Selling Doesn’t Make You an Artist

When I saw the Sephora bag being packed in the store, I thought, “this could be a journal.” (This is what happened when I got too eager and didn’t plan enough.) Accidentally, I spoke that out loud. The sales associate lit up. “How would you do that?” she asked. I folded the bag to show her.

Photograph © Quinn McDonald, 2018

“That would be so cute!” she gushed. “And you could sell them on Etsy and make a lot of money and be a real artist!” There was so much in that comment to understand and come to grips with. In real life, I smiled, took my purchase and left the store.

In my head, I began to wonder how we got from being an artist, to being defined as an artist if we sell our work. Make a living. Get rich. That’s the American business model–develop an idea, monetize it, get rich. Success!

Years ago, I wrote a book called Raw Art Journaling. It was for people who wanted to do art for themselves. To heal. To making meaning in life, instead of chasing meaning. I believed every word of it then, and still do. Art is a way to express yourself creatively, and it has nothing to do with selling and making money.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great if you are a working artist and successful. For years, I did support myself with my art. I found it hard work and the joy of art left me. So I left the field of money-making artist. And I became a meaning-making artist.  It is not mutually exclusive–making art and making money. But for me, I chose the making art–making meaning path. I’m happy with it.

Much of my art is weird. Much of my life is weird. It becomes clearer to me, makes more sense, when I make art out of it.

I can start a piece and not have to choose what frame I’ll use first.

I can decide to use a paper that is not archival, simply because I like it.

I can experiment without wondering how much I can charge for it.

I can make mistakes and take a long time to decide how to change the work without worrying about time management.  In fact, I can make mistakes and decide to leave it just the way it is because I understand more about it now.

Art and money are not necessarily linked. I do other work to take care of my family. Work I love, but different from art. Being an artist is exploring the dark, interesting, funny, odd, hard, difficult parts of your life and seeing what you can discover about it. For me, that’s valuable.

When people ask me if I’m an artist, I generally say, “I do creative expression.” Sometimes I’m asked if I make money, and all I say is, “I decided not to sell my work any more.” It’s all I need to explain about my deeply important art.

—Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people cope with the creativity they don’t know they have.

Start With What You Know–Now

When I saw the Sephora bag, I knew that it would make a cute hand-made journal.  The bump in the road—I haven’t hand made a journal in more than a year—didn’t bother me. Hey, I knew how.

The secret to producing anything decent is practice. But psssssh, I’ve made dozens of journals. Sure, I can still do it. Easily. Right? Maybe not. Without practice, the skill dulls. It doesn’t vanish, and I may know the steps, but the skill element dulls.

The Sephora bag, ready to be worked on. Until I cut my finger.

So does the knife blade. After I decided how to cut the bag, I pulled out my cutting knife, did not put in a new blade, and drew the knife down the edge of a ruler. The blade stuttered, the ruler jumped, and I cut my finger tip. Not a big cut, but enough to bleed onto the bag. And soak into the paper surface. Wiping it off made it worse. And my finger was still bleeding, so there was not one drop, but three. Then five. I stopped to get a bandaid.

Yes, the bag was ruined. It didn’t have to be. What I should have done was not start with building a book. As far as creative work, there were many creative exercises that would have made a great beginning. But I didn’t do that. I started with something I had not practiced for a long time. And I failed.

Photograph © Quinn McDonald, 2018

Not because I’m a bad artist, not because I’m not creative, but because I started where I’d left off years ago. Instead of where I was now.

I learn by failing. And my figuring out how I failed and working from there. It’s a good method. It helps you grow better with practice. And that works.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and writing instructor. She is working on a book about putting down your screens and getting out to listen to the Speaking World in the Invisible, Visible World.

Be an Expert, Be a Learner

Artists and writers are always pushing ahead–pushing their boundaries, pushing themselves to learn a new technique. That’s growth. But there is also a time for being an expert and sticking to what you know.

