seeing my first robin of the year -- in fact I saw three!

Was just thinking that my fave weather is when the windows are open.

• not too cold so you have to close the windows and put the furnace on
• not too hot so you have to close the windows and put the A/C on
• not too rainy so you have to close the windows and keep your sutff dry
• not too windy so you have to close the windows and stop your sutff from blowing around

We aren't remotely close to that kind of weather today -- I was just thinking.

new Delvón Lamarr Organ Trio album drops today!

unexpected [and freely volunteered] help shovelling my driveway - yesterday was the biggest snow we have had here in a couple of years

Having just posted about how down I'm feeling lately, I thought I should share a moment of genuine cheer I experienced just a couple days ago. I was in the car with music on, and this song came on, and I was instantly uplifted -- throughout the song and for a while afterward. What a great track!



No Name Bar by Ikebe Shakedown

Enjoy!

clean dry roads in good repair

"If you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from ya." - George Carlin


Lately I have been rethinking my stance on originality in the arts.

Especially since the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of modernism, so much emphasis has been placed on a creator’s originality. Schoenberg’s atonal music, Kandinsky’s abstract art, Joyce’s stream of consciousness literature - all of them proclaimed as Great for doing something no one had done before. [Even though none of them was in fact the first to have done the thing, but that’s another story.]

Meanwhile, some creators are dismissed for looking too much like, or sounding too much like, so-and-so. By which they mean that the artist’s means of expression show clear influences. But what about the ideas they express using those means? What about the ways they please and communicate with the audience? Too often, originality is held up, not as an important value in art, but as the only value.

Shakespeare is known for, among other things, coining new words in his writing, which became part of the language. Hard for a writer to get more original than that. But, by this way of thinking, does this mean that a writer who invents new words is necessarily writing better stories than someone who simply uses the language as they find it?

In my youth, I dismissed some comic artists for simply being clones of some better-known artist. I did this without paying attention to how well they used this stylistic language to tell a good story. I look back at their work now and see that I was missing out on a lot that was valuable in what they did, simply because it didn’t “look new”.

When jazz pianist Jutta Hipp released her album At the Hickory House, it was dismissed by many for “sounding exactly like Horace Silver”. And yet, today, her album is a fave of mine, and I listen to it more often than any of Silver’s. Because I enjoy what she plays. It’s not like she has no ideas of her own, it’s not that every line she plays is a direct rip-off of something Silver played. She has a similar tone and touch, but she uses it to create music of her own. Which you need to get past the superficial similarities to appreciate.

So, I am finally reaching the stage where I can look at or listen to someone whose style is highly influenced, or even derivative, and not simply go, “They aren’t giving me an original style or technique.” Now, I ask, “What are they giving me? Do I find anything worthwhile in this work?” Of course, originality still has some value in and of itself. A satisfying work that is expressed in a new and unique way can become even more satisfying because of that. But there are other things to consider, is all I’m saying.

My 33rd acrylic painting finally has nothing to do with the UK. I made this as a gift for a friend who loves chinchillas and currently is unable to have one, so I hope she likes this.

I suspect that some people will call this the best one I have ever made, and most likely because of all the fuss and attention to small detail, esp. the fur. My friend is someone who appreciates meticulous realism in art, so I did this with her in mind. But now that I'm done, I come away with a sense that I always felt I was capable of doing such work, but somehow that isn't what excites me in my own art. Just as my cartooning and ink drawing when I was younger involved far more tiny lines, more obvious technique, than what I choose to do today. Today I am more interested in simplicity and stripping down. Like Alex Toth did when he got older. Like the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists and Expressionists did. I like this painting, and I'm fairly pleased with it, but I'd be more impressed if I could pull off something that feels like Münter or Vlaminck or Macke.

messages from the cosmos

Over the last few weeks, I have received numerous insights and tips from articles, books, posts, intuitions, etc., and they seem to overlap in constructive fashion to help me push through a recent creative roadblock. Here are some:

• I am enough.
• The act of creating has positive and nurturing value, quite apart from the resultant creation.
• The experience of creating is a form of mindfulness that has meditative value.
• A work isn't a failure simply because it isn't the sort of work that will find a mass audience. I am allowed to like it, and even be the only one who likes it.
• We can reframe self-criticism as ambition: “my work sucks” becomes “I want my work to be better”. This completely sidesteps the issue of whether or not we can objectively view how good our current work might actually be. I can actually be producing decent work, or good work, and still want it to be better. It doesn't have to be dissatisfaction with what I've done; it can be a desire to learn more and to grow.

rediscovering old loves

Last night I got thinking about cartoonists who inspire me... in this case, a particular few whose work is very stripped down and simple, but evocative and unique. None of them are household names, but all of them are personal heroes: Fred Lucky, Jerry Marcus, and Vahan Shirvanian.

I went downstairs to see if I could find any of their books to look over again. All of these are very old, long out of print, but I got great bargains on all of them from used booksellers [one I got at a garage sale for twenty-five cents!]. And lo and behold, all of them were gathered together in one spot, as if to say, "Yep, we knew you'd come looking for us some time!"