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Kintsugi: The Art Of Recreating, Of Improvement

Kintsugi: The Art Of Recreating, Of Improvement

Garth Beyer

Kintsugi Art Of Recreating Of Improving

Yes, creating new problems is a rich method of learning about art. Likewise, though, it is beneficial to study, mend, and learn from the already-broken. Rather than creating new problems, which has its perks, we find what’s broken, what once worked, and give it the necessary aid.

Performing the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, which means “to patch with gold,” is to live beyond the life of simple repair, easy fixing, and auto-correct. To understand art, to follow the kintsugi rule, one must make something better than its original form.

Becoming a creator of art doesn’t mean you have to create something no one has imagined before, it doesn’t mean you have to start from nothing or from scratch; it merely takes determination to find room for improvement in something that is broken and to fill the cracks with imagination.

Artists don’t use band aids, duck tape or caulk, they patch with gold, with heart, with newness.

 

Stay Positive & Kintsugi: Make Something “Better Than New”

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If I Told You Exactly How

If I Told You Exactly How

Garth Beyer

Follow Instructions

If Milton Glaser walked you through how to create a masterpiece, step by step, every minute detail by ever minute detail, your art piece couldn’t make the same impact.

If Taylor Swift held your hand throughout the entire songwriting process, your finished product won’t feel unique.

If I told you exactly how to write with voice, you would feel like your writing is a cheap knockoff.

How others feel using your product or service, looking at your art, listening to your songs starts with how you feel using your product or service, looking at your art, listening to your songs.

If you paint by numbers, color within the lines, and follow every “how-to” guide, you’ll ship work and you’ll learn a thing or two, but it won’t feel right.

And the feeling is why we make art.

 

Stay Positive & Make Remarkable Art, Not Remakable Art

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What To Do With What You Observe

Garth Beyer

Relentlessly you’re advised to observe, to notice things, to really see everything that is happening throughout your day, throughout your life. What do you do with your observations?

Write about them? Smile at the moment, then forget about it?

Or invest them, shape the observations into something remarkable, turn them into insights that you can then use to build, to create, to share. Perhaps the best thing to do with your observations is invest them.

 

Stay Positive & See The World With Your Own Eyes First

Outsiders

Garth Beyer

What do you have on the inside? What’s in style? What’s in store?

The answers are out there. I mean that literally and figuratively speaking.

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The outsiders are the new insiders. In fact, one could go so far as to say that insiders now seek to reflect the trends being created by the outsiders. The outsiders, who are the handlers of grit, gumption, and creative genius, are creating art from the heart.

They are playing with the available tools and blowing raspberries at fear, failure, and malfunction.Outsiders are taking over in all mediums of art.

When you ask an expert what’s new in their industry (any industry!) they’re going to tell you what some person or team recently created, something previously unimagined, something… weird.

Like Sarah Boxer says in the Atlantic, “Out is the new in.”

 

Stay Positive & Now That You’re In Cahootz, What Will You Create Next?

Garth E. Beyer

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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

Why Experience Matters When Creating

Garth Beyer

Yesterday I wrote about how difficult it is to actually create something. The reason being is that to create something that is valuable and successful, you have to think the unimaginable.

One important factor to this way of thinking is that what you create needs to be something that someone, somewhere has no clue they want or need. There are only two ways this can be done.

1. Observe. Obviously the hardest since you are busy, on the go, and trying to be creative. I tend to agree with people like Daniel Pink that before we can be creative, we have to notice others’ creativity.

2. Experience. Jump in the ocean of opportunities life presents you. The more you experience, the more likely a creative idea will hit you. Zipup laces would never have been created by someone who never wore shoes.

 

Stay Positive & Start Swimming, Whichever Direction You Want, Doesn’t Matter

Garth E. Beyer

 

Profits Without Production

Garth Beyer

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I got turned on when I saw Krugman’s NYT’s post, “Profits Without Production.”

I thought to myself, “Finally, he sees it too!” Alas, while I am sure he would agree with me, he sees profits without production in a different light.

Nevertheless, since you cannot read what I thought he wrote. I’ll write it.

It wasn’t until the start of the industrial revolution that “production” became mechanical, void of emotion, and downright dirty. Prior to the industrial revolution, to “produce” held power. Anything that was produced contained a bit of the person who produced it.

Production took hands (many of them), impromptu thought power, and personal insight (not mechanical). There were technicalities before there was anything technical. Then, once the industrial revolution hit, “production” took on an entirely new meaning.

It’s as you can expect, recall, and still see industries trying to continue. During the industrial revolution production was being carried out by robots, assembly lines, programmers, and chain reaction contraptions. No grit, no personality, and no heart. The only connection was between two wires. Profits came from faster production. As a result, the process to creating goods was a stale, monotonous, banal one.

Now, though, we’ve entered the post-industrial revolution which has – I don’t want to say returned, but has reconditioned “production” and given it an all new meaning. Production has maintained its sense of efficiency and multiplicity while involving the human spirit, a person’s passion.

This post-industrial revolution is the collaboration of the assembly line and creativity. However, not in the sense that one piece of creative work is repetitively created, rather, art (whatever your art may be) is continuously created, day in and day out.

For me, I write something different every single day. Alisa Toninato, instead of molding a typical metal pan over and over, sculpts something different, again and again. Now, those who are profiting the most (financially and internally) are those who have salvaged the key parts to production, but, generally, tossed the industrial revolution concept away.

Profits don’t come from production, they come from the interaction created from making more art. And making more art comes from doing enough weird things until they get noticed.

 

Stay Positive & Potatoes Pototoes, I Suppose

Garth E. Beyer

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