Freedom to Be
One of the truly great things about life in my country, the USA, is that everyone has the right to be themselves. Yes, that right isn't supposed to infringe on the right of others to be themselves or to offend others (which mostly turns out to be the religious right who most often offend me by pushing their so-called "Christian Values" at me totally forgetting that what gives them the right to do that is what gives me the right to tell them to shut the fuck up about how I should be like them and espouse their values, eschewing my own, because they naively think that the only reason that I don't think exactly like they do is that I've not given it the proper consideration! And while I'm on a side rant, just WTF is not thinking for themselves in this case?!?!???).
We all have the right to be ourselves and to think what we want to think in this country. Many, many people come here, risking their lives to get here, by the way, leaving what may be in many ways a comfortable life, an extended family, friends, their support groups, to come here to be free. People are dying to get here and some do actually die trying. It happens every day on the Mexican border and in the sea between Cuba and Florida. I knew one man who was a doctor in his country and who came here, ending up working as a lab technician because his English wasn't good enough to help him pass the test to be a doctor here. (University degrees are not automatically universally acknowledged everywhere.)
The point is that those who live in the USA are entitled to be themselves, pretty much as long as doing that doesn't involve restricting the rights of someone else in which case, some sort of compromise needs to be reached. This is a really basic right and one of the most important tenets in The Constitution of the United States of America. To carry this idea down to the nitty gritty of everyday American life as an artist, let's think about what we as artists do or don't do in our sketchbooks and journals.
I've kept a sketchbook on and off since I went to art school in the 70s. At times, I've gone through them and ripped out any pages that were plebian enough to have only a list or address, etc. At various times in my life, especially my business life, I've kept a "planner." It started because my employer sent me to a class about time management (and where the hell did that skill go???) where I was given this Franklin Planner to help me organize my work life and encouraged to use it to make the rest of my life more organized so that I'd have more time to do stuff I wanna do! Things such as, kill time playing with art - which at the time to me was spinning, dyeing, and weaving. I like looking at the old planners and am sad that they've been replaced with a smaller, more convenient, less archival electronic version. Versions really as my Pocket PC shares with Outlook on my computers. But I digress.
I've subscribed to and bought bunches of back issues of Teesha Moore's zines. And I love reading them and looking at the eye candy. But maybe the one important thing that art school did for me was to tell me that developing your own style is really, really important if you think of yourself as an artist! Do you want to copy Monet or Degas your whole life? Do you want to be called "that chick who copies Degas"??? Or would you rather be yourself? I can appreciate Teesha's style and the styles of others. That is, after all, what draws us to them as artists and why they have readerships for their zines, blogs, articles, and attendees for their workshops. I don't think that their object is to make hordes of followers who do things exactly the way they do them. If it is, then that's another matter that might be better discussed at www.getoveryourself.com.
I think the thing we're supposed to do, as I've learned it and accepted it is to participate in the art world through communication with other artists. This involves looking at their work and showing them our work. It's Visual Communication.
Our sketchbooks and journals are about US, not about some other artist. Making our pages look like theirs is wrong and I feel it is actually insulting to them. If you copy the style of Monet or Degas or Klimt to the degree that your work might be judged to BE theirs, aren't you trying to steal a bit of them, their persona, their acclaim, or their revenue? Yeah, they're dead but most of them have estates that collect royalties on their works and the use of their names. There was a big thing about it when people making commercials started using motion picture images of dead stars taken out of context to sell their products. You shouldn't make money or gain acclaim or some other self-satisfying thing through the work of others. Just as you wouldn't copy someone's journal pages and paste a print into your journal as your own page (and if you would then that's just sick!), so you should look at their work, take an idea like maybe a color combination or how they combine texture and color with text and try it on. See how it fits into YOUR style. Take the class and learn how they do it. Then make it work for you in your own way. You can make it your's!
