Ancient Artist Resources for Artists - Study Group Guide for Ancient Wisdom Emerging Artist

Much of what we do in the daily work of creation is unfinished - those fleeting ideas and flashes of inspiration that come during the sixty seconds it takes to heat your coffee. Writing gives your left brain permission to pay attention while your right brain is in creative mode.

Okay - you can start with post-it notes if you want. Put them up where you see them and occasionally take a look at what you wrote to remember the ideas, the words or emotions - and write those down in your journals. Become the curator of your own thought process, an archivist of the insights you discover along the way. These are private thoughts that you record in written form, not meant to be shared at this point, so do not pressure yourself to make everything perfect.

Find journals that please you. Are you a tactile person, visual, traditional? Do you like warm leather with gilt-edged paper and string ties, or the classic Moleskine sketchbooks? Maybe you prefer the spiral drawing books with hard black covers that take you back to your art school days. Indulge yourself here. Have more than one, for more than one purpose.

In Ancient Wisdom Emerging Artist, there are several ideas concerning journals. You can use them to understand your creative thought process, the "why" behind wanting to be an artist. Or flesh out your artistic philosophy. You can capture plans for marketing, words to use in your vision and executive statements, and build your own textbooks.

What are your favorite journals?

How often do you write in them?

What unexpected reactions did you have when you started using journals?

Brainstorming and free writing can help you identify key ideas for your artist statement. The goal is to identify what it is you notice most about your art - almost as if you were talking to a fellow artist about what you do. Since most people will not know as much about art as you do, avoid unnatural "Art-Speak" - instead, focus on a specific body of work, arranged as if on exhibition, and write about what you see, feel, and want to communicate to others. Start with broad ideas, and as you write you will refine them down to four paragraphs that represent what you want others to know about the art, the process, the meaning, and the relevance in today's society.

Here are some sample questions:

What am I working on now?

Why am I drawn to this way of creating?

Why do I work with these materials instead of others?

Where do I get my ideas?

How does my art fit in with Art History?

What do I want to show you?

Why do I think this is interesting?

What is most meaningful?

How do I judge a concept or an idea to be successful?

How does this body of work relate to other work that I have explored?

Art and commerce have always had a partnership: throughout most of world history, art was a commodity - a decoration, a fetish, forms of identification, or a means of story telling to an illiterate society. Artists worked for patrons and created on demand. Very few signed their work, and only within the last century has the idea taken root of the Artist creating Artwork as a means of personal experience - performance art, earth works art, environmental experience art. While expressive freedom has indeed opened the doors of opportunity for many artists, for others, the reasons behind the "why" of creating art have become far more nebulous.

Creative people struggle to find meaning and purpose as a daily experience. Without a "patron" we find ourselves on our own. And we ask: Who will buy our art? Who will help us sell our art? How can we justify the long hours of hard work with so little financial reward? Where will we find the funds needed to replenish our supplies, pay our mortgages, and contribute to our families while still maintaining our creative purpose without having to give up?

In Ancient Wisdom Emerging Artist, the section on How to Mentor Yourself focuses upon how we can identify sources of inner emotional support, obtain practical knowledge, discover methods to improve our craft, and build resources to help maintain emotional balance. Discuss your response to these questions:

Do we create as a form of self expression? And if so, then when our "expression" is not appreciated why do we begin to doubt ourselves?

Do we create to sell in the marketplace? What does this mean in terms of the decisions we make regarding what we produce? How does this affect our interest in the work - whether the work sells, or does not sell?

What ideas did you respond to in the essay by Shannon E Myrick, Ph.D, titled "Motivation and Art: Does getting paid for your work lower its quality?" How does this theme of intrinsic verses extrinsic motivation work it's way through Ancient Wisdom Emerging Artist?

Depending on the type of art you create (photography, sculpture, pottery, jewelry, clothing, painting) how have you integrated your personal expression into your work?

How do you think you are honoring your creative vision and why do you find this important?

What are your best methods for maintaining a balance between what seem like competing concerns?

In her 1984 book, Has Modernism Failed?, author Suzi Gablik (b. 1943) raises questions about the nature of art after nearly a century of Modernism and Post-Modernism influence. By rejecting traditional ideas of why the artist might want to create art, Modernists looked continually for new ways to express their ideas "as a mode of thought."

The resulting work has often been characterized as experimental or intentionally disorienting - by not adhering to any established way for judging validity or meaning, Modernists slid relentlessly into an ambivalent posture: art for art's sake - intended to be art, presented as art, and judged to be art by experts. (Duchamp's "The Fountain" is often cited as the definitive example.)

After centuries of art for the purpose of the patron, Modernism evolved as an expression of the artist's desire to re-create personal experience, irrespective of the viewer. How do you think your idea of art today may have been influenced by Modernist and Post-Modernist ideas?

What purpose does the artist have in creating work that seeks to express ideas in a deliberately challenging way? Do you think the artist has an obligation to challenge society or culture?

If we define Theory as an organizing set of premises, how important do you think it is for an artist to formulate a "theory" about art that informs his or her work?

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) proposed a unique esthetic theory based on reason and an objective view of reality. Start a discussion using these quotes from the book What Art Is: the esthetic theory of Ayn Rand, by Louis Torres & Michelle Marder Kamhi:

"The fundamental purpose of art, according to Rand, pertains to the conceptual, integrative nature of the human mind - to the fact that 'man acquires knowledge and guides his actions, not by means of single, isolated percepts, but by means of abstractions'."

"Rand identifies what she considers to be the distinctive function of art: it is the means by which man can summon into 'full, conscious focus' his fundamental view of reality."

"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments."

"According to Tolstoy, the purpose of art is the direct communication by the artist to his fellow men of his personal feelings and emotions."

Wassily Kandinski (1866-1944) starts the introduction to his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with this statement:

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born...There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals...a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age."

Kandinski's book is considered one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Discuss any ideas that this quote brings to mind.

In the book Art/fear, authors David Bayles & Ted Orland begin Chapter VIII with this: "Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third's a zinger: Was it worth doing?" Then they ask the question: "What is worth doing?" What effect does this question have on you?

How do you establish your own criterion for what your art is about?

Have you ever experimented with work informed by a radically different conceptual approach? If you did, how did you feel when creating?

What thoughts or feelings were you aware of and why do you think you reacted that way?