For Art Spiel
Born in 1913, Canadian American painter Philip Guston began his career in the 50’s in New York during the Abstract Expressionist movement. The Ab-Ex-ers were sweeping the country as the next great thing and developing a bit of a swagger. Painters everywhere were ditching representational painting for the new experimental style of pure abstraction, and Guston was no exception. Well-esteemed and well-reviewed, he was a part of the in-crowd. Everyone loved the guy.

For Art Spiel
Recently I was watching a guy on TikTok gently freak out about all the revelations coming back from the James Webb Space Telescope. His panic was so relatable because the images returning from deep space only reinforce how utterly minute we Earthlings are in the cosmos. The JWST is so powerful that, looking from Earth, it can sense the heat signature of a single bumblebee on the moon. And, of course, faced with this, he just shrugged helplessly and said, “We’re a total nothing burger.”

For Art Spiel
Have you heard about a mysterious note found among Richard Diebenkorn’s papers that he made for himself in his later years? It’s a motivational studio credo titled Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting and is comprised of ten tips. All ten are fascinating to think about, but number eight is the most enigmatic:

“Keep thinking about Pollyanna.”

For Art Spiel
Sometimes I find myself scrolling Instagram on a dark day in February or March, just wondering what it would be like to make art in a lighthouse…or in Robert Rauschenberg’s old fishing shack…or in a Florida swamp…or in a small RV in a Utah ghost town…or on an island in Italy. Artists’ residencies are a nice thing to dream about when you feel stuck or in a rut and when life is wearing you down with mundane pressures. Sure, there are the big ones like MacDowell and Yaddo, but those are uber-competitive and hard to get into. There are so many other off-the-beaten-path secret outposts that will happily allow a creative person to try on their lifestyle for a bit. As an artist, it’s so helpful to get out of dodge now and then and hit the road for new sights and sounds.

For Art Spiel
Once, my day job was a freelance graphic designer and I worked from home in Brooklyn. My desk was in a corner of the combination living-room-kitchen-dining-room, right next to the TV. I had cable, and while I worked, I would put on Turner Classic Movies because they didn’t play commercials. And those of us who worked from home during the golden age of cable know that the middle-of-the-day commercials were the most depressing.

TCM showed black and white movies from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s in an unending ribbon of celluloid, one right after the other. And after months of working like this, it began to amaze me how little the films stuck in my head. They just pleasantly wafted into one ear and floated out the other. There were two exceptions, though, that seemed to have the ability to stick: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and The Bells of St. Mary…

For Art Spiel
Recently, I was making coffee, and I know it’s bad, but I love sweetening it with granulated sugar. I was trying to pour some out from a box, but only a few grains were coming out because the whole thing was full of clumps. And those clumpy lumps became for me an analogy for artist’s block, a condition I was suffering from at the time. As artists, we are like the sugar box with our sweet, sweet creativity trapped inside of us. Those heavenly granules are abundant and want to pour out to make coffee more delicious, but they can’t because their own selves are blocking it. And, as I was squeezing the box, trying to crush the bigger blobs, or choosing violence and stabbing a spoon handle in there, I started to wonder what other artists do in this predicament. So, I went up periscope, past the crystallized chunks, and spied about to find ideas for overcoming it.

For Art Spiel
“There’s always time to do what you really want. When I had children, I worked when everybody went to bed, after 11pm. I would set up at the kitchen table and clean it very well before I would start.”

–Luchita Hurtado

For Art Spiel
Gather round, me hearties, and let me tell you a tale: a tale about a much-dreaded comment received by many an artist on Instagram and during a studio visit. This comment can sound like a terrifying roar made by a fearsome beast. And it’s called—the “Leave-It-Like-That.

It’s the kind of comment we might receive on our works-in-progress (a struggling fawn just starting its wobbly walk). And we may have blithely thought to ourselves, “Hey, why don’t I post this WIP on the ‘Gram and give people a window into my process!” But…Beware ye who enter here. This generous sneak peek could attract a Leave-It-Like-That (or even its frightening brethren: the “Stop-Don’t-Touch-It” or the “Looks-Finished-To-Me”).

For Art Spiel
Last year, I watched a TikTok video where Kiersten Lyons, an actor, was hilariously recounting all her many misfortunes in love and career. Her whole video read like a voyage of self-discovery through rejection, a tale familiar to anyone pursuing a creative life. It was part of a trend on the app that encouraged creators to pair their comeback stories with a gospel song: In the Sanctuary by the Kurt Carr Singers. In the Sanctuary is one of those songs that seems to end, but then a few moments later, starts up again. And this plays out over and over, to almost comic effect, until you don’t know if it will ever end. And it really struck me as an analogy that could be widely applied to all the arts.