Apple Keynote

In memory of Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011).  Visionary American computer entrepreneur and inventor with a passion for simplicity, ease, elegance, beauty and a human interface.

Steve Jobs turned personal computers from brown boxes into user friendly, minimalist, seductive devices and mobile phones into sparkling digital jewlry. You leave us with a legacy to inspire and think different. To create, invent and reinvent. 

7-year old girl: “He made computers that when you touched the screen, they touched you back.” 

Steve Job’s Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 where he talks about following his intuition, joy and curiosity. Being poor, getting fired from Apple in 1985, about life & death.

Think Different

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

“Think Different” is an advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997.

Life drawing. Ink.

I’ve been experimenting with an ink pen during my life drawing project. It makes me think of the calligraphy master who meditates for an hour before making a brush stroke. Obviously, I’m not claiming to be anywhere close to a calligraphy master, but I do find myself working at a different rhythm, pausing, and then putting down my brush stroke. Ink is so definite.

I made a series of life drawings defining shapes as either white or black. Finding a quality of mystery emerge in the drawings when resisting the temptation to add outlines or boundaries. Which leads me to a quote about art and mystery:

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon

iPhone Photography: Cherry Blossom

I was deeply moved and inspired by this quote from artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones, about giving up goals, losing your passion, creating art to gain approval, and finding that joy is more important than approval.

As Jones noted many years after giving up commercial art:

Years ago I had goals (to get to this or that place), and when I did I found that all I wanted to do was art. So I have given up goals. When I was young, my passion was art, eventually comic book and fantasy art. I’ve seen a lot of people lose their childhood passions, not only for art but for life–just getting squeezed. My passion was and is my art. However, there was a time when I became aware that I might be losing it. Having used my ability to draw to buy approval from my childhood peers, I entered the real world with my “cash” in my pocket. I wanted to be published so badly that in the beginning I took on a lot of work that I hated. Ah, but maybe a million people would see it and love me. I lived in fear. What happened? I found that the more I went to the drawing board or the easel to do work I hated, the less I wanted to go there. I was losing my joy, and I found eventually that my joy was more important than approval. I began to get “difficult to deal with” and began to lose jobs. I became determined to, well, not so much “have it my way,” but to do work I loved. It’s not so easy to pursue, or even know what your heart’s desire may be.

Read the whole article Jeffrey Catherine Jones: A Life Lived Deeply at The Comics Journal.

The Color of Love

I made this design with hearts inspired by a quote of Marc Chagall.

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”

For Valentine’s Day. For the love of art and life. For finding that colour in your heart, and painting with it.

<— Save this wallpaper to your computer.

Pink heart

I’m just about about emerging to the surface after having spent six weeks In The Fish Bowl: Life As An Artist Online with Marisa Haedike of Creative Thursday, holding onto this quote by the Persian poet and philosopher Jalal ad-Din Rumi: “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”

It’s been six dynamic, inspiring & empowering weeks, charged with a combination of expert know-how and a passion for doing what you love to do. Organically connecting everything from pricing, to blogging and marketing with being connected to your vision and following your heart.

Thank you Marisa, for your focus on being true to your self, and thank you all of you amazing and inspiring artists who participated in the course!