mondayreadings

[mondayreadings]

Miya Ando. May 24 2021

Miya Ando (born 1978) is a contemporary American artist of half-Japanese and half-Russian-American heritage. Ando's work is characterized by a deep interest in natural phenomena, as well as the relationship of people to time and perception. She is known for her metal paintings, and for incorporating natural elements (especially leaves and wood) in her large-scale installations. Notably, Ando is the first artist to make use of hand-dyed anodized aluminum and patina on silver fabric.

From artsy.net re: self care rituals

Miya Ando’s practice transforms ancient Buddhist techniques and ideas into contemporary art, so it’s no surprise that her self-care rituals honor generations past. She prays every morning, she said, to help her “focus and concentrate.” The act also pays homage to her grandfather, who worked as a Buddhist priest in Japan. Prayer reminds her of family, comforts her, and helps her set intentions for her art practice. 

During the pandemic, she said, “my primary goal is equanimity and quietude or calm.” Her rituals help her stay focused and remain disciplined. Ando’s own ability to bring tranquility to her viewers is evident in her transcendent abstractions, the gauzy fabrics in her installations, and her sculptures that bring natural elements (wood, images of clouds) into the gallery setting.

From: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-7-artists-self-care-rituals-creative and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miya_Ando

[mondayreadings]

Rei Kawakubo, May 17 2021

Rei Kawakubo (b. 1942)

In an interview with New York magazine’s Cathy Horyn, legendary Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, was asked how she has coped with this last year.

Kawakubo’s answer was that she hasn’t stopped working for a minute: 

I strongly fear that once I take a break from my work of creation, I won’t be able to get back there again, that I won’t be able to move forward anymore.

Comme des Garçons has had 30 percent of its staff come to work every day, and Kawakubo herself has gone to work every day from “early in the morning,” she said.

Kawakubo hasn’t only been motivated by the fear of losing her creative momentum: 

This world is full of injustice and absurdity ... I put this energy of anger into creation. I get angry and work hard every day and night. That’s the least of what I can do now.

In 2016, the designer also shared a bit about unhappiness and creativity:

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit—the hungry mind—is what gets you going forward.

Where do you find your energy? What is your motivation? 

Content from: https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/rei-kawakubo-on-the-energy-of-anger

[mondayreadings]

Hayao Miyazaki - May 10 2021

From https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/hayao-miyazaki-creativity-selfishness

Hayou Miyazaki is the cofounder of Studio Ghibli and the creator of a string of internationally beloved animated films, including Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke. An NHK documentary follows him over the course of seven years, spanning the conception and execution of his final two features, 2008’s Ponyo and 2013’s The Wind Rises, after which he announces his retirement.

Miyazaki is the ritual-loving, publicity-hating, perpetually self-doubting creator hunched over his tiny drawing desk, throwing draft after unacceptable draft into his overflowing wastebasket, and smoking cigarette after cigarette while sharing  his insights into the creative process. For for anyone who has grappled with the same halting, extravagantly frustrating process, Miyazaki’s scenes are all too relatable. 

No one should get a pass for being a selfish jerk—but any ambitious creative pursuit does require an element of selfishness, and Miyazaki comes across as a grumpy avatar of this inward-turning, solitary side of the process. He is the melodramatically tortured, crabby-old-man figure in us all.

An excerpt of a memoir by a Studio Ghibli executive includes a detailed description of Miyazaki’s filmmaking process:

Hayao Miyazaki’s way of making a film was particularly stressful, and that was exactly how he thought it should be. He would often say that a person only does his best work when faced with the real possibility of failure and its real consequences. Several times after the completion of one of his films, Miyazaki would suggest that the studio be shut down and all the staff be fired. He thought this would give the animators a sense of the consequences of failure and make them better artists if and when they were re-hired for the next film. No one was ever sure if he was just kidding.

Is selfishness an inherent part of the creative process? Or is that just a convenient excuse for being selfish? 

[mondayreadings]

Eleanor Roosevelt - May 3 2021

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) was a creative force and an instigator of social change through a potent mix of optimism, pragmatism, stubbornness, and steady, ceaseless effort. 

