making, but instead I think I can address it by writing up this post and letting you sit there and read about how art is such a frustrating endeavor.

I think that the frustration that I feel with the art I make is the entire point.

If I could make the perfect print, then I wouldn’t need to make any others, I would have “accomplished the goal”.

Creating a work of art may be a goal in some respects, after all, I want to make art, give you an inside view of what it is about, and get it in to the hands of you folks. That certainly is a goal.

The entire reason I make art, however, is a process. I could be making tons of other things that might be far more profitable than art, but art is what I like to do. I’ll just have to work ten times harder to get rich off of my art.

The process of creating has meaning to me, and that process wouldn’t be important if I was satisfied with everything I do. I guess that lack of satisfaction makes it worth doing.

Anyway, back to dinner and Devo.

Are we not men?

We are Deacon.

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Inspiration, Perspiration, Motivation, and Grueling it out

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

How do you deal with a lack of motivation?

I know that my dreams of becoming an internet entrepreneur are going to require two things: work, and more work. Work in the morning, work at noon, work in the evening. Since I am weaving all of this work in with a busy day job, it is fairly tiring.

Motivation makes it easy to put in the 99% perspiration required. What do I do when motivation runs out?

For the last week or so, I had lost my motivation for my 101 Woodblock Series. I spent last weekend knowing I needed to crank out about 15 hours of work on this, yet I got nothing done. The motivation wasn’t there. I didn’t have that drive to get it done, and in its place was apathy towards the entire thing.

I think that it has hurt that I went cold turkey off of drinking coffee a little over one week ago. Coffee was largely my fuel, I drank a lot of it. It has been rough to get over the hump on this one. Though this talk of coffee is an extended aside from my main point, it gets to the heart of another point I will write about soon, the connection between physical well-being and emotional well being. I know deep down that I won’t make a million dollars on the internet if I am not physically healthy.

Back on track – last week, this lack of motivation caused me to miss my morning power hours. This set my whole day askew, since my day began with not following my own habits.

so when there is little chance that my motivation will kick in and take care of things, I have to rely on thing: Grueling it out.

Yesterday morning my alarm went off at 5:45, telling me to wake up and write. I had no idea what I was going to write, and this habit is new enough that I haven’t built that innate trust that the power hour will be productive, even when I don’t know how it will be productive.

So my alarm was ringing, and I was faced with a choice. I could reset my alarm for 6:45, and sleep another hour, or I could gruel it out and force myself to sit in front of the computer. Somehow, my willpower took over, and I did the latter.

I sat down with no idea what I would be writing about, and no real motivation to write about any specific topic. I started poking around my writing folder on my computer, and found a draft with just a few lines written that sparked something, and I knew what to write about. After I whipped out the first blog post in about 20 minutes, I had an idea for a second, and I whipped that one out too. I ended up with two blog posts written, edited, converted to HTML, and posted or scheduled to be posted within 45 minutes.

The main reason that I was able to get these two posts written was that I grueled it out and forced myself to sit in front of my computer. As I was sheepishly walking out of bed towards my desk, I remember thinking to myself that I had to do this, even if I just sat at my computer for 45 minutes and did nothing.

Those first 5 minutes sucked. When I was getting out of bed, cutting up a dish of fruit and pouring myself some juice, I was fighting with a part of saying that I could still go crawl in to bed for another 45 minutes. I didn’t have to be awake. Something happened once I began work, and it became a lot easier to follow through and get everything done.

Important lessons from yesterday morning:

  • If I wait until I feel like writing blog posts, copy, content, or whatever, I will never get anything done.
  • If I have a habit in place, I need to follow it, even when I don’t want to.
  • Genius may be 99% perspiration, but a lot of the time, it takes grueling it out to get to the point that you break a sweat.

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Lessons From Blog World Expo: Quality Content Above All

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I a weekend at Blog World Expo recently. The best way to describe it is as a conference and trade show for folks that create content and distribute it via the internet.