I once had a workshop teacher's jaw dropping because she told me that an element belonged in another place, just as she had placed it on the class sample. I explained to her that this was my version of it and that I preferred it here instead of there. You could see her stop to process this and then she stopped and said, "Oh!" The lightbulb had gone on! Yes, being yourself is A Good Thing!
Showing your stuff is an important part of being an artist. Having it appreciated by others is icing on the cake. And while it is a compliment to have others try to emulate your work, it would be a nightmare to have someone copy it to the extent that their work is then mistaken for your's. Thank goodness for the Copyright Office, eh? (And yeah, I won't go on about how all those magazine images are covered by copyright. If you're using them for your own enjoyment and not to sell or show as your original work, then it's a minor infringement, though by all rights, you should acknowlege them somewhere so that posterity doesn't make you look like a thief.)
Of course, there is the other side of the coin. I've often felt that there's no place on this earth to put your foot down where nobody else has stepped before. One famous mixed media artist and blogger agonizes in her blog over how others copy her work. She's complained that people teach how to do a particular element that some of her students named for her and this has made her feel that she owns the rights to the technique. What's funny about this is that I had just read about it but had not seen the element in question. One day while playing with materials, I discovered what I later found was this very technique. I thought I was putting my foot down in undiscovered territory but nope, others had been there before me. Oh well. I feel bad for this gal, but if she really doesn't want to be copied, then maybe she shouldn't teach. Maybe she shouldn't sell. Maybe she shouldn't show her work so that others won't copy it. As artists we put ourselves out there and sometimes that has unhappy side effects. We all have to get a grip about this.
Maybe we all need to get real about what is and isn't ours. And maybe we all need to say WTF (shorthand for 'What/Who/Where The Fuck' for those who use the phrase often enough to need a shorthand for it!) sometimes and get over ourselves. Maybe we all need to worry more about being ourselves and less about some junior high school notion that we all have to be exactly like everyone else. What The Fuck boring kind of world would THAT be, people???? My friend, Kathie, has a theory that it is okay to teach what someone else teaches if you a) change three things, b) write the instructions yourself with your own examples, and c) give your inspiration credit for the idea and cite them as a source.
And that gets me back to my Constitutional right to be me. And your right to be you. And let's do hope that the twain does meet somewhere. By all means, let's have a meeting of minds, a mutual appreciation for our work, and enjoy the similarities as much as the differences that make my work mine and your's your's.
But do let's NOT have the Journal Nazis judging whether or not we're doing it right! (So as not to rant even further, please see the perfectly wonderful rants by two artists I admire, Kelly Kilmer, and Ricë Freeman-Zachery in their blogs. Bookmark them while you're there if you don't have them saved already.) Right on, Kelly and Ricë!
Let us share ideas and information, sources, and inspirations. We can share prompts (or even spanks in Ricë's case). And let's share this too. Let's all stop worrying about Doing It Right and Just Be Ourselves! Do your own thing in your sketchbook, journal or planner. Let's feel free to rant and rave, be artistic or not, make our grocery lists and things to do lists in our journals and stop worrying about Doing It Right. Just Do It You! We all have that basic right to be us. American soldiers have spent more than 200 years fighting all over the world to guarantee that right to anyone who wants it. They lay their lives on the line so that we can be us. My goodness, people, don't we owe it to them to do that?
So feel free to leave a comment about anything that you see in my blog or on my pitiful not-updated website. I'm not Teesha Moore or anyone else who journals, not even my friend, Toni, who does the most beautiful pages that I love looking at, in her very own style. I'm just be and that's all I aspire to be, though I do want to be the best me I can.
Just don't tell me that I'm doing it wrong!
We all have the right to be ourselves and to think what we want to think in this country. Many, many people come here, risking their lives to get here, by the way, leaving what may be in many ways a comfortable life, an extended family, friends, their support groups, to come here to be free. People are dying to get here and some do actually die trying. It happens every day on the Mexican border and in the sea between Cuba and Florida. I knew one man who was a doctor in his country and who came here, ending up working as a lab technician because his English wasn't good enough to help him pass the test to be a doctor here. (University degrees are not automatically universally acknowledged everywhere.)
