Too Much

Ah too much time has passed since I've written here but I have a good excuse. I am a teacher and we had reports to write, then it was Thanksgiving and now it is the build up to Christmas.  Sadly I do not have anything properly prepared although I have a few things in the works and I will preview these with a little follow up to something I started a few months back.

First, to add to sequential art.  It has been the second time around that I have asked the students to make a story map, then a story board then studio work of art telling a story.  The first project of this unit is complete and assessed and the students are now onto their second project.  What I have noticed is somewhat inconclusive.  First, out of thirty students only about five or six actually completed both a story map and a story board (although all but one completed one of these) so it is hard to read whether it helped them creatively or not.  Secondly, as teachers know, students come in all mental shapes and sizes and while some ideas are quite imaginative, it may be a naturally occurring thing rather than the opportunity to use a thinking exercise.  What I have noticed is that the student who did not make either story board or map had a very limited story, with only one scene change and no bodily change showed in the art's subject matter.  Also the story board (which most of the students completed) definitely has an effect on how well they designed their work and even when the story was simple, it came out well rendered and engaging.  One student even wants to have the story mounted on a record player so that one can sit and watch the story spin before one's eyes.  The students are now onto the film making aspect of the unit and results won't be in until just before the Christmas holiday.

Also I spent some time working with one of our Spanish teachers and we looked at different ways we use story telling in our classes.  She uses it to help students access information and display learning.  We both thought that this is an excellent opportunity to start collaborating because I am working on the art of the story, she is using the form of the story and our ICT department is discussing the tools.  What I really like about this is the change in education that is being indicated here.  We all inform each other how to work and what we work on, and students can employ methods which are relevant to contemporary society in their education.

As an addition to this I decided to take my own medicine and created several narrative for myself which I could then turn into art.  This has had several results.  I've created a couple of paintings where part of the narrative is told and it has given me new ideas for imagery.  Another result is that my graffiti is taking on a more engaging aspect.  as well as getting my tag up I've been using my character (an octopus) to interact with the surrounding environment.  I'll link in my art Tumblr, not a lot is up there but you can see some of it.

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/devinallenart

Something I have been preparing to write (actually I wrote the outline but have since misplaced it)  Is the idea of struggle and creativity.  As one possible technique of examination I looked at the impossible problem.  Derive a solution to an impossible problem.  I think back to the time when I devised a scheme to create an atmosphere on the moon.  I will save you the details here but it involves planting one flower in a jar and letting things go from there.  Not that I really think this is possible but it's fun to imagine and could set the stage for a good story, imagery and maybe even dance, possible design.  This is somewhat highlighted by an NPR story filed about a month ago concerning how Japanese and American students respond to work.  Even when given an impossible to solve mathematics problem the Japanese students stayed with it for the entire time given (one hour) and attempted to derive solutions from it.  Here's the story you can listen for yourself.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning

There is another exercise I am working on involving nouns, adjectives and verbs but it is less well formed so I won't write about it.  So that's it, if you are celebrating a holiday this month or next hope it goes well.  Like always I will celebrate Christmas and Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) because I like the idea of seeing family, eating too much and blowing things up.

Daniel Pink, Autobiography and a Little More

At school today (I'm a teacher) Daniel Pink came to give the keynote address.  I watched his TED previous to watching him speak and I was a bit turned off because he seemed to spout the same thing a lot of people talk about regarding the right brain and creativity and the need to change schools.  The first issue here - right brain - I find annoying because recent research that I have encountered says that the brain is dynamic, not just hemisphere and I feel this description is just simplifying the complex issue of teaching.  However, his keynote address made up for what I expected to be a mediocre performance.  What I appreciated most is the data he presented us with concerning what the science and technology industries are looking for in education and how the policy makers in education are defining the system.  I will allow you to review what he said, since he said it and the information is readily available and my point here is to expand upon it from my point of view.

