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


#ListenWhileUDraw Twitter Hashtag


Our generation is the first to experience an artistic renaissance catalyzed by access to the web while creating. We can find inspiration in philosophy, literature, poetry, plays, films, documentaries, interviews, music, lectures, tutorials — worldwide, at no cost, anytime — while working in any medium. Whether painting outdoors or animating at a desk we have access to ideas and inspiration unmatched by any previous generation. 

Every few months this list will be updated.  Please make suggestions via the Twitter hashtag #ListenWhileUDraw

Enjoy being conversant in the Grand Ideas via our generation’s Web Renaissance!

 
The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare audio book — a multimillion dollar production five years in the making using over 350 actors — is the definitive audio Shakespeare.  Someone should buy the copyright for this entire project and release it publicly. In the meantime check out your local public library.
 
Poetry:
 
Literature: 
 
Art Tutorials and Reviews:
Space Exploration:

Extraordinary 2003 History Channel Documentary on Dr Seuss

Dr Seuss: Rhymes and Reasons (2003 documentary) Part 1 of 9
 
Oh! The Places You’ll Go!
by Dr. Seuss
 
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
 
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know. 
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
 
You’ll look up and down streets. 
Look’em over with care. 
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” 
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, 
you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.
 
And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. 
In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. 
It’s opener there in the wide open air.
 
Out there things can happen and frequently do 
to people as brainy and footsy as you.
 
And when things start to happen, don’t worry. 
Don’t stew. Just go right along. 
You’ll start happening too.
 
Oh! The Places You’ll Go!
 
You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.
 
You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. 
You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. 
Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. 
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
 
Except when you don’t.
Because, sometimes, you won’t.
 
I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups 
and Hang-ups can happen to you.
 
You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch. 
And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.
 
You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. 
And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.
 
And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. 
Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.
 
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. 
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darker. 
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! 
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? 
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
 
And if you go in, should you turn left or right…
or right-and-three-quarters? 
Or, maybe, not quite? 
Or go around back and sneak in from behind? 
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, 
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
 
You can get so confused that you’ll start in 
to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace 
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, 
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
 
The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.
 
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, 
or a plane to go or the mail to come, 
or the rain to go or the phone to ring, 
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No 
or waiting for their hair to grow. 
Everyone is just waiting.
 
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite 
or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, 
for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, 
or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, 
or Another Chance. 
Everyone is just waiting.
 
No! That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. 
You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. 
With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! 
Ready for anything under the sky. 
Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!
 
Oh, the places you’ll go! 
There is fun to be done! 
There are points to be scored. 
There are games to be won. 
And the magical things you can do with that ball 
will make you the winning-est winner of all. 
Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, 
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.
 
Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes, they won’t.
 
I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. 
Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.
 
All Alone!
Whether you like it or not, 
Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.
 
And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll 
meet things that scare you right out of your pants. 
There are some, down the road between hither and yon, 
that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.
 
But on you will go though the weather be foul. 
On you will go though your enemies prowl. 
On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. 
Onward up many a frightening creek, 
though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. 
On and on you will hike. 
And I know you’ll hike far 
and face up to your problems whatever they are.
 
You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. 
You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. 
So be sure when you step. 
Step with care and great tact 
and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. 
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. 
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
 
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)
 
Kid, you’ll move mountains!
So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby 
or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea, 
you’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

 

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations

Twitter via @verabee: “Reading about Somalia makes talking about comics seem very very trivial.

A vulture intentionally landed behind this girl; the photographer Kevin Carter scared it off.

No one knows what happened to the girl.

“The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted the photographer Kevin Carter to this emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.

The UN started to distribute corn and women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos and then the vulture flew off.”

A year later Carter’s suicide note read:
“I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carter

Fantastic political blog with iconic images of human rights violations:
http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/category/photography-and-journalism/iconic-images-of-human-rights-violations/

Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography (since 1968):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Feature_Photography

Dance!! Dance!! Dance!! Role Model to Superheroes: Nietzsche

“I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be
than a good dancer.”
Nietzsche
“I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance.” 
Nietzsche
 

The “Übermensch” is the being that overcomes the “great nausea” associated with nihilism; that overcomes that most “abysmal” realization of the eternal return. He is the being that “sails over morality”, and that dances over gravity (the “spirit of gravity” is Zarathustra’s devil and archenemy). He is a “harvester” and a “celebrant” who endlessly affirms his existence, thereby becoming the transfigurer of his consciousness and life, aesthetically. He is initially a destructive force, excising and annihilating the insidious “truths” of the herd, and consequently reclaiming the chaos from which pure creativity is born. It is this creative force exemplified by the Übermensch that justifies suffering without displacing it in some “afterworld”.


“Inspiring fellow-rhapsodizers, encouraging them on to new secret paths and dancing places. Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. […] There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from “folk-diseases,” with contempt or pity born of consciousness of their own “healthy-mindedness.” But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.” “Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann

(alt translation: “In these dancers of Saint John and Saint Vitus we can recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. Some people, either through a lack of experience or through obtuseness, turn away with pity or contempt from phenomena such as these as from ‘folk diseases’, bolstered by a sense of their own sanity; these poor creatures have no idea how blighted and ghostly this ‘sanity’ of theirs sounds when the glowing life of Dionysiac revellers thunders past them.”)

