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Methods of Creation

How to make a lifelong career as an artist

Michael Binkley
Apr 5th, 2011

Stone sculptor Michael Binkley, 2010.  Photo by Kevin Grey.

What does it take to be a successful artist?  Is it pure talent, marketing skill, or knowing the right people.  Last July I celebrated my 30th year as a professional artist.  Looking back and reflecting, I marvel that I have been able to live solely on my vocation as a sculptor.  Here I will describe how I think it happened, and if any of what I have to say is useful to anyone, that would make me happy.

 

Approaching art as a business

 From the outset, I approached my art as not only a calling but a business - - I had to make a living at it.  It was a calling and it still is.  I couldn’t keep doing it if it were just a job. But it is also a job, and it is the only one I have.  Making and selling art is a business, and I have had to approach it that way.

Something I Admire about Surgeons

Lee Gass
Dec 13th, 2010

Something I admire about surgeons, dentists, deep sea divers and astronauts is their ability to perform sensitive, technically demanding work wearing gloves.  Working with gloves is a serious handicap, and yet it is necessary in some professions for various kinds of reasons.

This revelation occurred to me suddenly during a rectal examination of my prostate gland.  For my entire life before that moment, it had never occurred to me to admire doctors for their ability to work with gloves.  But while the doctor was feeling what he could feel in there, protected but also desensitized by a rubber glove that also protected me, it became crystal clear to me that I admire anyone who can do delicate work wearing gloves.

To Build a Fire

Lee Gass
Dec 13th, 2010

Bootstrapping.  A newspaper fire lights a cedar kindling fire to light a red alder fire in a stove.  Photo by Lee Gass.

By the time I read Jack London’s To Build a Fire for the first time, a few years before reading it again in a high school English class, I had already made many mistakes in the wilderness, and I had learned from some of them.

For me in those days, the wilderness was what we called “the hill”, which began just behind the chicken house and went up and over a high ridge before coming to the first dirt road.  The hill was not just a hill, but a complex topography and an ecosystem offering complex choices for a growing body and mind.  It was hardly a real wilderness, but more than enough for a little boy growing up in it.

Think of the variety.  There were steep, slippery slopes, nearly impenetrable brushfields, three wetlands in very different circumstances, an abandoned orchard, and a variety of forest species including Douglas fir, red fir, ponderosa pine, black oak, live oak, yew, and incense cedar, not to mention anything about shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns, mosses, or lichens.  And not to mention the wildlife.  Just think of it.

Formats for community building and dialogue

Lee GassMark Winston
Dec 8th, 2010

Bee biologist, Centre for Dialogue director, dancer, and Experiments collaboratior Mark Winston.  Photo by Greg Ehlers.

Jobs, careers, employment, vocation, occupation, business: call work what you will, each profession comes with its own prescribed, limited, and limiting formats. Mine come because I am a professor who inhabits two workday worlds, one as a bee biologist and the other as director of SFU’s Centre for Dialogue. These are two quite different callings, similar in being potentially creative but in practice often stifling imagination and expression.

 Take science, where a typical presentation has a tightly controlled layout, whether it’s a written paper or a lecture. The introduction reviews the field and justifies the work, the methods tell readers or viewers what you did, and the results are tense with data and statistics. The ending conclusions are meant to impress with the tiny bit of new knowledge you’ve discovered and the inevitable next steps to justify a future grant application.

Emotion? Passion? What about the joy of discovery and the flashes of insight that are supposed to characterize science and reveal the great mysteries of the universe? Largely absent, subdued by the emotionless language of rationality that our scientific culture insists on.

Reflections on Experiments

Lee Gass
Dec 8th, 2010

LINK Dance dancers Leigha Wald and Darcy McMurray in the studio.  Photo by Alejandro Frid

To a scientist like me, Experiments, a dance production that premiered at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver at the end of November, was special, primarily because it is so rare for a work of art to express the essence of scientific creativity. It was special for that reason, and for the fact that it came so much closer to the mark than I ever could have expected at the beginning. 

