‘How do you think?’ That was what this artist friend I was speaking with a few weeks ago asked me. The question caught me off guard; I didn’t really understand it at first. What she meant was, like, does the image come first, like in your head, or the words, or ideas?

It struck me as one of those ‘it’s so deep, I’m drowning’ questions, but it stuck with me because honestly it had never occurred to me before. I guess it’s just one of many things I’d taken for granted; believe me, I try not to take things that way, like I try to remind myself to be grateful even for the smallest, inanest things.

But it was when my artist friend explained that she had asked me, because of another artist she knew. This other artist, I understood, was a paragon of artistic skill, as tidy and precise as a ninja with a laser cutter ~ at least, until my friend told me this other artist was unable to visualise anything she’d never seen.  Like for instance, my friend said, a pink elephant with wings.
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About a week ago, during a certain, super nerve-wracking (for me) (always) thing, I was asked on the spot who my influences were, and which artists I ‘copied’ (my interlocutor’s words, not mine).

This was kind of a difficult question for me to answer; I mean, I know what has influenced my art, I’ve written about that here on the jillablog before. But who, exactly, well. I mean, I know who my heroes are, at least, and I guess it makes sense for someone you admire to influence you, even in subtle ways, that is, even if you’re not, like, outright copying the work of that person.
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I sometimes wonder how painters from way back felt when photography was invented. They probably thought they’d be out of a job! Kind of like how a lot of us *creative* folks feel about AI, lol. Or wheelwrights when they invented cars or film camera humans when they made camera phones.

It’s just how it is, I guess. I mean if things like that didn’t happen we’d all still be digging holes whenever we needed to go to the jon or hitting the jungle for lunch (or something to wear).

That said, I’d like to say a few things about painting for memory. This does involve painting from memory, but I wanted to go into painting or drawing something to save it for a time when maybe our memory cells don’t work so well anymore. Or to save it for when things change so drastically that the thingy you’re saving isn’t likely to ever for never no matter what forever happen again.

So that when you look at the painting, you remember ~ and maybe even relive it.

You know how you have bad hair days sometimes? Me, sometimes I have “bad drawing days” ~ I can’t draw a bloody thing x nothing I draw looks right x everything I draw looks like a bad tattoo or one of those “delusional artist” pieces.

What do you do when you’re in a slump? 

I’m writing about this now because well, I’m kind of in the middle of one, so I guess I couldn’t help noticing a couple of other artists I know who’ve been in a slump recently, too.

So in this post I thought I’d go into what a slump is, exactly, for artists ~ what happens during a slump, what causes it to happen, and more importantly, what to do if and when you’re in one.
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If I had a nickel for every time I ever heard someone mention storytelling vis-à-vis marketing (or leadership or business, education or whatever), I’d be the Count of Monte Cristo (or well Elon Musk I guess in this reality, lol).

Yet there’s something to be said for storytelling in art; personally I’ve always believed that every piece of art, regardless of format ~ painting or sculpture, music or whatever ~ says something ~ even if the artist didn’t really mean to.

Lately I’ve been hearing quite a bit about this or that artist having the potential to “grow”. What does that even mean, anyway? That said, it made me wonder whether I’ve grown as an artist myself.

Take the case of this one artist, who I don’t know personally. (Forgive me if you’ve heard this one.) I was speaking to a certain gallery manager (who was also an artist) not too long ago, and this manager was telling me about how this particular artist seemed to be fixated on a certain insect.
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​My art and my ‘other job’ overlap in a lot of ways. For those of you who don’t know me very well, I’m also a writer ~ the kind that works at ad agencies, marketing departments and media (the publishing and broadcast kind).

I guess this overlap can’t be helped in that creativity is a requirement for both ~ admittedly, maybe not as much for some of the companies I’ve worked for. So I guess it also can’t be helped that my other job gets talked about here on the jillablog, like how I wrote about what happened with my ad agency co-workers once.

Some dozen odd years ago I was attending some Asian artists’ conference in Singapore, and I remember asking someone what made something (art) liked by everybody. By ‘everybody’ I meant everyone, everywhere in every time (age, era, century). ‘Like Shakespeare,’ I remember saying. The person I asked remarked laconically, ‘Not everybody likes Shakespeare.’

After a stupefied pause to consider the justice of that remark I attempted to explain, ‘Sure they do. I mean, the guy’s been dead a bazillion years and people still like his stuff.’ It was toward the end of the day at the time and we were on the beach, so, I don’t remember getting an answer back. But to this day, I find myself still asking.

What is it about Will’s stuff that makes people still stage it, watch it, quote it~ or Wolfie’s stuff or stuff from Vinnie, Leo or Remy? Or, closer to (my) home, what is it about the Noli or the Spoliarium (or pretty much anything by Amorsolo) that make them live on today?

Maybe it’s that time of the year ~ you know, when people get all *existentialist* looking back and trying to plan for the year ahead.

It’s just, personally I wonder whether any of my stuff is going to survive me a bazillion years from now. Or (as is the more likely), join the heap of Salieris that lived alongside Wolfie and ultimately disappeared into oblivion. (That actually isn’t fair, I mean they did use Salieri’s music in the first Iron Man movie ^^)

Or, more to the point: Is it worth making anything when you know they’re going to toss it all into the nearest landfill as soon as you become worm food? (Hopefully they at least recycle the wood and glass ~ or even the paper.) Are these questions even worth asking?
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Seona is a German artist I met in art class who specialises in hyper-realistic oil portraits and whom I somehow managed to stay in touch with after we both *got out of school*.

Recently I discovered she’s begun to explore relationships in her portraits, specifically those between old friends. It reminded me very much of Claudia, this other German artist who painted a picture of a friend of hers who (if I remember correctly) wasn’t her friend, anymore. I think I only saw that canvas of Claudia’s once but I never forgot it.

​A guy in one of my favourite forever movies put an ad in the paper trying to put a band together. As soon as each prospective band member showed up at his door, he’d ask, ‘Who are your influences?’

I think only God is capable of creating from absolute scratch, and all of us have influences on our creative processes, many, if not most of which lie outside of the ‘art world’ itself.

So I’m not here to talk about other artists (I already did that in my last post, lol) or movements, but the other things that might go into your ‘blender’, mainly by talking about what goes into mine.
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