The War of Art
Steven Pressfield

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
-p. 39

Living the artist life is hard. No one gives you a business card and a plaque on the door to help you feel official. There’s not a regularly salary. It comes with no overtime pay.

While we artists may turn up our noses at bourgeois needs like a pay raise and a corner office, the reality is that in our culture these things convey value. They tell us and others that we are legitimate–that we have a license to practice art, that someone has given us permission. In short, cash and clout confirm that we have cajones.

Without these cultural permission givers, artists often find themselves adrift and never progress professionally. Steven Pressfield would like us all to please, knock it off.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles takes the rose colored lenses off our romantic notion of what it means to be a writer/painter/poet/etc and gets us all prepped for battle. What are we fighting? Resistance, mostly –our most prevalent foe. In this pithy book, Pressfield teaches us how to move beyond being amateurs. More than any other book, The War of Art taught me to become a professional artist.

Go ahead, get your marching orders.

Wreck This Journal
Keri Smith

I’ve been a big fan of Keri Smith’s illustrations-and-ideas ever since my beloved Jen sent me home from Maryland with a copy of Living Out Loud: Activities to Fuel a Creative Life. In this first sprial-bound tome I learned how to make Keri’s “magic book,” which was the basis of my free love give away project last February.

Now I’m head over heals in love with one of Keri’s latest magic tricks, Wreck This Journal — a book designed to bust you right out of the strangling perfectionism that keeps you from living creatively. Each page urges you to mess it up…rip it to shreds, punch it full of holes, cover it with staples, and so on. While some people are making art of this destruction, others are gleefully playing along and just making a mess. Yesterday I burned a page inside the house, only to find my whole kitchen was magically dusted with grey ash “snow.”

Cate, my seven year old, loves this book as much as I do and has gleefully spilled drinks on it, smashed it full of blackberries, and thrown it into the sea. Keri even has a flickr pool set up for you to show off your handy work. Go ahead, give it a try! I trip dog dare you!

Anyone who posts a page of their wrecked journal in Keri’s pool in the next month, and drops me a note in the comments below will be in a drawing to win a copy of Living Out Loud.

P.s. Congratulations to last week’s winner Melissa (from a drawing of two!), who gets my copy of Water for Elephants.

The Complete Guide to Altered Imagery
Karen Michel

For those of us who are mucking about with mixed media/collage, there are a plethora of books out there. Many of them focus on using turn-of-the-century ephemera and photographs. While these are both lovely and inspiring, after awhile all the examples in them start to look awfully similar.

That’s why I was so pleased to find Karen Michel’s book, The Complete Guide to Altered Imagery. The cover art alone announces “fresh approaches to collage work inside!” The featured techniques are accessible to a newbie artist like me, but would also add to an experienced artist’s cache of ideas. Most of the techniques apply to altering photographs and Michel’s starts us out with bleach, stickers, crayons and gel pens. While the supplies might be basic the results are sophisticated and stunning.

Michel’s section on working with scanners and using digital imaging programs has lots of tips and suggestions. You could scan in one photo and try each of her techniques in turn to see the different affects. This would rapidly expand your editing “tool kit” without a lot of slogging through program tutorials or manuals. There’s also sections on altering Polaroid’s (Polaroid cameras can be easily found at thrift stores these days); basic linoleum and rubber block print making; and incorporating found object and altered images into each other to form a finished piece.

Order The Complete Guide to Altered Imagery now and get inspired, because next month I’ll be launching the First Friday Creative Challenge — a series of little assignments to help jump start our inner artists! (The book won’t be required for the First Friday Challenge, but it will help!)

“We open our dry mouths like the baby birds who rasp and cry. Fruit juice drips sticky-sweet rinsed off with hose or cold-water lake, ocean, sound. We lie down on the face of the earth and the heat blurs molecular lines…”

Oh, you must have this book now! Just the introduction to the Summer images alone is worth the purchase price! Nikki McClure is a local-to-me artist based in Olympia, WA. Her speciality is lace-delicate but boldly graphic images which she makes only by cutting away bits of black paper. (How can this be? What wonder!) The result? Images that are compellingly nostalgic and crisply modern in precisely the same moment. This art she pairs with the most evocative of words to capture the wonders of each season — one perfect moment at a time. McClure’s words of wonder for Summer include INCUBATE and RETURN, both capturing that wonderful back-to-the-womb feeling you have when you make the first springboard dive of the season. Treat yourself. Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered will nourish you all through the year.