 
“If ever a breath hath come to me of the creative breath, and of the heavenly necessity which compelleth even chances to dance star-dances.” 
Nietzsche

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche refers to the poems in the Appendix of The Gay Science, saying they were,

“written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of gaia scienza—that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, “To the Mistral”, an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism.”

“This alludes to the birth of modern European poetry that occurred in Provence around the 13th century, whereupon, after the culture of the troubadours fell into almost complete desolation and destruction due to the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), other poets in the 14th century ameliorated and thus cultivated the gai saber or gaia scienza. In a similar vein, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche observed that,”

“love as passion—which is our European speciality—[was invented by] the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the “gai saber” to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself.  Section 260, Nietzsche, The Gay Science (The Wisdom of Ecstasy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gay_Science

Role Model to Superheroes: Walt Whitman, America’s Poet

“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest”

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” 

Part of Whitman’s role at the Attorney General’s office was interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons. “There are real characters among them”, he later wrote, “and you know I have a fancy for anything out of the ordinary.”

Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

Whitman died on March 26, 1892. Thousands visited attended his funeral, Whitman’s oak coffin was barely visible because of all the flowers and wreaths left for him.

His poem “Song of the Open Road” may be found here.

Sea Shepherd Art Show "Sea No Evil"

 

Check out Sea Shepherd’s Art Show: Sea No Evil — raising money for a worthy cause featuring donations from artists around the world (consider making contributions yourself in the future). For inspiration from afar enjoy these links to donators’ websites and previous years’ photos:

 
Also worth a look: http://oceanroots.org/

Inspiring Art-centric Work-Ethic! Lynn Johnston on Chiustream

Highlights: “There’s no place on Earth that you’re not going to learn – if you get an art job…whether its doing window displays or whether you’re working for a packaging firm, or whether you’re doing sketches for the local library’s read-a-book weekend [hmm… : ) ] you just learn with every turn of your career, no matter what you do.”

“It all comes down to hard work, there’s no other explanation for it…I went around the whole city of Hamilton with my baby on my back door-to-door talking with anybody who would give me a job…anybody. I went to libraries, I went to schools, I went to ad agencies, I went to art studios — anybody. Shops which sold art supplies, “Can you introduce me to somebody who will give me a job?” And every so often, somebody would give you some work and you get it to them on time, at a reasonable price, at less than they asked for – you’ll get another job, and then you’ll get bigger jobs and bigger jobs, and by the time I was looking at the artwork that I am doing now — I was hiring other artists to do things for me, huge things…”

“I think hard times are important but I also think that a solid work ethic is important and to not instill that in your children is a crime — because they need that, because, without the ability to show up on time, be reliable, produce, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing whether your selling furniture or driving a cab — you have to show up on time, you have to be reliable and produce.”

“When I was in art school I used to think if I got doped up I would suddenly be link to extreme creativity and everything would just be so easy! And I would go into these places where everybody was stoned, and I would think, “But you’re not doing anything?? You’re all sitting on the floor stoned, blissing-out listening to Ravi Shankar music and doing and doing sweet bugger all — and so I didn’t get stoned, because I couldn’t produce.”

Lynn’s “For Better or for Worse” comic site: http://www.fborfw.com/

Gogol Bordello: Rethinking Inspiration One Artist at a Time

“I know that a lot of people are convinced that I am a heroin junkie and other people [in the band] have major doping, but, why does it need to be so? I’ve actually never done any drugs in my life and its all adrenaline, music, and a bit of alcohol…that’s really all it is.” 
I’m convinced drug-free inspiration enables a confidence in creative uniqueness which non-artists have trouble understanding: “It’s not drugs, it’s me.” 

Terry Gilliam: How to Use Storyboards for Film

Sometimes I was just enjoying drawing these things and they risked becoming illustrations rather than storyboards. But some scenes, say of the statue of the head with a horse in ‘Munchausen,’ that came out of drawing something. I actually started drawing an equestrian statue and thought, “oh, this looks better without the head on.” And then once you have the idea that the heads off the statue, “let’s have the head on the floor. And it’s got to be a big head, and people are living in the head.” So that’s something that came out of a drawing. 
The storyboard becomes my insurance policy — if I ever run out of ideas, I go back to the storyboard “just do that, and, I’ll have a film.” 

Oftentimes we put a billboard up on the set with the storyboard so that people on the crew can come by and say “Ah, that’s what’s going on.” And that’s what helps, again, showing people what we’re doing that day.

It’s often the easiest way to communicate with people. It’s accessible to everybody, and, anyone can come by and enter into dialogue with it. The more I can put out there for people to see, the better I am able to communicate. 

The way I work with a set-designer, I have a lot of paintings and I bring in photographs, and things I’ve spotted on location, and accumulate a lot of material, and then start drawing…. 
Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It’s about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we’re just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television’s saying, everything’s saying ‘That’s the world.’ And it’s not the world. The world is a million possible things.
—Terry Gilliam: Salman Rushdie talks with Terry Gilliam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam

Intrinsic Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose vs Carrots and Sticks

“Policies about motivation are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.  The solution is not to entice people with a sweeter carrot or threaten them with a sharper stick. Intrinsic motivation makes work Interesting, part of something important.”

“Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the urning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

“Autonomy over time, team, technique: 20% time, ROW results only work environment (how you work, where you work, optional meetings). If then rewards often destroy creativity; the drive to do things for their own sake strengthens business, motivates creativity, and solves problems.”