Today I went to visit a local showing of the Archibald Portrait Prize Finalists. [The Archibald is probably the most publicised art prize in Australia.] It was wonderful to see the artworks up close.

I was really impressed by the scale of them – just how large the artworks were. Interestingly this year’s winner, a portrait of comedian Tim Minchin by Sam Leach, was the smallest work (in terms of size) among the finalists and it seemed completely dwarfed by the other artworks.

I got to vote for my favourite painting of the exhibition and after much soul searching I picked Khue Nguyen’s ‘Unleashed’ (a self-portrait).

I was stirred by the intricate combination of watercolour and pencil, the personal mythology (apparently inspired by the artist’s meditation practice where multiple animals seemed to blur into one) and themes relating to expressing one self as an artist and sexual being.

You can see all the finalists’ work at the Archibald website. Though if you have a chance to see them exhibited I highly recommend it.

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• Greg Somers: Become An Artist

I’ve always adored this song (and particularly this remix). I’m hoping by listening to it today, on a day when I feel particularly meek, that I’ll be inspired to take life and run with it. Hey, I might even do some art.

Sting:

There’s no religion but sex and music
There’s no religion but sound and dancing
There’s no religion but line and color
There’s no religion but sacred trance

There’s no religion but the endless ocean
There’s no religion but the moon and stars
There’s no religion but time and motion
There’s no religion, just tribal scars

Throw a pebble in and watch the ocean
See the ripples vanish in the distance
It’s just the same with all the emotions
It’s just the same in every instance

There’s no religion but the joys of rhythm
There’s no religion but the rites of Spring
There’s no religion in the path of hate
No prayer but the one I sing

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Somebody left a comment on a video of a song I wrote and performed. It read:

[...] your voice is so unique.

I wondered momentarily if that was a compliment or an insult. But in any eventuality it struck me as true, that in a very real sense – whether by accident or design – nobody sings exactly the same way I do.

You Mean The Whole To Me (Demo) by johnlacey

Vocal Stuff by johnlacey

Born To Lose You (Distorted Organ Version) by johnlacey

I went for a walk earlier and Rickie Lee Jones’ Matters came on my iPod.

Doesn’t matter if you’re fat
Wear a helmet or wear a hat
If you’re sorry or if you’re sure
Who you are is who you were
Who you were
Who you were… matters
It matters

There is much talk about about making ‘great’ art and, actually, making ‘great’ art is tough for a number of reasons – not least the anxiety a need to be ‘great’ can often produce. There’s often talk about finding an agent, getting published, signing a deal, finding an audience. These things are all perfectly wonderful in their own right. But what I would like you to do today is really understand that you are unique, that nobody else in the world would’ve created that thing you created in exactly the same way you did. And I think that makes it special and gives it a value we don’t often appreciate.

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I alluded to a documentary about photography earlier in the week. It was actually Ovation TV’s Closeup: Photographers At Work.

Even in this short selection of outtakes from the documentary you get a sense of the different approaches and philosophies taken by this selection of photographers. For some people it’s about creating a connection with your subject, for others it’s technical aspects, for others it’s about making your subject (the portrait sitter) comfortable. And at the end of this video you see a handful of amateur photographers who talk about their motivations for taking photographs. “It’s like one moment in time.”

Ovation TV have some great content. Check out their website and YouTube channel.

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• No Related Posts

It’s helpful to know where you’ve come from.

For a lot of us bad teenage poetry is practically a rite of passage. (You might remember this video from Mary Richert.) In the video embedded above the Mortified Shoebox show delves into some of the relics from Felicia Day’s past.

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Discussions regarding publishing and electronic books have concerned themselves mostly with how books will be consumed and how they will be monetized. But what if there are even more staggering implications for how we experience narratives and texts? Futurist (and minor Australian television celebrity) Mark Pesce has much to say on this topic and it is both fascinating and frankly unnerving.