Thank you Twyla Bella: Experiments Six

Lee Gass
Dec 2nd, 2010

Hummingbird on hand-made felt.  Art by Twyla Bella.  Photo by Lee Gass

Last week, I posted a series of five articles in this space, each in some way inspired by Experiments, a dance production expressing the essence of scientific discovery.  It premiered last weekend with three performances at the Dance Centre, opening and closing its Vancouver run.  Perhaps the show will travel, and perhaps it will come again to Vancouver.  The future, as we all know so well, is yet to be seen.

Kids, Hummingbirds, and the RCMP: Experiments Seven

Lee Gass
Dec 2nd, 2010

Lee Gass telling a story about kids, hummingbirds and the RCMP.  As you can see, he is a very serious man.  Photo and photo editing by David Shackleton.

A Story for Twyla Bella let me give something back to a girl who loves hummingbirds.  It also generated comments and questions about hummingbird behaviour and ecology, leading to me to comment on the comments.  All of that, as well as the Experiments premiere, triggered an avalanche of hummingbird memories.  I don’t know when or how or whether it will stop, or even why it should. 

What I want to tell you here is not as much about hummingbirds as about kids learning about hummingbirds, and learning about themselves at the same time. More than that, it is about adults helping kids learn.  In particular, it is about a conversation I had about all this with an RCMP constable on Galiano Island.

Graphing in Sculpting and Choreography: Experiments Five

Lee Gass
Nov 26th, 2010

Graph (model) of a sculpture by Lee Gass, Heart of Anima.  Photo by Lee Gass

This is the fifth in a series of articles inspired by Experiments, an evening-length dance production expressing the essence of scientific creativity.  It will be performed November 25 – 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. 

Gail Lotenberg, the choreographer and director of Experiments, suggested that I mount a sculpture exhibition at the Scotiabank Dance Centre during Experiments (it is there now).  There was space for only one actual sculpture, and we agreed that I would display it as a rotating laser light show, which will operate during all four performances.  In the stairwell we hung 13 photographs of sculptures. Gail wanted textual material of two kinds, too, so I made two large posters.

In the interviews with scientists  that she videotaped, Gail was struck by two things I said. 

Repetition, precision and chaos: Experiments Four

Lee Gass
Nov 22nd, 2010

Promotional photograph of dancer Darcy McMurray performing on the set of Experiments.  Photo by Peter Eastwood.

This is the fourth in a series of articles inspired by Experiments, an evening-length dance production expressing the essence of scientific creativity.  It will be performed November 25 – 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. 

Fairly early in his masters research in ecology at UBC in the late 1970s, Dave Marmorek, now President of ESSA Technologies Ltd, a consulting company in Vancouver and Ottawa, came to my office one day to announce an important discovery.  Dave’s discovery was not about the lakes he was studying, but about how to study them, and he was not the first scientist to have discovered it. 

Arabesque: Experiments Three

Lee Gass
Nov 21st, 2010

Arabesque.  Pink Portuguese Marble.  1987.  Sculpture by Lee Gass.  Photo by Stuart Dee.

This is the third in a series of articles inspired by Experiments, an evening-length dance production expressing the essence of scientific creativity.  It will be performed November 25 – 27 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. 

I want to tell you the story of how I learned about Experiments, how it made me feel to find out about it like that, and what it continues to mean to me to be asked to participate.  Like many of the best stories do, this one changed my life, even by making me more aware of who I am and what is important to me. 

I’ll do my best to give you the short version, because both of us have other things to do.

Two years ago, Lucretia and I opened the Lee Gass Gallery in Vancouver, where we displayed my sculptures, hosted dinners, and discussed the meaning and marketing of art.  (One happy consequence of our spending that year talking with people was that I’m now represented by the Petley Jones Gallery.)

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