We all know that a good person can be a bad artist.
But no one will ever be a genuine artist
unless a great human being and thus also a good one.
Marc Chagall

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Imagination embraces the entire world,
and everything there will be to know and understand.
Imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
Albert Einstein

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.
I ♥! Dr. Seuss

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt


Power of Art: Think Different

“The Crazy Ones” 
(Original “Long version” appeared on posters made by Apple.
Apple folklore has it Steve Jobs was the author of the original piece.)

Original
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Full version
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Short version
“ Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Power of Art: Let’s Draw Endangered Species!

[scan of 1998 poster made by unknown artist]
 
As artists we can tell stories relating the problems of endangered species through animated films, illustrations, and projects of all kinds to humanity worldwide.  We can create endearing, lovable characters based upon species which need our help now. We can use our skills to make humans raised with such characters — as their childhood friends — incapable of destroying their habitats, wearing their skins, or not loving them in any way! : ) Whoo hooo!
 
One small part of the solution.
 
The idea is, if you can draw, paint, or render a cool character based upon an endangered species — and would like to post it online to publicize your illustration and narrative skills (while still retaining copyright to your work) — please send us an image!  Tell us about the personal history of your character, a bit of imaginative background story, and a bit about yourself and your inspiration.
 
We’ll post characters and stories as often as possible. Hopefully this will turn into something larger than a blog, with broader lasting impact like Sketchtravel or Tortoro Forest.
 
We’ll be around for a long time, so, maybe you or a group of your friends and colleagues met through similar interests and styles shared in work seen here, will, perhaps, create films, children’s books, and similar projects with cool characters which might help to save endangered species. Maybe ten to fifteen years from now there will have been a few blockbuster films which contributed to funding a wildlife refuge, renovated a zoo or two, and maybe started a few wildlife reintroduction programs.
 
It can be done. We have the skills.
 

Where is the Art? Marijuana and Lost Friends

How did it become artistic to get high? It is hard to imagine Da Vinci as a pothead. Drugs are a cheap way for untalented poseurs, curators, and hangers-on to purchase the aura of “artistic” without producing a single work of meaningful bold imagination.

As Anthony Kiedis said, “It’s easy to be a junkie. It’s not easy to be one of the greatest guitar players of all time, or one of the greatest writers.”

Marijuana makes you stupid, lethargic, paranoid, irrational, schizophrenic, emasculated, passive, complacent, and easily ruled. It is not the drug of revolutionaries; it is the drug of frat boys and social incompetents who have nothing in common with each other except marijuana.

Da Vinci would have been curious about the effects of various activities on his mind. With marijuana and most drugs this curiosity can be answered through observation: where is the art??? Where are genius potheads?

With a clear mind you will have confidence the flights of your imagination are empowered by genius, the breath of God, insightful and bold — rather than self-censored by doubts about their chemical origin.

Protect your neurons; take care of your physical brain. Nurture your physical mind — your neurological system — with sleep, exercise, healthy nutrition, optimism, travel, friends, joy, sunlight, and Kindness.

Unfortunately many artists use the drug culture to project an aura of coolness — while in fact they themselves do not use any drugs whatsoever. For example, a brilliant inspiring author (albeit of “horoscopes” in their most broad literary form), writes on his website:

“I was peeved that so few of “the antennae of the race” had enough courage to blow their own minds with psychedelics. How could you explode the consensual trance unless you poked your head over onto the other side of the veil now and then?

Pot, hashish, and LSD were very good to me (never a single bad trip), but their revelations were too hard to hold onto. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could barely translate the truths about the fourth dimension into a usable form back in normal waking awareness.

The problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, psychedelics bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness or craft was involved on my part. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as “storming the kingdom of heaven through violence.”

Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic. Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dream interpretation, meditation, and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice.” (http://freewillastrology.com/writings/started.html)

Amazingly Brezsny goes on to write on page 21 of his book Pronoia, “I had not ingested (and still have not as of this writing) a single mind-altering substance, even marijuana, since 1985.” Why not state this clearly, upfront, as a straightforward guide to future artists?

Why is it so difficult for artists to say clearly, “Hey, I don’t do drugs. I don’t need them. You probably don’t either; they’ll almost certainly make you a worse artist. Nothing has destroyed more potential in our generation than marijuana. Protect your Mind. Rewire your brain with Kindness, not chemicals.”
—

Rather than militarize our society while providing the false veneer of ‘hip counter-culture rebel’ to paranoid poseurs, privileged dilettantes, and salaried weekend warriors (who need self-medication to survive dream-crushing careers), we should end this false revolution of the anti-imaginative class: all drugs must be legal.

There is nothing cool about getting high; there is nothing rebellious or counter-cultural about using a roadside weed to become a pothead. Marijuana makes you incredibly stupid and does nothing whatsoever to improve your imagination. If you want to go to an idiot parade, watch a NORML march…no kidding, truly unbelievable. Go to a NORML march before becoming a pothead, please. (Many of my friends would be marching if they could wake up and remember the date.)

