art

Encouraging Creativity

It was a rare moment of sibling collaboration—when all the kids put aside their squabbling, grabbed their markers, and made something.

This scene used to happen more often, especially before Aiden became a teenager. Our kitchen table was the family art studio, and the kids would take on a three-marker challenge or create handmade birthday cards for friends. 

Early on, we encouraged creativity. My wife is a talented musician, and I have a background in music and photography, so we made sure to give our kids a solid artistic foundation. All the kids took early childhood music classes, and we enrolled the girls in the local art school’s preschool program. Aiden is a talented musician in the middle school band, and the girls are musical theater performers. 

We know it will do them good. Art for art’s sake is a perfectly fine goal to me, but there are other benefits—like civic engagement and writing skills. And the arts are social: most of Aiden’s friends come from marching band (so did mine, back in high school!). The arts, combined with a love of reading, an appreciation of the outdoors, and a bit of Midwestern kindness, are a pretty good recipe for an enjoyable childhood and a successful adulthood. 

For some families, it’s all about sports and competition, or pure academic achievement.

Our kids? They were cursed with art lovers for parents. They didn’t stand a chance. 

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Don’t Apologize

So you haven’t made anything in a while. 

Maybe you broke a habit, or a long streak of productivity. Perhaps you haven’t taken your camera out in months. It could be you have nothing to share.

It’s fine. Don’t apologize. When it comes back – whatever it is for you – do it, share it, and keep going.

When you’re ready, we’re ready.

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Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

 

We’ve always been a musical family, but we officially became a musical theatre family this fall.

The women in our group all joined the cast of Center Stage Jackson‘s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – my daughter Madelyn taking a lead role as Jemima, Riley as one of the ensemble kids, and Jaime as the wicked baroness. 

That meant lots of light nights, back and forth trips to rehearsal, and tired kiddos who aren’t used to staying up late for practice. But the last two weekends, it all came together.

The show’s director, Lisa, is a close family friend, and she let me hang out back stage for some behind the scenes photography. 

Supporting the local arts in our communities means showing up, and lending talents where needed. 

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Artist vs Content Creator

In Terrible Simplicity

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to decide if you’re a content creator, or an artist.”
– Gozer Goodspeed

Gozer’s tweet thread (via Jeffery Saddoris) is great to think about if you Make Things – either as a content creator or artist. 

I wonder all the time, watching my kids view YouTube video after YouTube video: is all this content artistic? Or is it entertainment? Is there anything wrong with either approach?

A few thoughts in reaction to Gozer’s thread:

  • Content creation is a conveyor belt – art is a walk in the woods.
  • Content creation seems more about business. Not that making art can’t be a business, but content creation, as Gozer puts it, involves “relentless output” to feed an algorithm hoping someone will discover your stuff.
  • Art is at your speed. Content creation is at the speed of an audience’s appetite. 
  • A lot of this speaks to artists as business owners (music in Gozer’s case) – but I bet a lot of hobbyists see “content creation” as their ticket to the big money. Actually making an income from your artistic hobby can be very, very difficult for most people.

I consider myself someone who makes and shares the things I make, at my own pace, for a very small audience. But I do it for me, not them, and I certainly don’t do it to feed a social media platform. 

And then there’s the language that gets thrown around in business and entertainment and just about everywhere: do you make “content?” Or do you make photographs? 

 

 

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Greatest Hits

Shadows Take Their Toll

When your favorite band or musicians compiles a greatest hits album, it’s usually a collection of their singles and fan favorites. Over a long career, a productive band or artist will have enough singles to make a good greatest hits record. Take Genesis or the Temptations – multi-decade output combined with hit singles makes for a representation of the artists’ career. 

Now, a greatest hits album may not include your favorite song from that musical act’s portfolio. For me, “Supper’s Ready” is my go-to Genesis song, but it’s not considered a “greatest hit” on their album. Too long or too weird, I imagine.

How about for visual artistic output? How does one compile a list of “greatest hits” in photography, painting, or video work? Do you pick your favorites, or someone else’s favorites?

Brooks Jensen at LensWork had me thinking about my own work, and what I would consider my best pictures. In fact, I recently submitted a few images to Flickr’s World Photography Day contest. I had to think about what are my best people and nature images, out of all the hundreds and maybe thousands I’ve taken over the years. It was a tough exercise, combing through and wondering, what are my “greatest hits?”

