Michael, qualified to muse?

So, we have established why you want to read this, but we must ask; what qualifies me to write it? What in my background enlightens me on creativity? What do I know about Art, or Design?  Well, only what I have read in books (remember those papery things bound with glue and usually covered with dust?), learned in art school, and gleaned from life’s experience.

From the earliest age I have been a creative animal.  Drawing comics, writing sword and sorcery fantasy stories, even drafting on graph paper elaborate plans for houses, parks, and zoos (this presaging my aptitude for design). The unfortunate thing is with an absentee father, a highly distracted and depressed mother, and a frustrated grade school art teacher who took great pleasure in pointing out how poor we all really were.  I had no one to encourage it or even help me to see what it all meant.  An artist was trying to get out.

It was not until I moved back to California in my late teens that I really got started along my path.  Falling in with a group of performance artists (before there was even a term for that sort of thing), painters, and poets.  I found myself juggling on Venice Beach, selling “splatter art” clothing and canvases in the galleries of Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey, and reciting poetry in the Cafes of West Hollywood (snappity, snap, tre` bohemian).  We published our own literary rags with titles like: The Amphibian, LA Driver and Enervate, at a time when cut and paste still meant trimming little strips of paper and gluing them next to others.  We also traveled around with the Renaissance Fairs performing, creating and teaching. It was the 80’s so, yes, there was substance use and abuse, but I navigated those dangerous shoals fairly well (substances and creativity humm a topic for later discussion).  I started doing some piece-work with some of the big scene shops of Hollywood building sets and backgrounds for Disney’s movies, rides, and attractions. Learning the trade from some pretty uptight Production Designers.

This was all experience, real world, dirty hands experience, but it was not until I started teaching that I really learned about creativity.  It was working with pre-school and kindergarten children that taught me more about process than any other single aspect of my background.  The sheer joy of blending colors, the over arching stories and perceived themes in a smeary finger painting. The kids taught me to separate product from process, and I learned that “art” is anything that you can get away with.  During this time I became less productive and more of a collector, filling boxes with the product of the children, much of which I still have.

But, then it was off to Art school to study Industrial Design and I learned to look at the world very differently.  I went in to gain the skills: airbrush, photography, wood and metal work, vaccu-forming and mold making, and of course computer skills (against which I rebelled, much to my chagrin). I knew that these would further my art, but I did not know that it would instill a whole other thought process.  I became all about product.

As the intervening years have past and many projects have come and gone, I have reconciled the process and the product, like yin and yang, alpha and omega, I realize the two must be as one.  A clean, consistent, and yes somewhat disciplined process is the way to achieve a quality product.  Whether as production designer of houseware products for Edart USA Inc. manufacturing pieces out of plastic, or in the custom creation of fine home furnishing from high-end materials the process is the same and the product is quality.

It is from these experiences in the trenches that I feel qualified to speak on the subject of creation and creativity.  Inspiration, however, is another matter entirely and that is what I will need your input for. So let’s do it, let us dialogue on this vast and varied subject that we might learn, teach, and grow. Stay tunned!