First, sketch the raven. Then, cut out words and letters about ravens and glue them in place, using tweezers. Tiny, fiddly steps. There is no worthwhile project that doesn’t require time, attention, and practice. © Quinn McDonald, 2018

I’m learning how to create and run an online class. I’ve been teaching for many years,but it’s always been face-to-face. Online is a new medium for me, and a new medium always brings a learning curve. I don’t always love steep learning curves.

While creating a course (The Invisible, Visible World will be an online class as well as a book), I began with a brain dump of all the things I wanted to do in a four-week class. I had so many great ideas! But then I began to cram them into the modules. Either just a taste of an idea, or too many to finish in one class. Stop!

I backed up and looked at what I had a lot of experience in. I narrowed down the content, because too much information is just passing on my feeling of being overwhelmed.  The modules are simple and leave time for practice. Practice bring out expertise.

With less to learn and more time to practice, I see a better course emerging.  I hope so.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and a trainer in business writing topics. The Invisible, Visible World is a book on what we miss.

Lawn Ornament as Art

Here in the desert, we often don’t plant lawns. They get shriveled by May, and need too  much water. We use rocks instead.

This lawn had a big chunk of brown glass. I’ve never seen such a large piece of glass. (About the size of a shoebox.) But the sun was at the perfect angle. The glass looked as if it were on fire.

Sometimes is just a pile of rocks, sometimes its a piece of art. Up to you, always.

—Quinn McDonald is writing a book about the invisible, visible world. She is a writer and creativity coach.

The Beauty of Destruction

Building, making, and creating are wonderful. But there is also great beauty in things that are old, damaged, or worn. Wabi sabi is the Japanese phrase for honoring the worn, the old, the damaged.  I’ve had a long-lived love affair with wabi sabi.

A few days ago, Phoenix had a hard freeze and stucco’d walls will often pop off the stucco. This wall is on the way there. I found the shadow work on it really beautiful.

You can see the lifted stucco as well as the line where the bricks are joined. It forms a map of its experiences, just as the lines on your face tell your story, too.

–Quinn McDonald is writing a book on the Invisible, Visible World–seeing things in new ways with fresh eyes.

Box of Colors

Storage sheds. We all know about them, we all need them.  Most of mine have had a jumble of broken items, tools, spiders, toads, snakes and rust in them.

Today, I found a shed clearly planned ahead and carefully. It’s in an older neighborhood in Phoenix, but as so often happens, once the updating started, almost everyone on the block got into the updating swing.

I love this box because it is not what you would expect. It does not hide itself. It stands, colorful and proudly offering its services while also brightening a front yard.  Being different isn’t easy, but it can be beautiful.

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who is working on a book about the Invisible, Visible World.

The Tiny Fence

The Invisible, Visible World depends on perspective. Seeing things differently than others. Appreciating what shows up in front of you as you walk.

I am two different people: one who wants to know how everything works, is interested in reasons and causes and one who wants to experience the world through my senses.

Sometimes I see something and just want to enjoy what I see, what it makes me think of, the memories it brings out.

Here’s an example of how it works: I saw the tiny plant, clearly planted as a seed, surrounded by sticks, clearly broken off by hand, and stuck in the ground.  A tiny, wireless fence. It looks as if a child did it, but there were five of them, all in a neat row. Too neat for a small child. How could that protect anything?

But as I stood and looked at it, in the middle of the downtown front yard, I realized that the most likely attacker of the plant would be birds. (No rabbits in this part of town.)

The sticks were too tall for the birds to reach over, too close together for the bigger birds to squeeze through, and too tall for them to jump over.

A week later, the plants were bigger, and still there. I noticed the shadows the sticks cast, and the health of the plant. I noticed that the soil was damp and smelled like rain.  The things that protect us don’t have to be fancy, or complicated. Simple works. On plants. On people.

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people discover their creativity and put it to use. While she helps people who are labeled “creative,” she works with parents, investment bankers, teachers, and marketing executives, who often don’t know how to find their creativity.

 

Glue Sticks–Not For Me

Glue sticks are wonderful–for other people. For students, for fast workers, for people who hate using bottle glue. For me? Not so much.