Do I pick the popular images? Or the ones I consider to be my best? If I start picking my favorites, it could be a random picture of one of my kids, one that I hold dearly in my heart. 

It’s the same if you’ve ever had to develop a portfolio of images to share with others: your best wedding photographs, or your top artistic representations. How do you pick? 

Like musicians, it could be a combination of popularity along with your own personal tastes that make a “greatest hits” collection. If the Rolling Stones don’t want to play a popular song, they leave it off the playlist – no sense in spending effort on a song for which the band has no passion, right?

Looking at photography and our best-of list, we can use the same metric to guide us: what do people like? What do I like, too? 

There’s your list. 

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Nostalgiapalooza

What is it about nostalgia that is so attractive?

While it’s a bittersweet emotion, nostalgia can be used to “counteract loneliness, boredom, and anxiety.” Think of that feeling you get when you flip through an old photo album, or listen to a favorite album. Nostalgia, while wistful, helps you think of good memories. It’s grounding, and gives you roots.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been on a nostalgiafest here lately. In the past year, I’ve made a point to relive things from my past that, at one point, I knew I loved. The feeling is especially strong with movies: I watched (and continue to watch) a ton of movies growing up. Now, I’m revisiting those late ’80s and early ’90s films that I watched over and over again (and haven’t watched since), primarily comedy classics like Major League, Funny Farm, and Naked Gun. For one, they’re funny, and those movies brighten my mood.

And two, I have great feelings associated with those 30-year old films. With the pandemic and all the anxiety surrounding it, it’s nice to dip into the past and relive something that’s fun and frivolous. 

It’s the same with classic books – Frog and Toad with the kids, say – and albums. I’m even browsing through my Lightroom catalog from years past and scrolling through my iPhone photo library to remember the times when I took a ton of pictures. Remember that? 

I think about that scene in Inside Out where the memory globes become bi-colored – both joyful and sad. Memories are rarely pure joy or pure sadness. Nostalgic feelings, especially, have twinges of melancholy with the feel-good moments. 

That’s how I feel: a little good, a little crummy. So I’m feeding that with nostalgia in all its forms. 

Right now, I need the familiar. 

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Adapt

Change of Seasons

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Michigan in March, it threw our situation – like everyone else’s – into chaos: no more office commute for me, no more in-person schooling for the kids, significant changes to my wife’s music therapy practice.

Those early days were a whirlwind. We had to develop new routines just as spring was warming up. We had to adapt to this new reality.

Along the way, I photographed our home and our lives as we lived it, and I have a selection of those photographs on display at Ella Sharp Museum’s new Adapt exhibition, exploring artistic responses to the pandemic. My series, “A Change of Seasons,” looks at our changing home life, changing routines, and changing light as March turned to April and winter turned to spring. 

The exhibition is online for now and features great local artists with exciting work. Next week, starting July 21, I’ll have three photos on display at the physical museum when they open back up. 

I always thought one of my community portrait projects would be my first chance to appear at Ella Sharp Museum, but the pandemic threw everything into the air, including my expectations. Still, I’m proud to be on display in the Adapt exhibition with so many other talented local artists. 

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Bright Walls

It’s almost like all this is a bit too cool for Jackson.

International mural artists? Tons of people downtown? Beauty where once there was empty brick?

It all happened, thanks to the Bright Walls mural festival, this past week. But really, it started months ago with one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t go anywhere in town without seeing that sunrise-and-brick logo. The campaign worked, too, because people – both Jackson natives and out-of-towners – showed up in droves, slowing down traffic in an otherwise sleepy downtown.

Maybe it’s obvious, but here, right in front of all of us, was the power of art on display. It was a spectacle, sure, but it was also a reason to celebrate.

A reason to believe.

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Make And Take

Leave it to me to schedule our Family Art Studio session for the snow storm weekend.

But so it went. We drove to Ann Arbor, braving the highway traffic and slick conditions, to spend the day making art at my work.

This was the boy’s first trip to an art museum, and he had a lot of questions. Were the statues real? Why can’t you touch the art? That bust of George Washington – where’s the rest of his body? Why was that girl so hairy?

We took inspiration from Japanese graphic design and made our own poster out of cut-out shapes of colored paper. It was us and six other families – half of what was scheduled to show up.

“The difference between your art on the fridge and these drawings is that there’s a frame around them, and they’re hanging in a museum,” I said.

I hope he took the day to heart.

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