Creative Mondays #003 – Truth In Your Art
Someone once told me I needed to ‘put a little more truth’ into my art. This person felt that things going on in my life should be expressed through the things I was creating at that moment. I can see this person’s point. What’s going on in your life can have a heavy influence on your creativity and lead you to new places. The problem was the current things going in my life were fraught with turmoil and my current project was a lighthearted, family friendly affair. Adding the ‘turmoil’ to that project would have been…wrong.
But that comment, ‘put some more truth into your art,’ really got me thinking about things. About putting truth, what’s currently going on in your life, into you art. I think this is a really good thing to do. The art you create should capture your true spirit. Your art should speak the things you feel deep down inside. The things that, maybe , you are afraid to say out loud. Your inner truth can make for some amazing art.
However, people should recognize that everybody’s truth is different. It’s not the same for every single person. Two artists would undoubtedly go about tackling the same subject completely differently. If two artists are feeling pain and heartache, one may create a somber piece that clearly defines the pain they are going through because that’s their truth. The other artist might create a darkly comic piece that points out the humor in the bleakest of situation because that’s how they deal with their truth. Two artists, same pain, two different pieces of work.
When I was in college I took a directing course in theatre. The professor was a very accomplished, yet very opinionated, woman. In the class I quickly realized I had a strike against me, I was male. This is not just something I’m saying because of sour grapes. I respected her and her work and was in a play or two of hers while in college and learned a lot. I’m saying because she was the type of woman who would regularly wear a shirt to school that would read (and I’m sorry for my sensitive readers) CL*T POWER. If you were a guy, you had a strike against you.
Anyway, the major class assignment was for each student to direct two other students in the classic ‘water’ scene from The Miracle Worker. If you are familiar with the story this scene is where Annie Sullivan finally gets through to Hellen Keller. As we were instructed to do, we all read the play and were to find our ‘take’ on the text. The ‘water’ scene is a powerful scene in the play and the major turning point and I knew that everyone was going to direct it that standard way it is written. Serious. Powerful. Stoic. Well, I wanted to find a different take and, as I do in most of my creative endeavors, I wanted to add some humor. Then it hit me, “Laughter can build bridges.” What if Annie could get Hellen to laugh and THAT’s what creates the breakthrough?
So that’s how I did it. Super big shout out to my actors in that scene (John & Kristin) who went with everything I put them through. I blocked a raucous scene involving climbing under and over the table, silverware flying and a dutch door that was the cause to much consternation to poor Hellen. When we did the scene for the final project it killed. I have several ideas as to why it killed. One, the amazing actors. Two, it was different. It was different from every other one of the same exact scenes because it was a different truth. The other scenes were fine. They told passionate, dramatic versions of the same story. They were one truth. Mine was another truth. Mine was MY truth.
The professor wound up giving me a B+ on the scene. Why? Who knows? I believe it was because she felt I didn’t take the material ‘seriously.’ I will tell you this, I’ve never forgotten how fun that was to do, because I was bringing my truth to the project.
So bring your truth to your creative work and never apologize for it. If someone tells you to put more truth in your art, ignore them. Your truth is not theirs. Putting your truth in your art is all that matters.
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Are you someone who brings their truth to their project? What one creative thing can you point to right now and say, “That has a lot of my truth in it.” If you are comfortable with sharing, let us know in the comments below!
A Tribute To Charley & Humphrey
I’m sure I do not have to tell you that the internet is an amazing place. If you are sitting around and you suddenly have a fleeting thought of some obscure childhood toy you had as a kid, through the power of Google, second later you could be browsing a site devoted to that toy.
I remember, as a kid, I once played with this weird toy that was a a goat that ate things. That’s all the toy was, a big plastic goat that came with all this stuff you could make him eat. I type in the phrase ‘goat toy eat” into google and seconds later I’m looking at videos of the toy in action. The toy was called Gobbles The Garbage Eating Goat and there is discussion about him going on all over the internet. Heck, if you’d like to see a 3 minute video of Gobbles in action you can CLICK HERE.
The internet is truly an amazing place.
The internet is also responsible for reconnecting me with a nugget of childhood nostalgia in the form of Charley & Humphrey. When I was a kid, after school cartoons and shows in the San Francisco Bay Area were on KTVU Channel 2. G.I. Joe, Diff’rent Strokes and more would occupy the time between homework and dinner. And during the commercials of those shows, KTVU would run little PSAs called Bits & Pieces. There were several that rotated throughout the afternoon but my favorites always included Charley & Humphrey.
Charley, the horse and Humphrey the bulldog were two puppets who gave little one minute lessons on topics including leaving bees alone, the importance of the Coast Guard and this classic on borrowing without asking…
These characters were created by KTVU’s weatherman Pat McCormick. Looking back at these with some puppeteer experience under my belt I can see what I didn’t see as a kid. Pat is puppeteering both characters. True, he’s a little off on lip sync but when you realize he’s doing both voices back and forth, it’s pretty neat. I had these memorized they played them so much. Even to this day I can recite the bee one (which has yet to surface on the internet) by heart and part of the one about the Coast Guard. A few years ago I found a guy selling T-shirts of Charley & Humphrey online and, of course, I bought one.
In trying to come up with ideas of short videos to make featuring Uncle Interloper I stumbled upon the idea of doing something in the same vein as these Bits & Pieces PSAs. I sat down and wrote about ten of them, they were super fun to write, and on New Year’s Day my friend Russ Walko and I shot a few of them. The first is scheduled to go out this weekend over at UncleInterloper.com and on his PODCAST, but I thought I’d share it here with you, the readers of my blog.