Mark Pesce:

At this point a question needs to be asked: what’s so electronic about an electronic book? If I open the Stanza application on my iPhone, and begin reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I am presented with something that looks utterly familiar. Too familiar. This is not an electronic book. This is ‘publishing in light’. I believe it essential that we discriminate between the two, because the same commercial forces which have driven links from online newspapers and magazines will strip the term ‘electronic book’ of all of its meaning. An electronic book is not simply a one-for-one translation of a typeset text into UTF-8 characters. It doesn’t even necessarily begin with that translation. Instead, first consider the text qua text. What is it? Who is it speaking to? What is it speaking about?

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Michael Jackson was by pop culture standards ‘The King of Pop.’ It was a sad event for many when he passed away last year. One of the things I came to realise was that he had been a constant presence around me. There had never been a time in my life when there had not been Michael Jackson, indeed his life and career extended long before I showed up on this planet – and he had been Michael Jackson the entertainer almost his entire life too.

When you watch him perform it seems everything he touches turns to gold. It’s a kind of miracle. You don’t sit there thinking, “Wow, so he’s been developing his talents for close to fifty years,” you just think “wow!”

But was it always as easy as he made it seem? Robert DiFazio doesn’t seem to think so. He has a startling revelation and I’m hoping it will change the way you look at your own work too.

Robert DiFazio:

The average person would say ‘scrap this, come up with something better.’ But the producer is supposed to say, ‘no, there’s a Billie Jean in this song. We can figure this out.’ It’s going to be hundreds of different decisions and hours and days and months and whatever. But you have to somehow recognise the forest through the trees and see the whole picture at the same time. So don’t discredit things that suck initially is one thing I would say to my students…

You have to see the forest, the trees and the whole picture – all at once. There’s an obligation to have a sense of the work as it is while also imagining how it could be. And then, of course, you build on what you have. So don’t be too dismissive of your early efforts, they’re building blocks and you’ll never know what you can create upon those foundations unless you try!

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I recently had the joy and pleasure of attending a webinar featuring Sir Ken Robinson. I’ve mentioned Sir Ken Robinson on this blog before, but to many people he is probably best known for the talk he gave at TED, where he wondered if schools killed creativity.

[Annoyingly I was literally the next person in the queue to ask a question during the Q&A session of the webinar when they ran out of time. But otherwise it was a truly amazing and inspirational experience - I concede I'm a huge fan of this gentleman, I think the ideas he talks and writes about are truly revolutionary.]

One of the things I found most compelling was how Robinson suggests that finding your passion is about much more than just a career or a hobby, that it can really affect the quality of your life and interactions with others. He describes his book, The Element, in part as a spiritual argument.

Sir Ken Robinson:

There’s a big argument in the book about this, about energy. And one way to think about it is that some activities give you energy and some take them from you. Human energy isn’t static and it’s not limited. If you do things that you love to do you can be physically exhausted by it but spiritually uplifted. If you do things that you don’t love to do you can be physically stable – you know, not worn out by it – but spiritually depleted. And I’ve seen this all the time, people get to the end of the week and they do things they don’t like and they’re just kind of empty, spiritually. But other people do things they love to do and it’s that thing ‘I could’ve danced all night!’ you know if they kept their energy, if their physical bodies held up a bit longer.

So one way of thinking about the book is it’s a spiritual argument. Spiritual in the sense that all life is essentially energy and it’s about our internal spirits, how our spirits connect with other people that determines the course of our lives and the quality of our lives.

You can listen to a recording of the webinar session at Conversations.net.

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The Archibald Prize is perhaps Australia’s most celebrated art prize and you can currently see the finalists here. The final result will be announced later this week, and while I’m really impressed by all the finalists I wanted to single one in particular out for special mention here.

