Recently in art Category

So my friend Mags will soon be leaving Louisville and moving back to her beloved New Orleans. While I'm super happy for her I'm bummed that in a few months I'll have to pay shipping like everyone else when I want to buy her very cool art. My latest purchase? This great Obama shirt.

A couple nights ago B and I walked to dinner. She was wearing an Obama t-shirt, one from the campaign, and she was quite the conversation starter. We could barely go five feet without someone saying "I like your shirt" or "Cool shirt" or "Go Obama!" etc. I was a little envious. "I want an Obama shirt dammit, but a cooler one, a more artistic one." In comes Mags. Not only is her shirt awesome but by purchasing it I'm supporting an independent artist and supporting the Obama campaign (Mags is donating part of the purchase price).

The big ass win in North Carolina plus the really good showing in Indiana has re-energized me toward the campaign and I'm going to send another small donation. I can't freaking wait to stroll down Bardstown Road with this kick ass Obama shirt on. Did I mention that HRC's Louisville campaign headquarters are on Bardstown Road?

Kids you too can be cool like this buy ordering the Obama stencil shirt from the art by mags etsy store. If you're not in Louisville you're almost guaranteed to be the only one in your town wearing one, which will of course make you even more awesome than you already are.

I vaguely remember the feeling I had when Bill Clinton won his first presidential election. I was still in high school and stayed up late watching the returns come in. I was excited, electrified, engaged. I was an ardent Clinton supporter for many years, a real true believer. As I've said many times there is no fall like the fall of a true believer. So while I remember vaguely that feeling of hope and possibility when Clinton was first elected what I remember most vividly is being so incredibly disappointed in him.

I am filled now with hope for an Obama presidency. I am filled with excitement at the possibilities his leadership of our country would present. I am more engaged and connected to the political process than I've been in going on ten years. I don't want this feeling to someday be vague. No matter what happens with Obama, whether he fails to be the Democratic nominee, whether he wins the general election, whether he is a great president or only a passing one,  I want to remember this feeling. I want to remember being optimistic for our country and the direction we can move in. I want to remember feeling excited about the political process and my generation's role in it instead of detached.

So today I placed an order for "Change" by Shepard Fairey. The poster cost me a $70 donation to the Obama campaign, pretty hefty for a poster but a very fair price for an inspiring work of art and contributing to the candidate I'm passionate about. Again, no matter what happens, in 15 years I want to look at this poster on my office wall (I imagine always having it in my office) and remember this feeling of hope and possibility. Hopefully it won't be a reminder of what could have been but instead the reminder of the way things felt at the beginning of a major positive and progressive movement in this country.  

It's been a while since I've liked any story as much as I like How I Cured Your Heart by Kevin Fanning. You should read it.

In September I told you some things I learned while writing my first grant application. Today I received word that I did in fact receive funding based on that application. I wasn't granted the full amount I asked for but the amount I received is significant enough to really help me take a step forward with this specific project and my photography at large.

After I sent my grant application in I took a hard, critical look at all the materials I had included with my application packet. I tried to review the packet as objectively as I could. In doing so I realized that my sample works were far, far weaker than I would have liked them to have been and that the structure of my project still needs to be edited and fine tuned a bit. I considered those two issues to be large problems that it in all likelihood would prevent me from receiving the grant.That is to say I was completely certain I would not be receiving the grant. So I was of course overjoyed but also genuinely surprised when I received the letter from the foundation today.

There are several layers to my joy. The first, obviously, is that a committee of strangers reviewed my work, my descriptions, my letters of recommendation, etc and came to the conclusion that my work is worthy of their foundation's financial support. Naturally that is a bit of an ego boost (imagine me channeling Sally Field's "You like me" speech). On another level though it makes me feel so good to have some confirmation that this thing, this making art and making a life outside of the usual or even expected path is possible. It's also small bit of validation for those of us who came to our art a bit later in life than others or who took different paths to find our way to this spot, this place, this way of being in our lives.

This is a bit more touchy-feely than I'm normally comfortable being but please indulge me and allow me to say that if you're one of us, one who knows the corporate path, the 9-5 path or any of the other expected paths isn't for you have faith that you can make a different kind of life. It will not always be easy, in fact its rather hard and can be quite stressful a lot of the time, but it is so worth it. It's worth it every single day.

Sufjan Stevens is an interesting artist to say this least. I am fascinated by his latest project The Great Sufjan Song Xmas Xchange.