If you have been following this blog for the last six months you will see that I am working at creating exercises that can be employed in any situation to allow one to develop new ideas.  This informal research started out to assist my art teaching, however, upon consideration I have determined that it is applicable in many situation and I just have not worked out the details.  In fact, part of the reason for me writing this blog is so that others can try some of these concepts out and see what results can be obtained.  In this respect I am a punk/communist/Buddhist e.g. no one owns a guitar chord or idea, this should be owned by all and try it for yourself to make the best out of it you can.  Some of the exercises I have written about in the past are brainstorming plus, writing from a point of view, motion as a creative thinking skill (this one is weak but kudos to Will Percy for turning me onto an article about a motion classroom that helps students think) and story mapping.

Last night I put my money where my mouth is so to speak by employing one of my techniques (mind you I did not invent these, they came about over the course of my experiences, some synthesized, some dreamed up and some just from conclusions I've drawn).  In an effort to make my own art work stronger I brainstormed two categories to make art about and ultimately would like to combine them.  The first autobiography the second what I fantasize or dream my life to be.  I forced myself to write non-stop for a given time period for each of these categories, even if I did get off topic, and then review the results.  What I found was some thoughts that pop up once and again but I never focus on and some ideas I think about have finally been put to paper.  From there I put titles at random on the top of sketch book pages and while I may have no visual vocabulary at present and am requiring of myself that I make two sketches of each title.  What has piqued me most is that I have a problem to solve and generally speaking it is a fun problem for me to solve.  Will it make my art stronger?  I hope so.  Something nice that did come of it was my affinity for art materials and then a collage from art supply flyers that will be a drawing or painting soon.

An implied charge in Daniel's address today was that it was up to us, the teachers, to figure out how to educate students to think creatively, holistically, recognize patterns and develop systems and things people need.  Hopefully this is what I am doing, at the very least, it is what I am attempting to do.  I am beginning to consider how this work can be made into a tangible and I am looking for people who would like to collaborate with me on this endeavor. My initial thought is to create tablet computer apps (I even have some hand-drawn interfaces for these) or to work with people in a variety of industries and have work sessions where we try out some of these exercises an see what results present themselves   If you yourself are interested or know someone who might also be, by all means get in touch and let's see what can become of it.  I am going to do something bold here, I will put both my phone number and email address. - 2167540879 - china.devin@gmail.com.  This is because I am not sure if you can get the info from my blog, but I hope it shows how sincere I am in this endeavor and how much I trust humans' good nature.  Waiting to hear from you

Point of View

Over the past week I have been writing an additional supplement for my grade eleven students about how to analyze art.  The course they are studying requires that they pay the most attention to the study of art, which I find quite fascinating  especially for a high school student.  They will be assessed most heavily on their research and exploration.  While they are required to make art the importance is on what they think about and what I can find in their sketch books.  In my graduate studies I happened upon a course which discusses the fundamentals of analyzing a work or art.  In brief there are two main types of analyzing, formal and stylistic.  formal deals with how a work or looks and stylistic is about interpreting its meaning.  for the longest time I felt that what critics were interpreting in art, while entertaining to read was based so much on just one's subjective opinion.  Ultimately I have trouble with subjectivity, at least as it being the sole basis of evaluating a work of art.  There is such a thing as good and bad art, but this good and bad is difficult to pinpoint and left me the weaker of the arguments.  Another thing I find quite annoying in art is that shock and/or entertainment value seems to be how people immediately recognize a work of art as good or bad.  I myself am guilty of this but I have gotten better at enjoying the immediate pleasure derived from an eye catching work of art but also forcing myself to look deeper to see if the piece is really of value.

Let me tie this together now.  Through my re-review of stylistic analysis I was able to put together two practices I have encountered over my work as an artist and art teacher.  What we have already been talking about, stylistic analysis and what a colleague of mine dubbed 'The Idea Generator'.  Let us talk stylistic analysis first.  I am actually going to write about more specifically contextual analysis.  The idea that one adopts a certain standpoint when interpreting a work of art.  The common contexts I have come across are Marxism and Feminism.

