Tag: work

Look Closer — Adrian Tomine talks about moving to New York, and his new book of drawings with The New Yorker:

I’m not one of those artists with an incredible imagination who can just make things up out of nothing, and I’m not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life, and just try to look at things a little more closely. And even though I’ve lived in New York for eight years now, I still feel like a recent transplant, and I think that’s a big influence on how I see and draw the city.

Invisible — Jeanette Winterson on Tove Jansson and the Moomins, for The Telegraph:

I keep the Moomin books in my study and if I am tinkering about preparing for work I will often open one at random and read a page – they are funny and subversive, (Hemulens of either gender only wear dresses). And playful. Whatever happened to playfulness? Why, as adults, is serious/superficial the boring binary of our lives?… Tove Jansson believed in happy endings… Not the Disney kind but more solid and ambiguous, which is a paradox, but more truthful than black-and-white solutions. Ever-after is what is invisible on the next page.

Approaching Zero — Michael Faber reviews How Music Works by David Byrne, for The Guardian:

Everyone knows that the music industry is in terminal decline. Unlike many doomsayers, however, Byrne feels the changed landscape is good for musicians. Even 20 years ago, any artist wishing to make a record needed a huge sum of money to pay for studio time (and thus needed a large corporation to loan it to him). A lucky few shifted the millions of units necessary to repay the industry’s investment, but the majority got hopelessly into debt. Nowadays, recording costs are “approaching zero”. Distribution costs in the digital era are also negligible compared to the days of physical warehousing. As long as artists can find ways of holding on to a fair percentage of their income (an impossible challenge in the heyday of the record companies), even modest sales can sustain a career. Indeed, says Byrne, “there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience.”

And finally…

A Short Lesson in Perspective — A fantastic essay by Linds Redding. First published in March of this year, this seems to have taken on a life of its own. If you work in a ‘creative industry’ and haven’t read it yet, make sure you read the whole thing:

The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It’s a need that has to be filled. I’ve barely ‘worked’ in any meaningful way for half a year, but every day I find myself driven to ‘make’ something. Take photographs. Draw. Write. Make bad music. It’s just an itch than needs to be scratched. Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.