How do they do it?

Not getting along with people is certainly no guarantee of greatness, creativity, or intelligence. It is funny to watch when the two combine, though.

The Stirling award winning architect Will Alsop has decided to be a painter now. Ok. You can see the article here, which includes:

He used his televised victory speech after receiving the Stirling prize to berate one of London’s most conservative planning authorities. “Fuck the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but thank God for all those imaginative boroughs that know that the way out of their problems is architecture.”

The image below is of his Sharpe Centre for Design, in Toronto.

68162404_966a95983f

I know that we are all unique flowers, and I probably have very little in common with Will Alsop. I know that the people I’ve taught, and the people I’ve studied with, and the people I’ve read — we’re all very different. But examples of craft, intelligence and work are nicely paired with the humanity of each person. That is what I like so much about Bourgeon. Because the artists decide what they focus on when they write about what they’re making, Bourgeon exposes not only concerns of technique and performance, but also the day to day realities which bind the creative life.

A friend of F’s posted this on Facebook a few days ago, and while it’s not as revealing as most of the articles on Bourgeon, I enjoyed it.

I’ve been away from Bourgeon for over a month now, and need to commission some new articles. Any artist reading this who’d like to contribute, please contact me. I’d love to learn about your work and I’m sure others would too. (And my apologies to BB for not getting back to him as promised… with my company’s show, and then things really heating up for the DC Advocates for the Arts, the last few weeks have been hectic.)

Telling Stories is Like Doing Card Tricks

I have some “good stories” from my life. Last week I told a story I havent told in a while to AS and JW. For some reason it made me start thinking about the process of telling my personal stories. Why do I tell them? When do I tell them?

Telling my personal stories feels a bit like doing card tricks. I share these little bits of myself – sometimes fantastical, sometimes impressive, sometimes magical, sometimes revealingWhat makes me share my stories?

What makes someone go around and perform lots of card tricks to everyone they meet? If you perform a card trick every now and then, perhaps the purpose is to share your magic. But if I go around constantly performing my magic tricks (and I’m not saying I do), perhaps its more about my own need to perform magic than about the tricks themselves.

As I finish this post I realize it could be read as somehow judgmental of actual story-tellers, or magicians. There are people who do those things professionally. This post refers to people like myself — people who share their stories outside of professional settings to do so.