Nothing is Ever New – I often tell my students about a great piece of advice that I received as a photography student over 30 years ago. The advice was simple, but it has had a profound effect on my work through the decades. It goes like this…… “When you have your finalised brief or theme – go away and brainstorm 5 ideas and write them down on a piece of paper. Once you have your list, screw it up, or better still tear it up and throw it in the bin. Why???…Because those 5 ideas will probably be the exact same 5 ideas that everyone else will come up with.” I now always pass on this little piece of advice to all my students. They usually give me a look of abject horror, having just spent the last two hours working on the first idea that came into their heads. Yesterday Noah, one of my fellow students, kindly alerted me to an artist who is working very much along the same lines as me. Here is an Instagram link to his work. I am not really surprised by someone else working in my area of trying to marry up […]
Steal Like an Artist – For a long time now I have been aware that in the art and design world it is very difficult to find something that is completely new. There are elements borrowed from one piece of work that may be copied or changed to make a more exciting piece of work. Even in my own practice it feels like there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. I find there is nothing more frustrating to think I’ve found a great idea, only to research it and discover that actually I’m way ‘behind the curve’. However in today’s talk this became even more pronounced when we had some examples quoted from artist Austin Kleon’s book titled: ‘Steal like and Artist’. Kleon decided to research into his own style of art. He found that over the centuries there had in fact been not one but three other artists working in a similar way. These were namely Brian Gysin (1916 – 1986), Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) and Caleb Whitefoord (1734 – 1810). Apparently they had all been doing something similar. When this is seen across the ages it really does show that nothing at all is ever new. Indeed […]