They like to call it “New Media”, but really it is just old media distributed in new ways.

There was a whole lot of talks given about how to make money by producing content on the internet, but one point was driven home more than any others: the importance of quality content.

Without quality content, readership, followers, subscribers, etc, just won’t come.

This point hit home for me, specifically as it relates to this site and my overall goals – fame, fortune, and glory through art.

Amazing content is not easy, and it does not come naturally. It takes hard work, and a lot of it.

Printing may be like riding a bike, but that first mile or so on a bike after ten years without riding is going to be a little shaky and wobbly. This is the reason for the 101 Woodblock Series.

It’s been a long time since I spent the majority of every day in the printmaking studio, knocking out lithograph after lithograph. The 101 Woodblock Series is my chance to get reacquainted with an old friend, and catch up over a long night of drinks and stories from the good ol’ days.

My goal for this series of prints is to make each one different, no two are alike. Each one requires thought and consideration to balance the image and the colors and decide what else is needed.

The result is that this series takes a lot longer than a standard woodblock edition, where each print is the same, and also that I am having that long night catching up, telling the old stories that we remember, and reacquainting ourselves with an old friendship.

In other words, I am forcing myself through a crash course of printmaking to re-learn the means and methods required to make beautiful art.

Of course, my work is your benefit, because when these are all done, I will be giving these out for a fraction of the real value. I want to celebrate this old friendship with printmaking by putting a piece of handmade artwork in your hands for less than the cost of a burger and a beer (my favorite meal).

If you’re not already signed up, head over to the 101 Woodblock Series page, and sign up for the newsletter for updates on the series, and notice of how to get one of these hotcakes into your hands.

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This Post Is Too Personal For A Title

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

I have a new habit of writing for an hour every morning. I’ve been struggling to write something this morning. I wrote, deleted, wrote, abandoned, and now, in frustration, am writing this.

Life has always felt like it takes a lot of work. Without constant, diligent work to stay on top of everything in my life, it quickly falls apart, and I am left in a river that ebbs and flows and takes me wherever it happens to turn.

Entropy is the scientific term for “things fall apart”, and my life feels like entropy in action. Constant work is needed to keep everything in place, or it will fall out and go its own direction.

The crazy thing is, when I start to feel like things are flying off every which way, and I am just struggling to reign it all in, I feel like I am the only person who has ever felt this way.

I’m the only one. Maybe other people have felt something similar to this, but I’m the only one that actually feels this way this much. It is my personal struggle.

(This, I have learned, is wrong. One of the little secrets of humanity is that the more and more something feels intense and personal, the more universal that feeling is)

Making art is one of the ways that I reign it all in. That is why I am making myself do this 101 Woodblock Series.

When I make art, I feel like that crazy river that bends, turns, and roars every which way… mellows out. The river widens, slows down, and the rapids disappear. I can think again, and more so, I can breath again. Life doesn’t feel as chaotic.

I don’t make art because I love to, I make art because I have to.

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Speed Bumps on the Road to Productivity

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Last week I talked about how I schedule my morning to be productive. It’s been going well, and I have gotten a lot done in the few mornings since then. I whipped out two blog posts on Thursday, and Friday got hijacked by fixing a problem with one of my blogs. My buddy, Dr. WordPress advised that I add alt attributes to images on my blogs. It turns out that if you put a bracket character “>” in an alt attribute it may mess everything up and break a wordpress theme. It took me a while to track down the problem.

I have learned two lessons:

  • I have to have everything I need for my morning habits, or it falls apart
  • I have to have a nice evening before, or it falls apart

Simple habits may be easier for me to implement, but this habit is a pretty big change. I have a lot of negative momentum that tries to keep my old habit of sleeping in, hitting snooze, running late, and picking up some unhealthy muffin or egg sandwich on the way to work.

