Posts tagged "steal like an artist"

“I stole everything i ever heard, but mostly i stole from the horns.

— Ella Fitzgerald

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steal like an artist

“As a writer, you’re always something of a vandal. You’re a tomb raider. You’re gonna go in there and take the things that already exist - drag ‘em out again, and dress them up differently. There is a sense in which you are a thief. It’s no wonder that writers are ruled by Mercury, god of thieves and liars, and Mercury of the double tongue. There is the sense in which you will always steal, and take for yourself, the things that you need. But then you also bring them back into the light. You dust them down, and then you put them out again for people to find in a different way. The whole thing about myths is that they need to stay fluid, they need to keep moving, and they need to be dynamic. And that’s why we can go on retelling them, so that, what is valuable is passed on from generation to generation, across time, through cultures.

— Jeanette Winterson

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Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers

I love Westerns. I love a good story. I love 300-page books with super-short chapters. I love funny dialogue. I love narrators who digress.

I loved this book.

My wife got it for me for Valentine’s Day. I’d never heard of it. 100 pages in, I started reading it really slowly because I didn’t want it to end.

After I finished, I read some interviews with DeWitt, and found out that the novel was sort of an accident.

After his first novel, he’d been thrown off the scent of story, and was more concerned with “voice,” but he got really bored with his reading habits, and started re-reading some older favorites of his, rediscovering story as a kind of constraint. (He says now of his reading habits, “The moment it begins to feel like homework, I head for something more welcoming.”)

Then one day he scribbled “sensitive cowboys” on a piece of paper. He started thinking about how the neurotic is rarely featured in Westerns, instead, the hero is usually a “near mute man in black who kicks the devil in the dick before breakfast.”

So he wrote “a testy exchange between two men riding side-by-side on horseback. One of them was self-doubting and vulnerable, while the other was confident to a fault.” He didn’t know what to do with it, so he set it aside. Later, he found a book about the Gold Rush at a yard sale, and he remembered the two men. He wrote about forty pages before he discovered they were brothers. He says writing the dialogue “at times I felt I was eavesdropping.”

In the book, the brothers head out to kill a man named “Hermann Kermit Warm.” This character came about after DeWitt cut a photo of a prospector out of the yard sale book and tacked it up on his wall. The name however,

I didn’t make it up. I stole it. I was watching Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and a Hermann Warm was credited as the art director. He’s got a Wikipedia page and everything. I added the Kermit, because I like the musicality of the added syllables, but really, I just lifted it.

Another fun tidbit: at some point he realized he was spending too much time on the internet, and that he’d actually never gotten a good idea from there, so he had his wife change the wifi password.

Anyways, this is the best book I’ve read so far this year. Highly recommended.

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Steal Like An Artist now available in over half a dozen languages

Steal like an artist

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Cool photo of Steal Like An Artist.

(Source: mikeyhundred)

steal like an artist

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“Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

— Oliver Sacks defends Tumblr? Ha.

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“I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten…. There is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested

— Oliver Sacks

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» Steven Soderbergh's exit interview

After 25 or so years of directing, Steven Soderbergh is retiring from film. A few great bits:

“Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it.”

I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.

How to learn anything: identify your heroes, figure out what they did, then get going.

On learning to paint:

What’s exciting is to feel at the very beginning of something. It’s also terrifying starting from scratch, but panic has always energized me. It’s the same process as anything: identifying who your heroes are, figuring out what they did, and then just going and doing it. I can stare at my Lucian Freud book for hours and hours, but at a certain point you have to go to the wall and imitate. … I’m always curious to hear how something was made—though I have no interest in why an artist did something, or what his work means. Like with Jackson Pollock: I’m always interested in what kind of paint and canvas he used, I just don’t want to know what he meant. You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

Steal from everywhere.

The very idea that someone from Congress can’t take something from the other side because they’ll be punished by their own party? That’s stupid. If I were running for office, I would be poaching ideas from everywhere. That’s how art works. You steal from everything.

Great read.

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Girl with a Pearl Earring Selfie

The Vermeer mashup represents one of the internet’s many mysteries, and highlights some of the problems current and future researchers face when aiming to determine points of origin for creative works expressed on the internet and uploaded as an image file.

The earliest reference to this piece I could find was March 5 2012, posted at the Clumsy Odd Stubborn Tumblr.[12] This post does not identify a source, nor the artist responsible. Later postings at other sites identified the artist as Mitchell Grafton, though with no link the artist’s site or original post source. The image achieved widespread exposure when it was posted by pioneer blogger Jason Kottke on October 18 2012.[13] Kottke clarifies that he has been unable establish an “airtight” source or attribution for this image.

(via Three Pipe Problem: Alteration and invention - Raphael, Vermeer and the mashup)