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A Blog About Creativity
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Shouting Into the Crowd
Sharing your creations online is kind of like shouting into a large, loud, busy crowd...
How To Be an Artist With a Day Job
There are fifty thousand articles online about turning your creative passion into a full-time career (that's an exact number I counted myself, so no need to check if it’s accurate). Many of said fifty thousand articles include very good advice. You should read them and maybe take what they say to heart. But there aren’t many articles tackling the far more common situation: being an artist and having a—*gulp*—day job.
How (and Why) to Establish Your Creative Philosophy
Creativity and philosophy go hand-in-hand in crucial ways. In fact, you will have trouble making any worthwhile art without first understanding the philosophy behind it. Luckily, it's easy to achieve in a few simple steps.
How to Organize Your Entire Creative (And Personal) Life in Three Steps
Juggling work, personal and creative lives can get complicated. After years of trying to make it happen, I finally figured out a system that's both simple and effective.
You’re Doing It Wrong: Happiness
Ah, the pursuit if happiness, an American institution so beloved it’s scribbled on a little piece of our country’s history we call the Declaration of Independence. Surely a man from Philadelphia, the very town in which that historic document was signed, would never dare to criticize such a hallowed phrase.
Of course I would, because this is the Internet and I have the power to tell an adoring public my self-important opinions. I’m going to wield that power like crazy right now, because this one’s a doozy: happiness is a lie, and contentment is overrated.
How to Calculate the Exact Worth of Your Time: A Handy Guide
There’s an old adage that time is money, but this is America in the 21st century, so vague-ass statements like that don’t fly anymore. Everything needs to be super-specific now. You can’t just find out how many people are visiting your website, you need to know how long they spent there, what pictures they looked at and what their dog’s name is. No longer can we settle for simply equating time with money, we need to figure out exactly how much money every second of our time is worth so we can bill accordingly. The fact that I’m adding a superfluous sentence to this paragraph has probably slightly enraged someone reading it right now because it just took up a few seconds of their billable time.
You're Doing It Wrong: Manliness
I remember it like it was yesterday: The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” came on TV, I saw those ladies rocking out and said, matter-of-factly and with all the conviction a 7-year-old can have, “Girls can’t play guitar.” My mom and sister set me straight very quickly, but it’s indicative of something in men that starts in us extremely young and then gets so ingrained that it winds up feeling like an objective truth by the time we’re adults.
Art Defined for the Non-Pretentious, Aggressively Realistic, Grounded Human
I talk about art a lot in this blog, but it wasn't until fairly recently that I stopped having a genuine aversion to using the word to describe anything other than paintings hung in museums. Every time I heard someone talk about art or being an artist, they just sounded pretentious to me. Stop acting high and mighty, like you're changing the world because being an artist is such an important and interesting thing, I would say to myself regularly in between writing rock songs and blog posts that obviously weren't "high art." The worst was when someone claimed they had created art when it just looked to me like they were being intentionally eccentric or opaque. I just didn't get it, and I distanced myself from the term accordingly.
Making Art for Art's Sake or: How I Learned to Give Up the Agenda
When my band broke up last year, I found myself in an uncomfortable but interesting place. I’d been in bands for almost my entire life starting shortly after I first picked up the guitar (six months after, to be exact). From that time in 1996 through 2011, the longest stretch of time when I wasn’t in at least one band was no longer than a few months. It’s always been something that felt right to me, that feeling of being an important part of a small, tight-knit group of like-minded musicians creating new and exciting things. But here I was after a six and a half year run with Shaimus: bandless, lost and exhausted.
Comfort in the Skies
For many years now, I have had a minor obsession with all things outer space: astrophysics, the night sky, stars, planets, nebulas, constellations, solar systems, galaxies, you name it. I am captivated by the science of astronomy and pictures of celestial bodies. They are, without a doubt, the most epic images ever captured by man. But while many of my friends probably already know of my extraterrestrial interests, they might not know exactly why I am so drawn to it… Why I savor every chance to gaze upon its grandeur and find no term too dramatic to describe it.
Well, here is why: besides being strikingly beautiful, it gives me comfort by reminding me that we are but an insignificant speck in a vast, unfathomable universe. To say that feeling inconsequential is comforting might seem a bit counterintuitive, but that sort of contradiction is exactly how life feels to me.
We Are All Artists
Usually when I talk to people about my pursuit of a career in music, I stress that I’ve never really felt as though I was pursuing a dream so much as fulfilling a basic need. Music is something that’s always been there and, much like eating and sleeping, will always be around just begging for my attention every day. I hesitate to use terms as dramatic as “life force” when describing it, but despite the lameness, it is pretty accurate when describing creative and artistic pursuits in my life. I thrive on creating and otherwise being involved in artistic endeavors, whether it be music, drawing or writing. Even humor is a creative aspect of my personality that is stubbornly embedded into my being. Art isn’t something that I do, it’s something that I am–it happens naturally and necessarily.