Let's start with Marxism.looking at the work of art from the standpoint of artist as worker and patron as gentry.  I told my students to ask questions like 'What does this work say about the life of the artist versus the select public that enjoy it?'  However, I feel this does not go far enough and I have individually substituted the artist as creating a product and the public as consuming that product.  So when we look at a work of art, we are the consumers, how does it influence us when we consume it?  I am quite pleased that art is now more in the public realm than before and we can even ask 'How does the public consume the art?'  How does it influence our clothing, our food and our computer games.  I'm not a gamer but I am aware that a lot of popular music is now used for the soundtracks.  So next time you are at the gallery ask yourself "When will this show up in my breakfast?'  Have a look at Takahashi Murakami's work with LV to get the idea.  Feminism works in a similar fashion only we are reading the art from a woman's point of view.  Ask yourself "What story does this work tell?" "How do women understand this?" "What is the role of the artist in relation to their use?"  Beijing based artist Megumi Shimizu has a performance piece where she reverses Yves Klein's blue model work with red and a boy, and when I saw it that boy must have just been eighteen.  The reason I am writing about this as a creative thinking skill will become apparent soon.  We are putting ourselves in a context or a perspective and applying thinking skills from those perspectives to imagine meaning.

The Idea Generator - I read that Bob Dylan book a few years back.  In it he discussed placing himself in a character's position and then writing from that position.  I've seen art teacher Richard Todd do this and he even made a graph for it.  Take a concept and brainstorm what that concept means from and old/young position, a old/new position, mother/father, student/teacher, commercial esoteric, analogue/digital, baby boom/generation y.  Really two terms that are unlike in some way.  The IBO does this when they ask students to think from different areas of interaction.

So try this for me.  Seize on a thought you find interesting.  The run it through different contexts to see what new comes about.  Add interpretation and also new meaning.  See where the contexts take you.  If you are an artist, make art about it, if you are a thinker build a syllogism around it. See what becomes.

Not Sure Yet

So this entry is going to be a thinking entry, at present I do not exactly know what I am going to write about, however, it will be related to my most recent creative thinking work.  I set the task for myself to first investigate any apps at apple's App Store that had to do with creativity  and when that was only so-so I looked up thinking, less that so-so  The two quality apps I found were WordMpress and Ulysses.  The reason I liked Word Press is because it gives one a variety of tones, styles and whatnot to create posters and they are generally designed to fit together so that no matter what you do it will look like good design.  This being said after you make neat posters it really doesn't do much more and if you are slick enough with Photoshop one could  do it on one's own.  Ulysses intrigued me more because because it offered writers a wide variety of tools that I suspect are going on in writers heads' as they write.  One can write and you will get different prompts for word choices, definitions and research on the spot.  My impression that it allows one to multi-task without leaving one window.  Pretty slick, but I don't write and I probably will not write.  Thinking did not present much in lines of aids for thinking but the process lead to me contemplating programs like Mind Node and then another I saw later in John Medea's talk on TED where a company structure could be mapped out and one could view not only the connections between departments but also keep track of the kinds of correspondence (in electronic form) that a member of a company has with that person.

Sine this did not push my thoughts too far forward I went onto another task I set for myself and was to watch at least two talks on TED about creativity and this time keep notes hoping to find confirmation of my existing ideas, or realize new things that others are doing, thinking about or reveal.  I watched for like the fifth time Sir Ken Robinson's lecture about schools and creativity, John Madea's discussion of design, technology, art and leadership and finally Issac Mizrahi's discussion on his own creativity.  Several things came to my mind but I am only going to discuss one right here.  As I said before this is a thinking entry so what follows is unstructured but hopefully helps me reveal an idea to myself.

Movement as a creative thinking process.
The thought process started from here.  Ken Robinson discusses in a joking fashion that university professors use their bodies as transports for their heads and that these people live almost entirely in their head.  My mind started churning and I will copy verbatim what I wrote in my notebook:  Professor - head - body is only a transport   Then can we say that action should be encouraged as thinking?  If so how can we use action as a creative thinking tool?

I am going to reach back into my history and memories and recall something I heard said in a cabin at a YMCA camp.  One of the lead male councilors was discussing his love of sport and they way he described it was like this:  When a person moves, completes an action like a dunk it is perfect artistry, the manipulation of the muscles to create in time something that is both useful and beautiful   In regards to professional sport even the usefulness of it is inconsequential.  While we make take very seriously how our favorite baseball, basketball or football team does, this has little effect on matters of the world.  So in essence that dunk is art for art's sake.  It's the creation of something beautiful simply for the purpose of performing the act.

