I haven’t actually mentioned this on the blog yet, but after many many years of thinking about it I actually created a photo book featuring my photographs. It is a 20 page book and features many of my favourite photographs from recent years. I was really happy with how it turned out too, how vibrant and clear the printed photographs looked and how nicely bound the hard covered book is.

John Lacey Photography Photo Book Cover

Moody Sky

Pelican

Chinese Lion

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Some of my writings were included in a book. Here’s a video of me opening and holding said book for the first time! [This video was recorded on an iPod Touch.]

Bound By The Secrets We Trust is the third book in Scott Faithfull’s Bound By The Secrets anthology series with each book benefiting a different charity. This book features the poetry of Felino A. Soriano, Michael Mc Aloran, Nahshon Cook, Peycho Kanev, Stephen Coltin, Tina Barton, Zhivka Baltadzhieva, Cristina Umpfenbach-Smyth, Tyler Malone, Henry Lui, Petar Yanev, Glenn Flintrop, Chris Cole, John Lacey, Lisa Marie MacClellan Kay, Keith Landrum and Frank A. Bella.

For more information and links to buy the book see the the official Desperanto page.

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When I was a kid it seemed that the worst thing that could befall an individual was not to know something. You were ignorant, excluded. The sheer number of times I or someone I knew would claim to know about something someone else was talking about (but not be able to explain it to anyone else) was truly amazing. There was a pain to be associated with not knowing, it was a social pain, a stigma and as a kid I felt it intensely.

I came to realise that my teachers were much better than my peers at explaining what they wanted from me. They gave me detailed descriptions of what they wanted and (for the most part) I complied. It is as true of TAFE (where I’m currently studying Business and Information Technology courses) as it was of high school. University was another beast entirely – sure they gave you strict formatting and referencing guidelines and frameworks within which to consider things, but ultimately your conclusions and your prose were your own. Sometimes this freedom seemed empowering – I could follow my whims, like the time I used a communications subject as an excuse to wax lyrical about soap operas – but other times it seemed too much freedom and I didn’t know where to start.

There’s a huge difference between knowing you could do anything and actually doing something. Doing something is grounded in specifics – specific ideas, specific actions. We have a word for this and I’m sure you’ve heard me use a lot. They’re called constraints. You might know them as guidelines or parameters. They nudge you in a direction and you can follow the flow of that direction or fight against, but either way you have a starting point.

Like that Robert Frost poem, we have to realise that some actions and directions preclude other actions and directions. By deciding to turn left, we – consciously or unconsciously – decided not to turn right. It gives us a direction and an identity, we choose certain mediums and certain modes of expression. We become known as a poet or a portrait painter or a blogger or… whatever.

The alternative is to be overwhelmed by choice and stalled by inaction.

The thing I learnt as an adult which escaped me as a kid is that there actually isn’t much to be gained by pretending to know things. All you really know is what you don’t know and even then it’s usually only the tip of some larger iceberg. So learn, try, play.

It is my hope to adopt a two prolonged approach to my creativity. Firstly to actively work on the creation of creative works. But secondly – and perhaps even more importantly – to practice, to play, to experiment. To practice making marks with a brush or pencil or a stick of charcoal just to better understand the medium, to better understand my own preferences as an artist and my personal visual language. To take some prose and rewrite it – perhaps without the letter ‘e’, or by using a thesaurus to change every third word. Just to see how it reads, how it sounds. Just to get a sense of what else is possible.

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So this book of poetry I’m featured in is an actual book somewhere. It exists as a tangible object. It went from an idea to a thing… I guess that is what creation is. I get a bit of a buzz out of it to be honest.

I was approached about submitting stuff for an earlier book. And I stumbled. I hadn’t written anything in ages and it just all seemed too hard. Plus even though I was contacted there was no guarantee that I would be accepted. It felt like I was setting myself up to be rejected and my skin was much too thin.

But there was another opportunity and I wrote a few things and I raided my archives for the rest. I was surprised then too because writing was an alchemy I thought I had long lost the secret to.