For an articulate alternative point of view, the comedian Bill Hicks frequently defended drug use as inspirational. Most people though do not take drugs for inspiration; they are not remotely capable of broadening their minds, they are not revolutionary, they definitely cannot retain a single meaningful interesting concept from the supposedly novel experience of smoking marijuana. Most artists were exceptional in elementary school. Long before experiencing drugs they experienced inspiration as a gift. Only then, long after, did some became fat angry drunks and has-been potheads.  2¢

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA

Chemically induced light-trails are not enlightening; hallucinations are not Ideas.  Let uncreative poseurs trip on their crutches.  Artists only need hearts filled with the breath of God.

‎”All the great writers were alcholics. [This is untrue!] Where are the great pothead writers? I’m sure they’re out there but do really want to read a whole book by a pothead? 500 pages on why if you put a hat and glasses on a dog he looks like he could drive a truck.” Dave Attell

Lead singer for the rock band Kiss, Gene Simons, has the courage to speak out against fake Muses, “I have never been drunk or high in my life. I have never smoked a cigarette and do not stay in the same room as people smoking.”

An alternative point of view: “We have a lot of really bad prejudices about marijuana, and we need to expose them as a society, because they’re holding a lot of people back – I know they held me back. They made me – until I was thirty years old I thought pot was for idiots. A lot of people do. And it’s important to let them know, not only is it not for idiots, it’s a tool. You can use it. It can benefit you. This is not a benign substance – it’s slippery, like all other psychoactive substances if you are on the wrong path mentally, you can go off the deep end with it. Like everything else. Like alcohol or anything else.” Joe Rogan, JRE Podcaast #807

Role Model to Superheroes: Euripides (Εὐριπίδης)

“Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry.” 
 
 
“I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” 
 
Euripides (Εὐριπίδης, ca. 480 BC – 406 BC) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Euripides wrote ninety-five plays, eighteen have survived complete. Euripides is known for portraying strong female characters and focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown to Greek audiences. Sophocles said that he himself portrayed men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrayed them as they were.
 
“I was thinking”, he answered absently, “about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.” Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
 
 
“Our Euripides the human, 
With his droppings of warm tears, 
and his touchings of things common 
Till they rose to meet the spheres.” 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls

The Economist headlined as their cover story an article titled “Gendercide: The War on Baby Girls,” the most important take-away being: cultural appreciation for the value of girls rather than economic development prevents gendercide:
 
“It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike. Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones.”
 
“In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary.” [I’m not a Christian fundamentalist psycho — and hardly understand what Christianity even means — but it is worth noting South Korea is now more “Christian” than Europe and most parts of the United States; this may be a factor.]
 
“And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.”
 

Ed Catmull on How Pixar Creates Stories

This is my favorite quote by anyone involved in animation, it is INCREDIBLY liberating (inasmuch as you do not need to write for sappy parental approval):

“As far as heading for an audience? We don’t target a group — in particular we don’t go after kids, alright…it’s a bad idea to target films for little kids.  Two reasons.  One is, essentially it is talking down to them. And if you talk down to them, they don’t like it that much. And for adults its very boring.  The truth is, children live in an adult world, and they’re used to hearing things they don’t understand.  So our approach is, we want to make movies that we enjoy. There’s a physical humor and physical comedy that comes from acting from animation that kids do enjoy. So there’s a thing that they do like. And obviously, we don’t put in things into our movies that would offend families or their children.  But, we write the dialogue and the story for us. We want them to be meaningful for us. And that’s how we think about it.”

One wonders if supposedly loud vulgar blood-thirsty leaders like Genghis Kahn or King Leonidas (see below) were actually more straight-forward, level-headed, well-spoken strategists with good ideas like Ed Catmull.

Ed Catmull’s presentation to the 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (key points in the video: 43 minute mark and the second to last sentence, in true Genghis fashion, “Then they can burn and die.” Go Ed!!!! )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

Imperfect Transcript
http://wyndowe.googlepages.com/iinnovate15:edcatmul,founderofpixar
________

Update: Pixar Artist (of 20+ years), Craig Good, expresses a similar sentiment:

“We don’t make movies for kids. We make movies for adults, actually ourselves, and then just make sure there’s nothing in them that the little ones shouldn’t see. The local cineplex is littered with movies made by studios who want to second-guess what the audience wants. We find we get better results by making what we want, and then assuming that there are other people like us out there. If audiences in general are underestimated, kids really get the patronizing treatment. Two things are often forgotten about kids. One: They have no taste. They will watch just about anything. This is normal and healthy. Taste comes later. Two: They are not stupid! Kids are born intelligent, and there’s no good reason to make dumbed-down entertainment for them.”

http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/good200412230957.asp
________

Additional thoughts by Catmull:

“We work hard on culture here,” explained the animation studio’s co-founder and president Edwin Catmull. “When you go into other studios, you’ll find that most are either artistically driven or technically driven. We’ve tried hard to make sure that our technical people and creative people are peers. We’ve found that when the technology is strong, it inspires the artists. And when the artists are strong, they challenge the technology. The result is that our artists and technical people appreciate each other talents.” One of the ways the animation studio sets about establishing a sense of camaraderie is through education.

“Another thing we do when people [artists and technicians] come on board is send them to Pixar University,” revealed Catmull. “This is a ten-week classroom program to teach people how to use our tools and to cross-train them. So we’ve got classes in filmmaking, sculpting, drawing, painting, and improvisation.” The benefits of the unique initiative have proven to be indispensable.

“One of the effects Pixar University has on the culture is that it makes people less self-conscious about their work and gets them comfortable with being publicly reviewed.”