The point is that those who live in the USA are entitled to be themselves, pretty much as long as doing that doesn't involve restricting the rights of someone else in which case, some sort of compromise needs to be reached. This is a really basic right and one of the most important tenets in The Constitution of the United States of America. To carry this idea down to the nitty gritty of everyday American life as an artist, let's think about what we as artists do or don't do in our sketchbooks and journals.
I've kept a sketchbook on and off since I went to art school in the 70s. At times, I've gone through them and ripped out any pages that were plebian enough to have only a list or address, etc. At various times in my life, especially my business life, I've kept a "planner." It started because my employer sent me to a class about time management (and where the hell did that skill go???) where I was given this Franklin Planner to help me organize my work life and encouraged to use it to make the rest of my life more organized so that I'd have more time to do stuff I wanna do! Things such as, kill time playing with art - which at the time to me was spinning, dyeing, and weaving. I like looking at the old planners and am sad that they've been replaced with a smaller, more convenient, less archival electronic version. Versions really as my Pocket PC shares with Outlook on my computers. But I digress.
I've subscribed to and bought bunches of back issues of Teesha Moore's zines. And I love reading them and looking at the eye candy. But maybe the one important thing that art school did for me was to tell me that developing your own style is really, really important if you think of yourself as an artist! Do you want to copy Monet or Degas your whole life? Do you want to be called "that chick who copies Degas"??? Or would you rather be yourself? I can appreciate Teesha's style and the styles of others. That is, after all, what draws us to them as artists and why they have readerships for their zines, blogs, articles, and attendees for their workshops. I don't think that their object is to make hordes of followers who do things exactly the way they do them. If it is, then that's another matter that might be better discussed at www.getoveryourself.com.
I think the thing we're supposed to do, as I've learned it and accepted it is to participate in the art world through communication with other artists. This involves looking at their work and showing them our work. It's Visual Communication.
Our sketchbooks and journals are about US, not about some other artist. Making our pages look like theirs is wrong and I feel it is actually insulting to them. If you copy the style of Monet or Degas or Klimt to the degree that your work might be judged to BE theirs, aren't you trying to steal a bit of them, their persona, their acclaim, or their revenue? Yeah, they're dead but most of them have estates that collect royalties on their works and the use of their names. There was a big thing about it when people making commercials started using motion picture images of dead stars taken out of context to sell their products. You shouldn't make money or gain acclaim or some other self-satisfying thing through the work of others. Just as you wouldn't copy someone's journal pages and paste a print into your journal as your own page (and if you would then that's just sick!), so you should look at their work, take an idea like maybe a color combination or how they combine texture and color with text and try it on. See how it fits into YOUR style. Take the class and learn how they do it. Then make it work for you in your own way. You can make it your's!
I once had a workshop teacher's jaw dropping because she told me that an element belonged in another place, just as she had placed it on the class sample. I explained to her that this was my version of it and that I preferred it here instead of there. You could see her stop to process this and then she stopped and said, "Oh!" The lightbulb had gone on! Yes, being yourself is A Good Thing!
Showing your stuff is an important part of being an artist. Having it appreciated by others is icing on the cake. And while it is a compliment to have others try to emulate your work, it would be a nightmare to have someone copy it to the extent that their work is then mistaken for your's. Thank goodness for the Copyright Office, eh? (And yeah, I won't go on about how all those magazine images are covered by copyright. If you're using them for your own enjoyment and not to sell or show as your original work, then it's a minor infringement, though by all rights, you should acknowlege them somewhere so that posterity doesn't make you look like a thief.)
