The Book Guild - Chapter 14

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Pulse -- The State of the Art -- a survey in words and pictures of the online artist community. Nearly 150 artists have answered a list of questions which make up The Pulse. Their responses will be presented as a series of online and print projects. Secret Sunday was the first project and the links to all the secrets can be found on the sidebar of my blog. The Book Guild is the second project and Chapter 14 starts right now!


All artists participating in The Pulse were asked to name their favorite art books. The Book Guild will present this list, along with links, book reviews, giveaways, and interviews with many of your favorite authors. And as members of The Guild, I am hoping YOU will participate by leaving comments related to the books in each post - for example thoughts, book reviews, personal experiences, or a link back to your own blog posts that include artwork based on a project in the listed book.
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GIVEAWAY

Thanks to everybody who entered last week's giveaway for a copy of Collage Playground. The random number site chose Kimber from A Journey in Creativity as the lucky winner. Congratulations! Please contact me via email with your mailing address. And if you didn't win, you can purchase this book here.
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Chapter 14: Rice Freeman-Zachery

Several of Rice's books were listed as favorites by a number of survey participants. Both Donna Joy and Jill Zaheer selected Creative Time & Space: Making Room for Making Art as a favorite.

Patti Sandham named Living the Creative Life: Idea's and Inspiration from Working Artists as one of her favorites. And you can add my name to the list, as this book is also one of my biggest inspirations.

Rice generously shared the following with The Altered Page:

I read a review of Creative Time and Space the other day in which the guy said the book had a lot of “fluff” and needed more depth. I had to laugh because I knew exactly what he wanted: like a lot of people, he thinks “creativity” is something deep and mysterious and tortured. He’s thinking Van Gogh, he’s thinking Michelangelo. He’s thinking the miserable starving artist in the garret.

I’ve talked to dozens of working artists--artists who make their living making their art--and none of them have been tortured, miserable, struggling. Oh, sure--they’re miserable when things aren’t going well, and they struggle just like everyone else with bills and taxes and supplies and time. But what I’ve learned from them, and what I want to pass on to readers, is that work is work. If art is your work, you work at it just as you would if your work were law or teaching or automotive repair. You don’t sit and daydream and ruminate about your lousy childhood. Does your dentist start every day going over the trauma of his toilet training?

I chose working artists who are generous and genuinely interested in helping other people find their own way to creating the things they imagine in their heads. They’ve offered tips and ideas, techniques and jumpstarts--all in the hope that one of those will be just the thing to spark the fire. But, really, in the end it’s just about doing the work.

People want creativity to be mysterious. There have been tons of books written that try to dissect and quantify creativity. Some are scientific. Some are touchy-feely. Some, like my two, are based on interviews with working artists, and my point in writing them was to show that creativity is about the work, about taking whatever ideas you have, learning the skills and techniques you need to know, and then getting busy and doing the work to make them real. It’s about work, and there’s nothing fluffy about that. That’s not sexy, though, so we don’t harp on it in the books as much as I would in real life, but it’s the truth. And if you love what you do, “work” never seems like a bad word at all.

Visit Rice at her blog Notes from the Voodoo Cafe