The muse stopped showing up, and I stopped showing up and over time it just seemed easier. Easier to not show up. Easier to not write. Easier to watch TV. Easier to fill my days with minutiae and pretend writing was never something I was interested in.

There are few things as truly soul destroying as pretending to be “fine” when you’re not, as pretending that something (or someone) important to you actually isn’t. It is a betrayal of the self and you probably won’t even realise why you feel so crummy because you haven’t admitted there’s a problem (you’re a blocked writer). And as the old adage goes admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it. Perhaps writing about it is the second.

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My friend Michael Meloni started a personal blog recently. I actually read one of his blog entries and found myself thinking, “Oh it would be so cool to have a blog…” And then – of course – it dawned on me that I did have a (much neglected) blog. So yes, here I am.

I don’t want to gush too much but I’ve been going to art lessons for a few months now and I have to say it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I want to try to unpack some of the benefits I’ve experienced from having a great art teacher.

The Obvious – Technique
A good art teacher will provide you with specific technique relating to your medium. Perhaps it’s about improving what you do already, perhaps it’s about introducing a whole new skill set. You may be surprised at what you can do even with a medium you’ve practiced with for some time. Sometimes it’s just about getting a new perspective.

Philosophies
It’s not just technique that your teacher passes onto you as a student, it is also their philosophies. One of teacher’s favourite sayings is, “The only difference between a good painting and a bad painting is more work.”

The Stuff That’s Not Written In The Books
And then there are those tips and tricks that are garnered through a life time of creating and shared with you the student. Whether it’s cost effective ways of reusing old objects (a stay wet palette made out of a sponge, an icecream lid and some cling wrap?) or when to use industrial hardware over “artist supplies.”

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Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is familiar to many of us. While I’ve mused over the meaning of this poem elsewhere, today I want to really focus on the part that stays with me. Specifically the last stanza.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What interests me here isn’t the final line, not even the final three lines, but rather the first two. Frost will share his adventures with someone, he is so matter-of-fact on this point, there’s no doubt in his mind. Perhaps he did this conversationally, certainly he uses a poetic form to share it with his readers. He has such a profound sense of audience.

People need people. Artists need an audience. Sometimes even the whispered possibility of an audience. It is the reason that videos are uploaded to YouTube channels with no subscribers. It is the reason that poetry gets taken from a journal in a bottom drawer and transcribed into blog form. If it’s out there, perhaps someone will find it. Perhaps someone will see it or read it or watch it. Julia Cameron refers to it as being witnessed. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it does it make a sound; moreover, if nobody notices we were here did we actually exist at all?

It’s the reason too when we don’t have someone to talk to face-to-face we blurt things out online.

I was taken aback by how succinctly a handful of tweets summed up so much of my life, how much they embodied things I hadn’t said or was reluctant to say.

*********

I became a writer because I was a frustrated musician. And then I became a visual artist because I was a frustrated writer.

I’ve always loved music but even as a seven year old a part of me genuinely thought, “If I’m a rock star maybe people will love me then.”

But I couldn’t play an instrument, or sing. I studied audio engineering and music business management. I figured I’d be a producer.

Somehow on completing uni it became apparent there were no opportunities for me. I came home to live with my parents and get a dayjob.

And I kept that dayjob for about five years until I was so driven by despair (with a broken heart) that I gave it all away.

And that’s basically the John Lacey story in a nutshell.

*********

Nobody replied, I don’t know if anybody read those tweets. But still I share them there – and here – in the hope that someone bear witness.

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There’s an old adage – well, I’ve been using it for years; families, can’t live with them, can’t kill them and bury them underneath the pool (we have no pool).

Now there’s little doubt that I am part of my family, the family resemblance between siblings is too striking for me to be adopted. But at times I have this overwhelming sense that we might as well be different animals and that I am certainly the odd one out.

So how do you explain what you do to your family, to your parents? It was hard enough for my brother to explain he was in IT Support, so what hope do you have of conveying meaning when you’re doing something as seemingly esoteric as creating art?