I say this because this morning I blew it and didn’t get any writing done. I woke up at 7:00, and had an entirely unproductive meeting.

Missing Fruit Makes a Mismanaged Morning

I was in LA all weekend, and I blame my problems on that.

LA itself was great, a buddy of mine opened his home to a few of our friends, and we all had a good old time for the weekend. Lots of male bonding and geeking out.

I got home late yesterday evening, and didn’t have groceries. I was missing the usual fruit that I cut up in the morning for breakfast, and I was out of coffee. Two hits to this new habit of mine.

Late, wasted evenings make a late, wasted morning

In addition to my lack of morning supplies, I stayed up late and had a couple beers to relax. I had been on the road for 8 hours, and I didn’t really have it in me to get anything done and be productive.

I fired up my computer, watched a few shows, threw down a couple beers, and in general had the alone time that I need to recharge. I was up pretty late, and 5:45 am came just a little bit too early.

It didn’t help that I was up till 2 or 3 am each night over the weekend, and up around 8 am every day. I was running on low sleep. When morning came around, I decided to not get any writing done, and sleep in till 7. It felt good, and I probably needed it.

Schedule for a productive evening

The big lesson for me is that I am gonna have to schedule my standard evening as well as my standard morning if I am gonna keep to my productive schedule. This might be a little more challenging, because my evening activities vary a whole lot more than my mornings.

I think I will need some evening habits in place to make this work though. As I work this out, I’ll be writing about it here.

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The Schedule of a Productive Morning

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

This morning, I had a glimpse of the habits that it will take to succeed. My morning was very productive and invigorating. This was a step to success.

This may seem odd and trivial at times, but it was very much planned out.

My alarm went off at 5:46am this morning. After a minute or two of clock radio, I hit snooze, which resets the alarm for 9 minutes. I got out of bed at 6am. Stumbled into the bathroom. My joints were stiff, my feet didn’t want to carry weight yet, and my eyes were half shut.

I got into my kitchen at 6:04. I started my laptop, started a pot of coffee, and opened my fridge to pull out some juice, a peach, and a nectarine. I drank a glass of grapefruit juice (the last of the container – I need more), and cut up the peach and nectarine and put the slices on a plate.

I told you there were going to be some trivial bits in here.

It was 6:10 at this point, and I spent 5 minutes stretching. I was determined to be able to touch my toes by the time I was done stretching. Mission accomplished.

While I was stretching, I thought about writing, and tried to figure out what I was going to write about.

At 6:15, I sat down in front of my computer with my sliced fruit and mug of coffee, and fired up my text editor of choice.

In 20 minutes I banged out a blog post about what my 101 Woodblock Series is about, and got it formatted for the web and posted by 6:50.

At this point I put on some shorts and a sweatshirt and left my apartment to move my truck. I was out and about last night, and got home fairly late. I parked in a meter spot the night before and had to find a street parking spot this morning. It took about 15 minutes. This situation only happens about once a week.

I got back in front of my computer around 7:05, and whipped out another post for another of my blogs (written with a pen name) in about 20 minutes. I already had half of the content written for this post, and it took about 20 minutes to get it up and ready to post.

7:25 rolled around, I fired up my email, cleared out my inbox, read a little news, then started to get ready for work. I packed up my lunch and mid-morning breakfast (when I eat breakfast this early I need an early morning breakfast and a mid-morning breakfast), and made it to work about 15 minutes earlier than usual.

So why bore you with these details?

This kind of habit that will lead to being successful.

I have a time management problem. I work 8 hours a day, and when I get home, it is difficult to focus on writing. When I get home, take off my suit and tie, and get some dinner in front of me, I want to relax.

My ability to focus drops significantly after 5pm.

I can’t focus on writing while I am at work, and I usually spend my lunch break exercising.

Mornings are really the best time for me to get my writing done.

I also realize that writing is the limiting factor to the growth of my projects. Every one of my projects revolves around content driven marketing, information products, or something that is written.

