Hello friends. Today is the fifty-first day that I have been on mandated leave from my work site due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and it's Friday. And that means that I am here tonight to share with you one more of my favorite art and creativity podcasts.
If you are looking for practical advice, real world examples and the steps involved in building a professional art career, you will want to listen to the Creative Pep Talk podcast by freelance illustrator Andy J. Pizza. And bring both your thinking cap and your sense of humor because Andy delivers his message about what it takes to become an art professional honestly, authoritatively and with a comedic sense through analogy, metaphor, science, his own real world experiences and those of his talented guests.
As with any profession, nothing happens overnight and what Andy digs into with his podcast is the importance of 'just doing the work' without judging yourself or getting caught up in results. Andy encourages his listeners to choose a personal creative project of their own making and to use that project to further develop those skills that can only be attained through a diligent art practice and the constant refinement of those skills.
But Andy goes even deeper than that. For me anyway, it's when he talks about using the creative process to tap into the emotional core of who I am and how my intuition can be a guide for knowing what my art practice is. Artistic concepts tend to be abstract ideas that can stifle creativity if we get too caught up in what they mean and then question ourselves during the process. Sure, we have to know the rules before we can break them. But we have to know how to develop and give shape to the abstract connections in the mind and that is best practiced through a disciplined approach to our own senses as our hand realizes them in line, shape, curve, color, and texture.
From my understanding of Andy's message, this is how we come to know our own taste, sensibilities and sensitivities in our personal art practice (and how to subjectively recognize these things in the greater world). I think this is what Andy means when he talks of making invisible things visible. That only through a commitment to an art practice can we develop and express that which is difficult to articulate any other way. It reminds me of how when each of my children were little, in order for them to verbally articulate what they were thinking, feeling or experiencing, each would do the same 'walking thing'. Either pace back and forth or in a circle while talking a thing through until their brain exhausted the subject. It was a process!
These concepts Andy talks about keep me going in my artistic endeavors no matter if it's collage, photography, writing or any number of creative personal projects. And at the end of each episode Andy asks his listeners to do just one thing - to stay pepped up until the next episode. And, indeed, I do!
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