Here's how it works: write an original Christmas song, record it, and send the song to us (see below for instructions). Asthmatic Kitty will pick a winner, and that person will trade rights to their song for rights to Sufjan's song.

Just like a gift exchange, Sufjan's song becomes your song. You can hoard it for yourself, sell it to a major soft drink corporation, use it in your daughter's first Christmas video, or share it for free on your website. No one except Sufjan and you will hear his song, unless you decide otherwise. You get the song and all legal rights to it. We get the same rights to your song.

Now maybe he'll write a crap song that no one would want to buy for commercial purposes, and you have to write a pretty damn good Christmas song to win the contest anyway but the potential in owning all the rights to a Sufjan Stevens song is pretty significant.

I've spent the last month or so with my head buried in a grant application. I've been working on a documentary photography project for the last several months and I've bootstrapped it the entire way. Meaning any cost associated with the project have come out of my pockets. No one is paying me to do the project, I'm doing it because I think it's a good project and the stories involved are worth being told.

I've learned a lot about myself and my project during the grant application process so I thought I'd write about a few tips/things I've learned because they might help another artist/writer struggling with the grant process.

1. Everyone has a first time.
No one comes out of the womb knowing how to write a grant proposal or application. The first few times you do it you're just going to have to muddle your way through it until you figure out what you're doing. You can ask people for help and they might give you good advice but it's still going to be you muddling through it. Don't let the fact that you don't know exactly what to do or you don't know exactly what the review committee wants to discourage. If you've made the commitment to apply for the grant then follow through. Even if you think your application doesn't have a chance of being accepted do the work to get the application completed. Having your first one done is going to make the second one much easier to complete.

2. It's a learning experience
I guarantee that you'll learn some things about yourself and your project during the process of writing the application. I learned about some of my insecurity triggers, learned that the vision I had for my project needed to be seriously tweaked, and that my work samples needed to be much stronger. Those were hard lessons to learn but I'm glad I learned them and I think they made my grant application stronger.

3. Writing is Easy
That's bullshit right? Yes but also no. While working on my grant application I found Scott Berkun's Writing Hacks Part 1. The first line is "Writing is easy, it's quality that's hard." True enough Scott, true enough. He goes on to say

Any idiot who knows 5 words can write a sentence (e.g. "Dufus big much Scott is"). It might be grammarless, broken, or inaccurate but it is writing. This means that when people can't start they're imagining the precision of the end, all polished and brilliant, a vision that makes the ugly clumsy junkyard that all beginnings are, impossible to accept. Good voice, tone, rhythm, ideas and grammar are essential to good writing, but they're never introduced all at once. I promise you, the first draft of Strunk and White didn't follow Strunk and White. The secret, if you can't start, is to begin without constraints. Deliberately write badly, but write.

For this reason writer's block is a sham. Anyone who wrote yesterday can write today, it's just a question of if they can do it to their own satisfaction. It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's its fear of not writing well; something quite different. Certainly every writer has moments of paralysis, but the way out is to properly frame what's going on, and writer's block, as commonly misunderstood, is a red herring.

Those two paragraphs really, really resonated with me and helped me conquer the much dreaded "description of activities" section of my grant application that had had me paralyzed. I had stared at blank page after blank page. I had started and deleted paragraphs time and again. I had been unable to move forward because I couldn't get the first paragraph right. Berkun's words were a kick in the pants that let me write the "shitty first draft" and move on.

So I very much encourage you to accept that every single thing you write needs a shitty first draft before it can be any good, including your grant applications or proposals. Don't try to hit it out of the park with the first swing. Just get a draft down on paper. 98% of it will probably suck but there will nuggets of good work in there that you'll be on with each successive draft.

4. Most of Us Won't Get the Grant But It's Worth Trying Anyway
I don't think I'm going to get the grant I applied for. My work samples were still a bit too work and my project not honed tightly enough toward the organization giving the grant. I don't regret any of the time I spent on the application though. I learned from the experience, sharpened some "writing about myself" skills, made necessary tweaks to my project and got my name and work in front of the review committee. These are all really positive developments.

I watched a fantastic program on PBS Wednesday night called Novel Reflections on the American Dream. The program's website describes it thusly

Novel Reflections on the American Dream considers 20th-century authors and the novels that illuminate society's inequities, limitations, and heartbreaks.

Basically it looks at versions of the classic American Dream as it's depicted in great 20th century novels with considerable amounts of backstory thrown in including the novelists' own defining experiences as related to writing their great works. It should be on everyone's viewing list. Check your local PBS station for show times.