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breakTHROUGHArts
a free newsletter for visual artists
Thanks to all who have passed breakTHROUGHArts on to other artists! To share this newsletter with friends who want more creativity in their lives, use your e-mail Forward button. To subscribe or schedule your complimentary coaching hour click: connect@dianereardon.com.
December 2009 Contents
I. Hours and Hours
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room, and the Shrink’s Couch
III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading, listening, or surfing the web
IV. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe
I. Hours and
Hours
Part of our family’s Thanksgiving Day was having Macy’s Christmas
parade on the TV. I got to see quite a bit and it flipped me out of
my Turkey mode with its many islands of Americana creativity. It
went from kitschy huge balloons to the life philosophy of Kermit the
Frog. From breathy vocal hits by teenage stars to the elegant
syncopations of high school marching bands, whose hard-earned
dollars brought them to the Big Apple from places like the hills of
Kentucky.
In the parade of images, costumes caught my fiberartist’s eye with
both delight and dismay. I gasped at the chromatic effects of flag
twirling teams and at how oddly some school colors fared in band
uniforms. There was an album’s worth of music with the parade
stopping for Broadway musical numbers (there is no green to match
that of Shrek’s entourage). On the moving floats, singers brought us
current groups, fine country and, my favorite, Andrea Bocelli. I
guess I’m glad to know there is a group called “Boys Like Girls” but
I really appreciated Bocelli’s rendition of White Christmas
with Olympic skater Emily Hughes carving figure eights on the same
float. I would say it was purely overdone, but the texture of his
voice makes me both swoon and somehow think I understand the wave
and particle theories of physics. Any swooning was then cut short by
the stream of cartoon characters, maybe lovable to kids, but all a
bit creepy to me.
At one level, you could feel the presence of Macy’s with its single
star and command slogan “Believe” (not so bad a one for creative
folk). But I could also feel something else behind it all. I felt
the hours and hours of choosing concepts, collaborating on design
decisions, rehearsing, and painstaking production of each float,
uniform, prop, and hairstyle. I could feel the hours of practicing
by each Kentucky tuba-playing kid and hours of sewing seams by each
costume maker. Whatever I thought of the results, I appreciated all
of their creative hours and, later, was somehow more patient with
the hours spent making my own work.
(Return to Top)
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych
Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch
Gladwell, Malcolm. Philip. Outliers. 2008.
This New Yorker writer (The Tipping Point, Blink) is
like a very talented squirrel gathering up shiny beads of
information and stringing them into strands of meaning. One strand
in this book is of special use to artists. He concludes that it
takes 10,000 hours of work in a particular medium to feel ‘at home’
in it, to have fluidity, to be able to push its techniques and
materials to new uses and frontiers.
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“. . .outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status
through a combination of ability, opportunity, and utterly
arbitrary advantage.””
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. 2007. p. 37 |
His major point is that outliers are those highly successful folk,
all by themselves in some advantageous position by chance, choice,
or fortune. They are all by themselves under the net with the ball
in their hands before the rest of us have even realized there a
basketball game going on. Bill Gates, for example, due to a
fundraising fluke at his secondary school, had access to
time-sharing programming in 1968. By the time computers were online
and past the punch-card stage, he was one of the few people who
already had put in his 10,000 online programming hours.
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“…once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music
school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another
is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the
people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much
harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. 2007. p. 39 |
It was revealing for me to go back and estimate the number of hours
I’ve spent with a particular medium. For example, I figure I’ve
spent about 2000 hours dyeing fabric. (It was also instructive to
make estimates in other areas of my life, as in my 3,000 hours
loading and unloading dishwashers.
Of course, a lot depends on how broadly or narrowly you define your
medium. You could count hours of doing dishes (narrow) or cleaning
(broad), hours of low water fabric dyeing (narrow) or making art
(broad). 10,000 hours as a Photoshop graphics artist can make a huge
difference in some visual arts. Many contemporary art quilt artists
improve their design work rapidly based on 10,000 hours of some
prior skill, if not Photoshop, it could be machine stitching learned
while making Halloween costumes or kitchen curtains.
This exercise led to two questions for me. If I have the 10,000
hours, how come I’m not surging ahead in some way? And then, if I
have only 250 hours of a skill and am only adding 52 hours a year,
what are my expectations for this arena? I leave it to you to make
some hour estimates for yourself and see what questions they lead
you to ponder.
(Return to Top)
III. Friends in the Media: When you feel like
reading, listening, or surfing the web
In the spirit of wishing you joy and pleasure this holiday season, I
send you the YouTube of Macy’s musical greeting from Andrea Bocelli
and Emily Hughes (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71FXMHPVK50
). Now, to improve your spirits further, turn off your computer and
go celebrate in your own favorite way.
(Return to Top)
IV.
E-mail changes.
To change your e-mail address, subscribe, or unsubscribe please
e-mail
connect@dianereardon.com.
If you use a spam filter, please add this e-mail address to your
list of approved senders. This material is
included on the
breakTHROUGH Creativity Coaching
(website
www.dianereardon.com)
All material is copyrighted ©, 30 November 2009, Diane Reardon. All
rights reserved. Visit the website for back issues and details on
scheduling a complimentary one-hour
coaching session.
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