Well-working glues I use and like. Notice: no glue sticks. Left to right, Leneco adhesive, Uhu glue, Elmer’s, and Matte Medium by Liquitex.

Part of the problem is Phoenix. Glue sticks dry out, crumble, and aren’t sticky in the low-humidity winter. In the high-heat, high-humidity summer, they melt unless kept cool inside. I keep mine in the fridge, in a baggie, where they dry out in about a week.

So I hate glue sticks. I know they are fast and I would love to love them, but they don’t want my love. Their glue is shiny, and my big, glossy strokes create a whole other layer unless I cover all the glue strokes perfectly.  (Which I don’t.)

Someone whispered a new brand name to me. And as everyone who lives in eternal hope, I thought this would be “the one.” The brand is Coccoina, an italian company.  They make pots of glue, tubes of glue, and glue sticks. I’m interested in the sticks. I ordered several.

Checking out other reviews, I found several enthusiastic reviews. Here are the major pros for using Coccoina glue:

• It’s solvent free
• It contains potato starch
• It’s not poisonous
• It smells of almonds (the containers may, the glue sticks do not.)

For me, potato starch means bugs. Maybe not in Phoenix, but when I lived in New England, most of the homemade wheat paste and potato paste I used wound up being eaten by tiny bugs, which left holes in my paper.

Because I am an adult, have no children and home, and don’t expect people to eat my art, I am not so concerned about using glue that is edible.

I want to use glue that is:

• matte
• dries clear
• keeps sticking over time, no drying out
• can be applied in tight areas without glopping
• doesn’t wrinkle paper or other materials

The Coccoina glue stick didn’t pass the basic tests. Here’s what it looks like freshly opened on a day that did not get above 72º, applied with a light touch.

You can see it doesn’t apply evenly, it blobs. Yes, I could apply it with a brush. But that defeats the purpose of a glue stick.

After spreading it around with my fingers, I left it to dry. After 24 hours of drying time (laughable in Phoenix, we have trouble keeping glue from drying out in seconds), it was dry, but lumpy. Slightly tacky. And it looked like this.

It’s not matte, it’s not clear, and it’s not easy to control.

My favorite glue stick is still UHU, which dries clear, but shiny, so I have to watch out where I put it.

For regular collage projects, or for attaching feathers to paper, I’ll use matte medium. and a brush. Liquitex and Golden are favorite brand names. I’ve used it a long time and it dried matte, clear, and holds on to the collage pieces.

If you have found glue sticks that don’t dry out, don’t glop, dry clear and matte, let me know. I always have more room in my studio for art supplies that work well.

Dust You Are

You see something, and your brain doesn’t quite understand it. Your brain, trying to be helpful, makes up information for you to believe. You not only believe it, you will defend what you are sure you saw.

About a dozen people have seen the photo above. Most of them guessed it was some sort of archeological dig, showing a partial skeleton. Some decided it was a sketch of a skeleton using pastels. I can see that.

But this is much more commonplace. It’s truck tire tracks into a construction site. The dirt mixed with rain to create the look.

–Quinn McDonald is writing a book on The Invisible, Visible World. It takes a look at commonplace things that have a more interesting story to tell.

Positive and Negative

Without  sunshine, there is no shadow. Without sadness, happiness cannot be recognized. We live with our own shadow–the negative side of our personality, we could not choose to see the positive, to decide not to give in to fear, but be courageous instead.

The Japanese art of notan (rhymes with so-wan) uses black paper on a white background to create positive and negative spaces. But it does more than that. The figure above shows a zig-zag cut-out, and while the spaces where white meets black look like they are intact, they are not. The illusion is created by leaving the corners intact. Our eyes fill in the rest.

Each section is cut out, then turned down, edges matching. The effect is mesmerizing. The process is simple, the result is complex. Just like the decisions we make in our lives, the ones that change the shape of the future.

–-Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people discover their creativity and set it free to play in their lives. She also delights in seeing the invisible, visible world, where creativity holds the oracles that make our lives interesting.