Lernert & Sander have produced a documentary series in which 5 abstract artists attempt to explain their work to their parents.

The first episode features Arno Coenen trying to explain his work (with beer) to his father.

How to explain it to my parents – Arno Coenen from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo

“Explain to me in simple terms how this beer is art,” Arno’s father (perhaps quite understandably) asks.

You can watch the other installments at Lernert & Sander’s Vimeo page.

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I used to think there was something inside of me. Something special. Even when other people didn’t. Even after an uncle made fun of my singing, I kept singing. Even when I couldn’t make sense of written notation and my playing abilities were limited I kept writing songs. Even when nothing made sense in my mind I kept on scribbling.

I don’t feel that way any more. And I’ve come to realise that my motivations for wanting to be creative are very different. Mostly I’m just hoping some creative output will make up for the hopeless failure I feel I’ve become. Unemployed, unhinged, uninvolved – so many ‘un’ words, so much lacking. I can’t be who other people want, and I can’t be myself and I can’t seem to find a way to be happy. I can’t hold up pretenses. I can’t pretend I’m not completely disillusioned with everything. I know it’s been a really long day and that I’m dabbling with things – art supplies and techniques, specifically – that I know next to nothing about, but right now my heart is breaking. I just want to give it all away. I want to get rid of all these art supplies and stop embarrassing myself.

Art was always my consolation. In my loneliness I would take comfort in the poems I’d etch out. When peers would ignore me I’d receive interaction and stimulation instead from teachers happy with my work. And that day I told the person who made my heart sing that I loved them, that day when they admitted they weren’t interested in me at all, I told myself I would at least have a song. My heart couldn’t stand the interrogation my mind was giving it. Asking over and over “why don’t you like me? why am I not good enough?” didn’t seem to change the facts that you didn’t and I wasn’t. So I distracted myself with lines and rhymes, counting syllables and changing chords. I mourned at my Roland keyboard, keeping busy and sane.

Art was always my consolation, but I hoped that it might too be my salvation. I hoped it would make things better. I hoped it would explain things, I hoped it would explain me. I hoped (if not the son they imagined) it would produce a son of which my parents could still be proud. I hoped that it would impress the next person to steal my heart. I hoped that it would somehow fill all the various voids.

But it’s too much – and not enough, all at once. I feel the shame of not feeling like enough coupled with the pressure to be prolific and profound when in truth I’m just a very amateur, very frustrated painter hack. Things need to change. How, I don’t yet know. But things need to change.

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Well one of my new year’s resolutions came to past, I found my copy of The Artist’s Way. (It was hiding in a enclosed compartment on my bookshelf.) I know I talk about this book a lot but it is like a personal oracle to me. I can open to any page at random and find something that seems to help. Yesterday I came to a section on fear.

Julia Cameron writes:

Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality. Most blocked artists tried to become artists against either their parents’ good wishes or their parents’ good judgment. For a youngster this is quite a conflict. To go squarely against your parents’ values means you’d better know what you’re doing. You’d better not just be an artist. You better be a great artist if you’re going to hurt your parents so much….

I want to hesitate for a moment to say that (as far as I am aware) my parents are mostly supportive of my various endeavours. But I have always had this sense that I am going against the grain. And that sense has often made me really driven, hopeful that if I’m brilliant in one area of life perhaps it will make up for my limitations in other parts.

But… it means I need a lot of support and feedback and encouragement. I tend to assume if I don’t get positive feedback that the work is terrible. [And there's clearly a difference between getting negative feedback and getting no feedback.] I constantly feel like the only way I can justify doing anything is to do it perfectly – which is difficult enough for seasoned artists, let alone the humble beginner I am.

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Mary Richert recently celebrated Thanksgiving with her family. Now Thanksgiving is not a celebration we observe in Australia though Martha Stewart has made me aware that consuming Turkey is a major element of this custom. Something that is perhaps less widely observed is getting together as a family to make stop motion movies, though this is exactly what Mary and her family did.

From Mary’s Twitter:

The family created six stop motion videos. You can watch them all on Mary’s YouTube channel.

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