So how do we turn movement into a tool for thinking.  Personally, I have only weak ideas.  One of my drawing teachers had the class exercise before beginning a studio drawing.  Simple Qi Gong which I am not embarrassed to say worked exceptionally well.  At times I have had my own students get up and move around to get the blood flowing, hopefully to the correct part of the brain that gets them excited about work.  I've often told them to pat their heads and rub their bellies because it feels good and moves the blood around and will get them energized for drawing, painting or even just thinking.  Most the time I get rolled eyes or laughter but the occasional student will oblige.  I've never collected research on how this works.  Another instance comes from my training in Wing Chun.  I will by no means claim to be an expert in this field, but from what I have learned we are studying movement and sensitivity, as force comes in, roll away from it and into its source, as it retreats follow it towards its source, attack the center of your opponent.  I also tell my students this, sit square to your work, focus on it, always go straight for its center.  But most of what I have just written is about approach to working not thinking.

So how? I am hoping my friends who teach drama or my friends who dance can enlighten me.  My ideas are that when given a way to think and then asking the body to speak that way, the individual will be revealed new connections, ideas and can translate that to completing a thought or solving a problem or making art.  I am anxious to see what becomes.

P.s. As I was searching for the right photo for this entry the figurative lightbulb went off over my head.  I chose a photo of someone who may be myself and friend making graffiti in Beijing.  I like this photo (which maybe someone who is my girlfriend took) because when drawing on the wall, especially bit letters, movement is quite important and it is in movement that form revelas itself, not all my graffiti is planned out, I just center myself and release.  Ah here is a key.  More exploration ahead.  And while on the subject also when playing the trombone, moving the arm is an art that effects the art of sound and Yoko Ono's word piece "When one is playing the violin, which is incidental, the sound or the movement of the arm"

Brainstorming Plus - The Spiderchair Incident

Brainstorming is a good start but experience has taught me that it needs more steps to make it more effective.  This is particularly apt with middle school students who sometimes need more guidance when developing ideas.  For purposes of clarity I want to define brainstorming as writing words and phrases freely, without editing or even stopping.  I often tell the students they must write no matter what, even if it's nonsense, for a given amount of time.  I limit this to writing because words usually work in concepts.  Images are also good but I believe they are thinking in a different method and I treat that as another creative thinking exercise.

I have serval starting points.  The first is to allow the students to just have at it and see where their ideas take them.  The next is to give the students the unit question and/or significant concept to think about and again go at it.  While some students will naturally take to this the results I have seen in the classroom are as follows:  About fifty percent of the students get right to it and the other fifty percent are stymied and may write one or two things down but spend the rest of the time looking at their paper.  Of the writing fifty percent only about 25 percent will have something that is a good representative of their ideas and the other 25 percent get off task.  Not that getting off task is entirely bad, but in the classroom setting where the teacher is guiding the students to a goal centered around a certain topic, it is ultimately unproductive, but I reiterate, still valuable.

These observations have lead me to construct the 'plus' method.  Break the concept down into more simple themes and have the students brainstorm along a certain theme.  The brainstorm may deviate as work progresses but it makes the work categorical.  From here I may take another aspect of the concept and have them brainstorm along those lines as well. Or instead of brainstorming along another line of the concept, have them run the first brainstorm and use another aspect of the concept as a lens to view the brainstorm.  Perhaps my writing is not clear but it is far more straight forward when actually conducting the exercise.  I will illustrate with a couple of examples:

Concept: Artists can combine unlike ideas together in a work of art - credit to Richard Todd who wrote this concept.

The students will create two brainstorms they like in separate columns in their workbooks.  Then randomly draw links between these columns and see what ideas generate.  (This moves onto a different idea of concept association that I will discuss in another blog entry) As I mentioned earlier this stymies some students and others get quite off task.  In my opinion it is a little too broad for students.  So my remedy has been to give the students more guidelines.  For this particular unit (once again credit to Richard Todd for planting the seed of this unit) I give the students two concepts to brainstorm, one of my choosing - furniture and another of their own.  Here I encourage the students first to brainstorm nouns and then to pick some of the nouns they feel attracted to and brainstorm those further.  When the massive brainstorming is complete then it's time to combine the concepts.