As America’s longest-serving First Lady, she went on monthly lecture tours across the country, made weekly radio broadcasts, held regular press conferences for female journalists, and, starting in 1936, wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which she filed six days a week for nearly twenty-six years. 

In her book You Learn by Living, Roosevelt considered the problem of how to make the best use of one’s time:

There are three ways in which I have been able to solve that problem: first, by achieving an inner calm so that I can work undisturbed by what goes on around me; second, by concentrating on the thing in hand; third, by arranging a routine pattern for my days that allots certain activities to certain hours, planning in advance for everything that must be done, but at the same time remaining flexible enough to allow for the unexpected.

Roosevelt’s daily routine was always packed with activity; “I don’t normally have many quiet minutes in the day,” she wrote. She generally woke at 7:30 in the morning and worked right up until her bedtime at about 1:00 a.m. Writing “My Day” was often one of the last things to get done, with Roosevelt frequently dictating the column from bed at 11:00 p.m. or later. According to a longtime friend, “She gets along perfectly on five or six hours’ sleep a night and apparently does not know the meaning of the word ‘fatigue.’ ”

Roosevelt’s example is inspiring but it could be a grueling job for her assistants to keep up with her. According to her daughter, Anna, Roosevelt’s work ethic was an almost fearsome thing:

I used to just cringe sometimes when I’d hear Mother at eleven thirty at night say to [her longtime secretary], “I’ve still got a column to do.” And this weary woman would sit down at a typewriter and Mother would dictate to her. And both of them so tired. I remember one time when Tommy with asperity said, “You’ll have to speak louder, I can’t hear you.” And Mother’s response was, “If you will listen, you can hear perfectly well.”

Taken from https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/eleanor-roosevelts-example, with edits made for length.

[mondayreadings]

Sarah Kempa

An interview with Sarah Kempa, the cartoonist and illustrator behind Aunt Sarah Draws

What does your typical day look like right now? Is this a big departure from your pre-Covid routine?

I work full time as a UX designer, so it’s always been important for me to spend the first part of my morning drawing. My alarm goes off around 6:45am and I get up and make coffee. I generally will spend the next couple hours hydrating on water and coffee, while going through different creative exercises—maybe some drawing warmups, creating lists, sketching ideas, or writing. I’ll generally switch gears into my job around 9am, working until 5pm most weekdays. After work I will go for a run, cook dinner, and spend some time reflecting on the day. I don’t generally draw in the evenings, but oftentimes I will write if there’s something on my mind.

In many ways this is quite different from my pre-Covid routine, which now in retrospect seems like I was doing way too much. I used to wake up every morning at 6am and go for a run, I had a long commute so I would draw on my commute both ways, and then cook dinner and draw more in the evenings. I think in some ways it was easier to draw more then because the mode in which I was seeing people or commuting provided some energy. It’s definitely more challenging and exhausting to be tied to video calls every day.

Do you normally have any rituals or superstitions that you rely on for getting your work done?

Oh hm, I’m not that superstitious, not unless I’m watching sports. I do set a lot of mini-goals at the start of the year and throughout the year. Some I try to be specific achievements or things to work towards, like getting published in a magazine I have so much love for, and others are things that I can just do (like take a number of classes, or write once a week, or email someone whose work I admire). I find then that in some ways it helps push me forward and grow, and that I start to hit the other specific, achievement-type goals.

https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/aunt-sarah-kempa-routine

[mondayreadings]

Mar 8 2021 : Emily Carr

Emily Carr (1871–1945)

The Canadian Artist and Writer, Emily Carr specialized in scenes from the lives and rituals of Native Americans and works representing the British Columbian rainforest. Since her death in 1945, the painter has become something of a national icon; but in her own lifetime, Carr’s paintings never earned enough money for her to live comfortably. 