The longer I look at Greg Somers’ Self Portrait with The Picture of Dorey In Grey the more I love it. “Dorey In Grey?” you might wonder aloud. Try Dorian Gray, that invention by Oscar Wilde, an individual who was completely obsessed with living forever and staying forever youthful.

So how does an individual grapple with such concerns? Well the artist himself has some ideas. If you look at the small writing on the bottom of that multi-faceted tie you’ll see the following:

“Become an artist. Immortality is to die for.”

The artist may age but the individual portrayed in the image will not. The artwork will outlive the artist, it will live on long after he is no more. The artist doesn’t become immortal by selling his soul (as Dorian does in Wilde’s tale) rather he leaves some essence of himself with the world before he departs.

You often hear the expression “Don’t die with your music still in you.” The idea is simple – express what you have to express while you can, don’t bite your tongue. But similarly I would say don’t forget to share what you’ve created with the world. As I explained to my friend Sam recently:

By all means explore all your options (and I’m keen to see where the next 30 days take you) but don’t die with the novel sitting in a drawer somewhere. Don’t deny humanity your particular individual contribution just because a deal didn’t ‘come together’ or that the powers that be couldn’t decide on which market gap you might fit.

Be an artist, leave a legacy, become immortal.

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I wrote about finding your power when no one cares. And that’s great, it is. But then there’s also the feeling that accompanies the realisation that – yes, really – NO ONE CARES. It is not much fun. Especially when you feel like you’re really doing great interesting stuff, really cultivating a talent, really developing a voice. At times you have to wonder if it is worth having a voice that nobody is prepared to listen to.

What if there was a territory that represented this struggle? Well, Ford Fiesta Movement team members Sam Proof and Jen Friel think there is. It’s the internet… or, erm, Los Angeles. Either way:

Go Big or GTFO, This … is the internet. LA is a city like no other, and a city that itself is most like the internet. It’s full to the brim with creative people wanting for a modicum of recognition. Opportunity is a bullet train speeding by at a thousand miles an hour. You can sit there and watch the blur, or you can take a leap, stick out a hand and grab on for the ride. – We’re going to give the LA community, (creative & viewer) the ride of it’s life.

I should probably tell you that I’ve known Sam Proof for several years now. We met in a Stickam chat room, he was a friend-of-a-friend… and at the time I remember him creating funny videos – often as Zeus or Jesus (it’s amazing what you can do with a beard and a toga). I’ve interviewed him on my podcast about online video creators (twice). I love catching his weekly web show Failpire whenever I can. And, yes, I even contribute periodically to another of his ventures – Podpocalypse.

What might be less apparent, even to those who know both of us, are the early morning (for him; late night with the time difference for me) peptalks and commiseration sessions.

At the beginning of the year an important part of my YouTube channel branding was drawn into question. The powers that be weren’t convinced that I had the right to use something in my videos that had been created specifically for use in those videos. It was annoying, but I wasn’t just annoyed – I was furious. It was the final straw in a growing sense of dissatisfaction about creating content online. My subscribers – my theoretical audience – was growing and yet the number of views a given video would receive was actually going down. Talk about diminishing returns…

As it happens, there’s a “90-9-1″ Rule For Participation Inequality online but even knowing this was cold comfort.

So when I recorded the first JOJCAST for the year, it was a miserable resentful lament. I told the world I was going to continue but on my own terms. Out of the ashes came some sorely needed encouragement:

I think we all struggle with this, and for those of us that are not in the 100,000 club I think we struggle with it nearly daily.

[...]

Good luck john, I’ll always be around to cheer you on

Stay Strong
-SamProof

And in that moment I think I finally understood the message of his catchcry ‘Stay Strong.’ To me that means keep going. It’s okay – indeed normal – to have doubts, to experience frustrations, but don’t give up! We all get by with a little help from our friends…

If you’re in that ‘other Internet’ Los Angeles, you can join Sam and Jen for the draw-a-thon on Thursday 4th March. And if you’re not, you can still follow their progress online.

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