They came out a touch longer, I supposed they could do with some editing down, but I think they are fun and capture the spirit of those old vignettes I used to watch as a kid. I hope that if Pat McCormick ever saw them, he would enjoy the tribute.
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How’d I do? Did I capture the spirit of these classic bits? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Creative Mondays #002 – Create A Little Everyday
We are all busy.
That’s just the way life is. We’ve got work, we’ve got family, we’ve got a million other obligations pulling us in a million different directions. So the statement is usually, “I just simply don’t have time to create.”
The thing is, you do.
There’s plenty of time to do so if you just create a little bit each day.
Notice the words ‘little bit’ in that last sentence? Those are key. You need to realize that you aren’t going to write the next Great American Novel of paint the next Mona Lisa in a day. Things like that take time. Lots of time. But there are ‘little bits’ of time each day where you can create and if you are able to get yourself to do that every day, those little things will build up into big things.
A year or so ago I made a commitment to myself to do at least one creative thing a day, no matter how big or small. Some days the creative thing is just some sketches on the Paper app on my iPad. Sometimes the creative thing is some writing on a script or one of my novellas that I never get around to editing. Sometimes the creative thing is a stand up show. The point is that I wake up each morning and say to myself, “Today I’m going to do at least one thing that is creative no matter how small.” And I’ve found that if I do that, I get it done.
Some days, I get a whole day to work on creative projects. Mostly though, I’m taking time out before bed or early in the morning to work on creative projects. The thing is, stuff gets done. There’s that old saying, “Slow and steady wins the race.” It’s true. If you work on your creative project a tiny bit each day, eventually it’ll get done.
Writing two hundred and fifty words a day, every day, for a year is ninety one thousand two hundred and fifty words a year. That’s a novel right there folks. You’ve just written a novel in a year.
You are going to discover that I usually look at things from a writer’s standpoint. Writing two hundred and fifty words takes me about 20 minutes or so (I never said they were good words). Looking at other disciplines, what if you painted for twenty minutes each day? Or practiced piano for twenty minutes a day? That’s seven thousand three hundred minutes a year. One hundred twenty one hours (and some change) a year. What could you create in that time?
I completely understand that you may not have twenty minutes a day. How about ten? How about five?
Maybe one day it’s ten minutes and another day it’s twenty. It doesn’t matter. Little, by little, it will get it done. You will create
And that’s not even the best part. Imagine how good you’ll feel when you commit to creating each and every day. Knowing that your art, your passion, is getting done and you’re keeping your creativity alive.
Start tomorrow. Or today, if there’s time left. Plan out when you’re going to steal away for that twenty (or ten, or five) minutes and then…
CREATE!
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This week I want you to try and challenge yourself to work on your create project a little each day. Even if it’s five or ten minutes, find some time each day to work in a little creative fun. How did it go? Were you able to do it? Let me know in the comments below.
Creative Mondays #001 – An Introduction
To me, being creative is something that has become second nature. It is now like breathing or blinking to me. I just have to create. I’m not saying all of it is good, but I just have this, almost instinctive, desire to constantly create things.
It has actually been that way for a very long time. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to ‘put on a show.’ I can remember recording the audio from cartoons off of television and then rounding up neighborhood kids and putting them through rehearsals to act out the cartoons in front of our parents. When mom and dad would have friends over I would organize the kids to do a lip sync number or something and then drag all the parents to watch it at some point in the evening. As a kid I also loved to draw, though I was never any good at it. I’m still not but I continue to do so anyway. I also loved to sing along with records and strum on plastic guitar (though I didn’t know any chords). I was just always trying to think of someway to entertain people.
I was very lucky. My parents encouraged all this. Sure, they would have liked me to focus a little more on my studies and less on drawing or writing, but they never told me I couldn’t pursue these passions. As I reached high school and started getting involved in theatre and band, they became very involved. Mom in the Drama Boosters and dad building sets for the shows. Again, I know exactly how lucky I am to have had that support and that is largely responsible for why creating is so important to me now.
At the beginning of 2012, for some odd reason, I just started posting daily Facebook posts and Tweets on Twitter that shared a short thought on some aspect of creating. I would sometimes sit down and think of them for the week or sometimes I would just go day after day coming up with one for each day. These daily postings seemed to catch on with people resulting in a lot of ‘Likes’ and ‘ReTweets.’ People would message me privately and let me know the little quotes were inspiring them to be creative in their daily lives and one person even wrote that because of these daily postings, they had left their full time job, partially, to pursue a creative career. Whoa, that’s heavy.
After a couple of weeks of these daily postings, I started to run dry. I had been keeping good track of them, but all the new thoughts I was coming up with were either duplicates of or very similar too ones I had put out earlier, so I stopped. But, as I said, I was keeping good track of them and the thought hit me to take each little thought and then write a three hundred to five hundred word piece on each of them and release them on this blog every Monday. My goal is to do this for a whole year so that by the end of 2014 I’ll have 52 short pieces on different aspects of creativity. I already have fifteen written, not including this intro post, so it’ll continue for fifteen weeks at least.
I would really love this to become something interactive as well. I’d love to hear your feedback on this “Creative Mondays” project as a whole and the weekly posts when they come out. Also, if you feel so inclined, I welcome you to share these posts with anyone you feel would enjoy them. Also, at the end of each piece I will post a question or prompt and I’d love for you to post your response in the comments below. Feel free to interact with other readers as well. Though creativity is not a decisive tops, I ask you please keep discussion civil and supportive. Comments will be moderated. Let’s get a really good creative discussion going!
See you next week for Creative Mondays #001!
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This week’s prompt….
Introduce yourself and tell us what your main creative passion is. (Writing? Drawing? Painting? Sculpting? Woodworking? Digital art? Etc.) Tell us in the comments below!