Carr did have one major financial asset: she inherited a parcel of land in Victoria, and decided to build a small apartment house, reasoning that she could have a light-filled painting studio, a large garden, and living quarters for herself, and fund this pleasant arrangement by renting out two suites on the main floor.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Carr put her plan into motion just as World War I broke out, which severely depressed the economy and caused unemployment to skyrocket. To keep Hill House (as it was named) afloat, Carr was forced to divide her own apartment into rentable suites, eventually having to set up a primitive camp for herself in the backyard, where she slept in a tent and cooked meals in a lean-to.

Carr oathed being a landlady, and the years in which she ran the boardinghouse (until the mid-1920s) were among her least productive as an artist.

The following passage from Carr’s journals provides a good taste of the artist’s attitude toward Hill House—and it may feel familiar to anyone who’s tried to balance ambitious creative work with a time-consuming and soul-deadening day job.

Oh dear, oh dear, all the wickedness in me rebels at the beastly, rotting house. I know it is crumbling up, I know it needs repairs, I know it is not modern, I know I am not a real downright good landlady ...

It crushes the life out of me, this weight of horrid things waiting to be done because my back hurts so I can’t do them myself and have no money to pay someone to do them. And then maybe I go into the beautiful studio and see some sketches about and feel my skin bursting with things I want to say, with things the place said to me that I want to express and dive into, to live — and there’s that filthy furnace to clean out and wood to chop and sweeping and dusting and scrubbing and gardening, just to ... squeeze out a pittance of rent to exist on. 

And all the time know you are shrivelling up, growing sordid because time and strength which you need for enrichment to allow you to search and absorb and grow cost money and time and strength — and your bile boils over and you are full of bitterness and hate yourself for being bitter when loads of folks these days have worse. 

God seems so deaf —your prayers dwindle away half formed or, if by effort you force yourself to form the words, they hit back at you like empty echoes.. . . Now go out, old girl, and split bark and empty ashes and rake and mend the fence. Yet — should I? Or should I climb higher, shut my eyes to these things and paint? Rise above the material? 

No — I think you’ve got to climb through these things to the other.

Original post: https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/painter-emily-carr-day-job-landlady // Edited for length.  http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/Emily-Carr.html

[mondayreadings]

Feb 15 2021 : Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Sepuya is a Los Angeles–based African American artist working in photography, whose projects, weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture and the material and conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. His work has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art, among several other institutions, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and galleries in London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Sepuya is also an acting associate professor in the visual arts program at UC San Diego

Last month, over email, he told (the blog author) a bit about his current routine and why he’s not worrying about making artwork during the pandemic.

What are you working on these days?

I wouldn’t know where to begin! The Fall Quarter has started at UCSD so I’m in the midst of teaching online, doing my best for the undergrads and grad students. At my studio there are always half a dozen projects happening. I’ve been making actual collages, organizing archival material. Since August my part-time studio manager has been back, we’ve found a good safe setup with our computers spaced a bit further apart, and sometimes staggering our times in the studio. 

I’ve been hearing from so many writers and artists who are really struggling to create new work with everything going on right now. Can you relate, and have you figured out any strategies for keeping your work flowing during these bizarre and distressing times?

Oh absolutely not! I actually resented all of the forced productivity, or focus on what artists are making during quarantine. I was happy to not make work. I didn’t want to, and it made no sense to me to be forced to process something in a moment when everything was unknown. I didn’t go to my studio for four months. I played around with a few things around the house, made a few so-so pictures, but I put my energy into pulling weeds in the yard and learning native CA plant gardening.

From Subtle Manuevers.

Image via Out.

[mondayreadings]

Feb 8 2021 : Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou: “I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon.”

Maya Angelou was a writer, poet, civil rights activist and award-winning author known for her acclaimed memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman.

In the book, Daily Rituals (audiobook), Angelou describes her daily routine and schedule in detail from morning till night.

I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine.

I keep a hotel room in which I do my work — a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon.

If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind.

I shower, prepare dinner, so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. We have a semblance of a normal life. We have a drink together and have dinner. Maybe after dinner I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Sometimes I hear the dissonance; then I try to straighten it out in the morning.

Image via The Paris Review