WELCOME

For those of you who read along on a regular basis, I greatly appreciate it. Over the years you’ve heard me endlessly talk about Live An Artful Life and usually through my escapades as a working artist and writer. This time will be a little different.

I have been thinking about the reality of things. Having written positive messages to creative types for so long, I have also had to come to grips with something.

We all have dreams. So why do some dreams come true and others remain as, well, just dreams? I think part of it is due to how we think of dreams. For too many, dreams are built out of fairy-tails, never meant to really come true.

Loving work or not, it is a bit of a race with an endless finish line. As with any product, (which if you sell it-art is a product), making art that is sellable is important. In many cases, it drives your creativity. Yes, this is where some feel that business interrupts creative purity. I would somewhat agree, but not to the point of wanting to starve myself.

In part one of this three-part blog post, I spoke about my love of creativity, how it became part of me from a very young age and then how creativity and a business acumen became key to the success and happiness of my art career. Additionally, I strongly made the case for the need for all creative types who plan on using their creativity for their livelihood, to become not only more business savvy but that they outright need to do so for their survival.

I love creativity. I really mean that. It runs in my veins like an unbridled horse, wild and free. When I was very young a pencil or a crayon was just as much fun as toys tapping into a boy’s youthful imagination as any to be found. As I grew I used them and words to therapeutically help as best they could with my parents' divorce.

In 1968 my Aunt Dottie, quite uncharacteristically, took a thirteen-year-old me to see Stanley Kubrick’s nerve twisting science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Creativity. The very nature of the word comes in making something from nothing more than an idea. Originality. It is the essence of something new. So listen, I have an idea.