Of course, there is the other side of the coin. I've often felt that there's no place on this earth to put your foot down where nobody else has stepped before. One famous mixed media artist and blogger agonizes in her blog over how others copy her work. She's complained that people teach how to do a particular element that some of her students named for her and this has made her feel that she owns the rights to the technique. What's funny about this is that I had just read about it but had not seen the element in question. One day while playing with materials, I discovered what I later found was this very technique. I thought I was putting my foot down in undiscovered territory but nope, others had been there before me. Oh well. I feel bad for this gal, but if she really doesn't want to be copied, then maybe she shouldn't teach. Maybe she shouldn't sell. Maybe she shouldn't show her work so that others won't copy it. As artists we put ourselves out there and sometimes that has unhappy side effects. We all have to get a grip about this.
Maybe we all need to get real about what is and isn't ours. And maybe we all need to say WTF (shorthand for 'What/Who/Where The Fuck' for those who use the phrase often enough to need a shorthand for it!) sometimes and get over ourselves. Maybe we all need to worry more about being ourselves and less about some junior high school notion that we all have to be exactly like everyone else. What The Fuck boring kind of world would THAT be, people???? My friend, Kathie, has a theory that it is okay to teach what someone else teaches if you a) change three things, b) write the instructions yourself with your own examples, and c) give your inspiration credit for the idea and cite them as a source.
And that gets me back to my Constitutional right to be me. And your right to be you. And let's do hope that the twain does meet somewhere. By all means, let's have a meeting of minds, a mutual appreciation for our work, and enjoy the similarities as much as the differences that make my work mine and your's your's.
But do let's NOT have the Journal Nazis judging whether or not we're doing it right! (So as not to rant even further, please see the perfectly wonderful rants by two artists I admire, Kelly Kilmer, and Ricë Freeman-Zachery in their blogs. Bookmark them while you're there if you don't have them saved already.) Right on, Kelly and Ricë!
Let us share ideas and information, sources, and inspirations. We can share prompts (or even spanks in Ricë's case). And let's share this too. Let's all stop worrying about Doing It Right and Just Be Ourselves! Do your own thing in your sketchbook, journal or planner. Let's feel free to rant and rave, be artistic or not, make our grocery lists and things to do lists in our journals and stop worrying about Doing It Right. Just Do It You! We all have that basic right to be us. American soldiers have spent more than 200 years fighting all over the world to guarantee that right to anyone who wants it. They lay their lives on the line so that we can be us. My goodness, people, don't we owe it to them to do that?
So feel free to leave a comment about anything that you see in my blog or on my pitiful not-updated website. I'm not Teesha Moore or anyone else who journals, not even my friend, Toni, who does the most beautiful pages that I love looking at, in her very own style. I'm just be and that's all I aspire to be, though I do want to be the best me I can.
Just don't tell me that I'm doing it wrong!
posted by Wabbit at
1:19 PM
3 Comments:
There are so many issues in your post that I recognise from life in Britain. We too have people putting their lives on the line, often loosing them, to get to Britain. We have the right to be free to but I find more and more people, and especially businesses, are trying to remove freedom and make us all conform to one way of life. The crux of the matter, I believe, is greed. People want to make money from their ideas and in the past people did just that. Now they are all fighting for a bite of the cheese, even if it is something as simple as an art technique. Some artists who believe they have created a technique won't even let you sell things you make using it. Chances are they were not the only person to have that idea and otheres have been using it discretely on their own. A great post. Let's face it, it's our differences that make the world a more interesting place.
I don't think anyone could say you do anything wrong in your work because it is always so wonderful, colourful and with your own spin.
Oh Wabbit, it sounds like one Hell of a bad day. I don't journal because of the JN and these where required journalings for courses that I was taking at the time. I found the comments and unsolicited advise where not what I needed, sometimes we just need to vent, or make a image that doesn't please the rest of the world.
I agree with you about not slavishly copying and being yourself, but I was hurt by slavish copying by someone who then passed it off as her own and as it was one of my very first 'own ideas' I found it difficult to deal with as she then trawled it round as her own wrokshop, and taught it in places I should have been teaching. I think there's two sorts of people in the blog world..those who do it for pleasure and already have an 'income' and those who do it for pleasure and try to make it generate an income. I am the second type but still have a bit of the first in me.
A great Article Marylin with some food for thought.
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