Typical instructions may sound like this:

1. Open your books and on the next blank page write 'Furniture' then take two minutes and write as many different types of furniture you can think of.  Don't worry of you get off of the furniture idea just keep writing for the entire two minutes, even made-up words are ok.

2. Now go to the next page and for two minutes brainstorm as many nouns as you can.

3. Pick three nouns you find most interesting and brainstorm them on separate pages.

Now comes time for concept association, which is another exercise I will discuss in future blog entries.

Here is an alternative example:

Concept: Humans made tools to make life easier and they make objects attractive to improve quality of life.

1. Brainstorm objects for use.

2. Take three objects from your brainstorm and describe each object looking pretty.

Ok I am going to leave it here.  In reality, many of the exercises are not isolated and please keep in mind that after the ideas are generated there is still a lot of work to do.  Refining the idea, designing and executing.  The goal of these exercises is to access the idea.  There is still a lot of creativity involved but I have found getting the idea makes the next steps more successful and more fulfilling for the students and teachers. 

This painting is from some time ago, but since I have not photographed any of the recent painting I've executed this will have to do.  I placed it here because in the past month and a half I have been painting a lot of pine trees (some other varieties as well).  The reason has a bit of a explanation.  I recently moved back to the USA after nine years in China and one in Korea, by far China has the stronger influence.  I was quite struck by some contemporary Chinese paining (by this I mean ink and wash painting, you know the classic style of birds and flowers and landscape etc. but the painting I was looking at was of a contemporary subject matter).  The power of the black ink was almost palpable.  That week I purchased paper and brushes and ink and had a go.  A complete fail but there was potential and I adopted it to how I was working.  Shortly thereafter I moved to China and after about six months I started studying the traditional techniques and I spent about a year and a half with two different teachers.  Another year or so after I stuck to the tradition, then it faded.  About three years ago I began to take it up again and this leads to the painting above as well as why I've been painting pine trees so much recently.

After I accepted the job in Georgia I began making plans to use the Georgia countryside as inspiration for traditional Chinese paintings.  Even though I am in the city (Atlanta) there is no shortage of pine trees (and others) to serve as inspirational pieces.  This past week I was on a school trip (I'm a teacher by profession) and lucky for me we spent the week at a YMCA camp where I had ample opportunity to view and draw.  I bought a brush-pen and sad to say I am complete shit with it but that's ok, the shape of the trees and leaves are there so now it is just the work behind working it out with a brush, and I am quite looking forward to this work.
      P.s. - the first attempt was also shit but I am working on it.

For those of you who are still reading I'll give a brief description of some of the techniques I use. You are welcome to give them a shot and let me know how you get on.  Some of the traditional rules to follow: Compose square-ish painting in a kind of C shape and long-ish paintings by an S shape.  There should be good rhythm between black and gray tones.  There should not be too much black.  By the way the Chinese can never be pinned down by how much is enough and how much is too much.  Unfortunately the trend seems to be whoever is talking to me always has the correct amount and I never do.  Anyway - whatever.  The brush is supported between the thumb on one side and the other four fingers opposite the thumb.  Once I saw in the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) that there should be the distance of an egg between the palm of the hand and the shaft of the brush, but none of my Chinese teachers ever said that.  Paint with the paper flat on the table or floor the the brush, more or less perpendicular, at least when you start.  The reason for this positioning is because the combination of wrist, elbow and shoulder give you every available angle from which to make a mark.  The beauty of Xuan Zhi (rice paper - which oddly enough has little to no rice in it) is that despite its fragility it can really take a lot of ink and water and color.  For instance you can paint in some gray, then add color, then let it dry and add black, then add some more color.  Or - this is one of my favorite techniques - make a nice think inky line and then wash the brush and add water right to the mark allowing it to bleed.  This effect is something that is looked for in 'good' paintings.  Another nifty trick (anything that entertains me I equate with good) is to load the brush with both color and ink in different parts of the brush then make a mark - cool two-tone effect.  Among my favorite strokes, and one you can see in the painting above, is the wavy, downward  line (my own description not an official term, my Chinese was pretty poor when I was taught this and I never learned the proper terminology).  Set out the edge of a shadow on a mountain or cliff and then alternate gray colored ink, water or even a little color in a wavy, downward stroke.  Another fun stroke is the hatchet (I now this one because my teacher drew me a picture of a hatchet when he demonstrated).  This one works best with think, black ink.  Load up the brush and turn it sideways against the paper and then with force shoot the brush in either direction that gives a full width streak.