Without writing, my projects stagnate.

My goal, then is to create a morning habit of writing. If I can dedicate 1 hour every morning to writing, I will accomplish quite a bit.

Yes, it was deliberate

I actually wrote this schedule out on paper last night. Habits can be difficult to change, so I thought through every bit of my morning, and wrote down what and when I would do.

Seriously. I scheduled waking up and going to the bathroom. I even scheduled hitting the snooze button.

I had the piece of paper with this schedule on it sitting on my nightstand so I could grab it and reference it in the morning.

It worked this morning, and worked pretty well. Two blog posts in a morning’s work makes me pleased.

I’m planning to keep the schedule on my nightstand again tonight, to repeat the process again tomorrow. The real test will be next week, when the momentum of motivation from trying something new decreases.

Anyway, expect updates.

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How To Find Out When You’re Getting Lucky

Friday, September 18th, 2009

This isn’t anything new, it’s pretty old hat, and it’s pretty obvious too, but it is what I am doing.

One thing Eben Pagan pointed out in his Altitude program is that you need to know when you are getting lucky in business, and follow that route.

I’ve been figuring out where I’ve been getting lucky by digging in to the search result keywords for my blogs. Google Analytics has a neat feature that let’s you see what keywords people are searching for to find your site. These keywords make great titles and content for new posts and articles! You have proof that people are looking for this information, and they are finding your site, so you might as well produce this content, or more content, or better content on these subjects.

On one of my blogs, I have a certain keyword search (after my name and the name of the site) that has given me the highest number of hits from search engines. All of this is because of one post I wrote on this subject, which is showing up on the first page of google for that search. I have an opportunity to create more content on this subject and provide it to these people.

This is a win-win situation. I know I can create better content on this subject than the other search results are providing. I also get more people exposed to that blog, with the chance of converting them to ongoing readers.

I am borrowing from my buddy Dr. WordPress who wrote a series of posts with practical blogging tips, and I am going to write a series of practical tips discussing the subject matter of that key word search.

I got lucky by writing an article that has gotten highly ranked by search engines for a search on that subject, now, I need to capitalize on that and be thankful that I got lucky.

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Viva Blog Vegas

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

I just found out that I won a pass to Blog World Expo from Mashable.com. Folks entered by leaving a comment about why they wanted to attend Blog World.

I’m hoping to get a lot of good information and inspiration that will help take my websites to the next level of performance. Plus, I might have a little bit of fun in Las Vegas.

Here was my entry:

I’m actually not a very good writer.

I can’t effortlessly whip out a thousand words or two on a subject. I struggle to find the words that will communicate with my readers, and inspire or inform them to make their life better. I write, and re-write, and it sometimes takes hours to craft a post that I think others may think is worth reading.

And I do it anyway.

The things about writing, and specifically blogging, that are a struggle are the things that make me do it. It is a challenge, and because of that challenge, I am drawn to it. I love that writing isn’t easy for me, and because of that, writing is far more rewarding than other things that I have a natural knack for.

Blogs have levelled the playing field and removed the barriers to entry. Anyone can have a blog up and running in just a few minutes these days. People all around the world can read what you and I write seconds after we decide to share it.

I’ve chosen blogs as my primary way of sharing what I have to offer with other people. Now I am faced with the giant task of writing compelling content, and finding ways to show people what I have to offer. Blog World Expo will teach me how I can keep working to do this.

I admit, I am greedy. I don’t want to sit in a cubicle my whole life. I don’t want to work form 9 to 5 every day, and dress up in slacks and a shirt to go in to the office. I want out. Specifically, I want out by communicating and creating value to share with other people. I want to learn how to make my writing, and my blogs, more compelling. I want to improve my life, and I want to do that by making other people’s lives better.

Blog World Expo is right for me.

You can see the comment on the blog post by clicking here.

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