Art

What It Means To Mashup

Garth Beyer

I preach endlessly that the new age art is created by mashing up two or more properties, objects, or entities to create something entirely new.

Here I present to you Ben Heine’s Pencil vs Camera project. Click the picture to view more.

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Something I’m incredibly happy that I found: Writers as Architects.

Another artist, defying gravity.

Art was once about taking a photo of a photo of a photo of a photo. Now it’s about using a different medium at each level. It’s about combining not only different types of brushes, but different paints, different juices, coffees, and mud.

This method of creation goes beyond the easel. It encompasses us in advertising, in technology, and self-made products. The world is being redesigned and it wants you to be an artist.

Well, will you be?

 

Stay Positive & Mash Mash Mash

Garth E. Beyer

Why These Are The Best Years The World Has Ever Seen

Garth Beyer

Not even a hundred years ago, everything was work. Food on the table. People relied on each other. You got what you made. Blood, sweat, and tears.

Then we hit the industrial revolution, and as a result, work became less of a worry. What took our attention is all the free time we had. What would we watch on television? What would we listen to on the radio? What activities and groups would we now participate in?

Then the post-industrial revolution happened. This revolution is lead by this current generation. This revolution can be summed up like this:

everything that had become free time, has now become design.

 

Interesting concept... - ImgurAnd if your mind goes to robots designing everything, I would argue that. Sure, robots can help us create things. But they can’t design them ahead of us. We crunched the numbers and wrote the program before a calculator could tell us the square root of 64. So it is with everything that is designed. And I’ll tell you, everything, and I mean everything is being designed.

Will you be a leader of it?

 

Stay Positive & Go On, Design

Garth E. Beyer

 

The Struggle

Garth Beyer

Ralph Steadman

Please tell me I’m not the only one that has had an incredible idea for a piece of art (painting, crochet, whatever) but when going to produce it, it turns out like garbage. And not the progressive kind of garbage where you do it enough times until it turns out the way you want, but the kind of garbage that not even a hobo would appreciate.

While you can read this article, and yes, it’s worth the read, look at the artwork first. It’s incredibly inventive, creative, and if you stare at it long enough, it seems like something we may be able to replicate..well, to some garbagy extent.

Enter: The Struggle

The Struggle is the place of frustrating emotions: between disappointment and geniusness; between euphoria and defeat. We feel The Struggle when we want, so passionately, to be creative, yet, can’t make the jump from our desire to our creation.

Something I’ve learned from Jobs and Pixar is that stories don’t really have a shelf life. Toy Story is as great as it was in 1995. Want to talk about artwork? Look at all the ancient art we still drool over. The fact is, we may not be able to replicate an image we have in our minds, but that doesn’t matter too much.

What matters is that we tell a story with whatever image we end up creating.

For those still worried, you can still create an art piece if you need to add a few lines to tell the story behind it.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Let Your Inabilities Stop You From Telling Stories

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit: Ralph Steadman

If You Find Treasure

Garth Beyer

Some treasures were not meant to be found because, in finding them, we reveal secrets, we dig up answers to mysteries that have kept us enticed in literature, in common conversation , and in analogy. We take items that are rich in character and make them as organic as the bones that surround them – sort of contradicts the idea of what treasure is.

My suggestion: turn the treasure into something.

Finding treasure is just like stealing art, it’s not stealing if you mash it up with your own flare and the style of a thousand other artists to create something new, something equally as valuable and treasured.

 

Stay Positive & “X” Doesn’t Mark The Spot, You Do

Garth E. Beyer

This was an old post I wrote, finally publishing. Part of me feels like the idea needs to be credited to someone, but I don’t remember what inspired this post. To that person, sorry for not giving you credit. If this was all my own, self-high-five.

 

Something To Pin

Garth Beyer

I consider myself a fairly creative person. But then I go on Pinterest.

We can throw paint on a canvas, carve our names in a slab of wood, and fill up journals with ideas, rants, and realizations. While I consider these creations personally invaluable, they are far from being valued by others.

Respected, maybe. But not valued.

Creativity contains both the mindfulness and skill to combine two or more unimagined pieces. Remember, the melting crayon art? What happens when you cut a marker in half, pour the content into a nearly empty windex bottle, and spray onto the colored side of Tootsie pop wrappers? Just imagine what you can actually do with a slab of wood?

If you want something to pin, you’re going to have to strain your brain and go through the emotional labor it takes to create something, truly create something.

Creating something sounds easy. Give it a try, though, and you will see just how hard it is.

 

Stay Positive & Respect Is A Good Place To Start

Garth E. Beyer

A Decrease In Critics

Garth Beyer

Let me note real quick, there’s a heavy difference between a critic and a hyena. The critic has lived life to understand all aspects of a subject. The hyena just yelps at everything until the creator backs away.

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Criticism used to be about showing that someone is wrong. Now, because everyone can be right, criticism is about guiding a person to become even more right – and to show others that they are right. This is tough work for the critic, extremely tough. The critic takes partial responsibility in making something work – so the critic sees it as this – if they don’t fully believe in the idea, they don’t criticize it.

In more simple terms. To critique means to discover a way to improve. Creators gather so much input before they launch products that it takes extreme talent to come up with a successful idea for improvement. Thus, there has been a serious decrease in those willing to critique any piece of work.

The reason to understand what a critic is and does is so you don’t confuse hyenas with critics. When creators do that, well, that’s when they get in trouble and the hyenas fill their stomachs.

 

Stay Positive & Keep Searching, There’s A Critic In The Group Of Hyenas

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit

The Three Whales

Garth Beyer

Twitter Whale

The killer whale and the serial whale are always out to get you.

The killer whale is that large weight holding you back from completing your project (or for some, starting it). The killer whale, well, kills. It kills your passion, your motivation, your hope, and eventually your art (or for some, just the idea of it).

The serial whale is the whale that you actually come face to face with while you’re doing the hard work of making your art. The serial whale doesn’t communicate through loud screeches and cries. No. The serial whale has a voice that it uses to tell you you’re not good enough, that your goal can’t be reached, that you should just give up. (Who knew the little voice syndrome was actually a whale talking to you. Things get more and more weird.)

Then you have the fail whale (pictured above).

The fact the whale is smiling says more than words can right now.

 

Stay Positive & The Fail Whale Is Okay, It’s The Other Two That Need To Be Poached

Garth E. Beyer