When approaching a Chinese style painting (the Japanese and Koreans do this too) the Western style general to specific, light to dark method will not serve you well.  Just get yourself in a quiet mindset and go at it with no fear - like a Samurai - There will be varying levels of success at first but when you reach that place where you can actively make decisions without having to think will yield some pretty wicked paintings and a good experience for you.  If you are going to go the traditional route work on parts of the painting that are nearest the viewer and work your way back into space.  If you are doing non-traditional subjects then fuck all, just see what works for you.  These techniques are really applicable to all subject matter, I really like to paint octopuses and jelly fish and one never finds those in Chinese painting.  I have no problem with this seeing as I am not even a little Chinese, I'm all American in blood at least.

So there you are, a ramble about something I have contemplated for the last ten years.  I'll post some of my current paintings as soon as I get an SD card for my camera.

I was just looking at my stats, really 700 people have looked at this.  I didn't think so many.  I was setting down to use this as a diary today, now maybe I am a little shy - ha ha.  No, I'll still do it because probably no one is really reading close.  Stop the news feed to so I can think clearly.

As I have written in the book-format diary, I need to focus a little more on money in the coming weeks.  I have gotten the house as settled as it can be until the rest of my stuff arrives.  The fish tank is in the place and furniture is placed wisely (I hope) to get good fengshui for the immediate future.   These things were bothering me so I am glad I took care of it even at the cost of a bicycle which I desperately want this morning.  I had it in my head to take week-end rides to the Virginia Highlands and other cool spots as I am totally sick of driving to these places and walking takes much too much time.

Back to money, it is not really money actually, it is more along the lines of having more control of what's going on i a professional/career direction.  It must be about art since I am at that age where changing career directions would slow me down.  I teach art right now and to those ends I have made some progress in the creative thinking project.  Other teachers have responded to my forum post and given good insight and ideas as well as feedback.  The information is not analyzed just yet but that is ok, still early.  Something I do need to get on is pushing the application and seeing what else is out there.  I did some simple drawings but these need to be more finalized.  Bill Eisner was one I wanted to talk to about this.  Project Zero is another group of people I need to make contact with.  Additionally I will need to look at student reflections.  I should spell the current development out more clearly here:

At the moment I am working with the idea of story-boarding as a creative thinking tool.  The students were given a sequential art unit where they are to create a book as well as a short animation sequence using clay.  I introduced the idea that they story board not as a planning document but as a thinking document.  Th concept comes from a Merce Cunningham quote. What I expect to happen is the students think about and then arrange a story into bite-sized parts.  From here they can re-work as needed or perhaps this act will move them into directions they didn't think about earlier.  I just stopped for a moment here to looks at Bloom's Taxonomy and I believe this ideas falls into the category of 'Application'.  Not as high up on the list as I thought, nonetheless it is good to have it in there somewhere.  Now the task of applying it properly to the task and ideas arrived.

Another thing a friend turned me onto to is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics which I have only read articles about, not the book itself.  I looked to see if it is on iTunes - no luck.  I'll check the book store as well as the school library and the public library as well.  Something that stands out to me looking at the Wikipedia entry is the six platforms - Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, Surface.  Just writing and reading about this stuff gets my brain into a creating mode.  I am thinking about my octopus making his way around town or in a space, is he cure or scary?  Don't know, but he must be eye catching.  I did a story-board for him before but it was quite simple.  I want to drop what I am doing now and get to it, but I won't because I have made a lot of art recently.

Now onto something different - design. Not really me making design, more along the line of me selling design.  I want to sell both quality, Chinese furniture and also Tibetan items from my friend Zhuoma.  The key here is to understand the market/clientele before I begin spending money here.  There is that artist Joy I met.  He said he sells things, if I understood him correct.  I have told myself to contact him but have not yet been able to get myself to do it.  I would be curious to see how he goes about it.  This is where living in a more communal area would do me well because I could be making connections and learning about who is out there and if they are buying anything.  This is sort of the rich part of town, but that is not to say I have made any friends around here.  How should I go about this?  Get on online sites and see what people are selling maybe.  This idea is far more rough and I do not have a lot to go on.  This one defiantly needs a brainstorm before I will make any progress on it.  The same is somewhat true of the vintage business.  I sent things off to CZ this week but that is not really a whole lot of anything.  The conversations I had with Pearl hae been much more productive.  I read up on activating my business fengshui in my den which is not there yet, but I have to put off buying things to make the fengshui better in here, low on cash.  I considered at times painting these items myself.  Again the issue here is not knowing the clientele well enough.  I am not sure what is needed there and honestly CZ has not been much help.  I should get Jimi in on this because he is probably easiest for me to deal with.  I had a good idea looking at the web-site Pearl sent me.  To buy 501's which are in abundance here and put the ATLBJ logo on them as well as some other cool stuff.  I was reading in Fader that floral patterns are cool so maybe I'll do that as well.  Here we go again, just writing about this stuff gets my juices flowing and inspires me to work and make some patterns and go get jeans and call Jimi and all that cool stuff.

I got caught making graffiti the other night.  I thought is was an abandoned building, however, it turns out someone lives in it.  He wasn't upset and we got into some good conversations.  There is a design opportunity there but I think there are other opportunities that are better.  I hope he sends me his email.  He is a combination preacher/social activist.  Of course help him with his logo which I wouldn't charge him for, I would just want apercentage of his enterprise.  But more importantly I would like to help him make short films, iTunesU stuff, and political graffiti to make Catalina happy - haha.

See this is why I don't any friends to go out with, because I always have things I want to work on, intellectual pursuits.  But to turn these into reality I will have to have friends to tell about and to help me find an outlet for.

Last thing:  Ihave been blowing the trumpet lately, the trombone too.  The urge to get a guitar and bass has been big but I have put it off because of lack of money and also so as not to serve as a further distraction.  Make beats in Garage Band before your purchase turntables, instruments or anything else.  Maybe I should peruse the local rags for bands that need musicians.  Should I get back into rock n roll again?  Oh well plenty enough here.  Get on to something else.

What my students think

I put to my students this question: Are graffiti and comics art? Here are their responses:

Graffiti and comics are art because they:

1. Use the elements of art and principles of design that other forms of art use.
2. They express emotion.
3. They use imagination (one student disagrees because she feels imagination is not a requirement of making art).
4. Communicate an idea (content) in a visual method.

What my Students thinkI put to my students the question

Graffiti Instruction video

I'm posting this up here so you can all have a look and to solicit advice. Writers and teachers and artists alike all feel free to comment.
Devin

Begin

I am going to begin posting some of the stuff that is going on in my classroom.

喜不喜欢

This is kind of gross but at the same time really clever. I can't decided if I like it or not. Your thoughts?

什么是什么

At last a little ispiration

I have been in a bit of a fuzz today. It is the first day back to school and my mind has not gotten into the proper frame of mind. Also I was still a little groggy from Pearl getting me drunk last night. That girl, I like it but who knows how much I can take - heh heh. I'll just tell her I'm drunk next time even when I'm not.

Anyway, it is the last class of the day and I have been buzzing around with the students looking at and suggesting different designs for their ceramic work. This group of students is quite excellent. They have a lot of ideas and they are not afraid of showing them. I was able to turn one of my students onto tiki mugs and he is now drawing them endlessly. That has finally got my mind in gear and I am excited about teaching and making art. I was in such a funk over the holiday (too many intoxicants) and aside from a day or two I really didn't create anything. Which is quite a pity because I had loads of time and too much of it was spent in front of the television. School is good for me.

Above is one of my prints from December. It is my tag that I wanted to make into a poster. I also found my old sketchbook and there are some good ideas in there I forgot about. So here we go again.