Nontraditional Work Spaces
My friend Katie tweeted about the Archipod Garden Office yesterday:
The Archipod Garden Office
…and I began fantasizing about how much fun it would be to work in such a quirky space. I’ve had similar fantasies about working from an airstream trailer:
Photo of airstream trailer by prawnpie on Flickr
(Having it perched on a cliff by the sea would be nice, too.)
I’d keep mine simple, not fancy…
Another idea: an office in a treehouse:
Photo of treehouse by haglundc on Flickr
Absent a treehouse, I suppose an attic could be fun – I imagine working only at night, by lamplight…
How about you? What’s your fantasy office space? Or are you already using a nontraditional space to do your work? Do tell!
Artists and Their Day Jobs
Brian Lehrer of WNYC interviewed author Summer Pierre about her new book, The Artist in the Office: How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week. Listen to the segment and read the fascinating comments here.
Related Post:
Art for a Paycheck?
Be In The Scene You Want To Be In
Image by Pedro Moura Pinheiro on Flickr
“If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you.”
-The character of Seymour, writing to his younger brother, Buddy, in Seymour, An Introduction by JD Salinger
I found this quote here, and it immediately reminded me of something my improv teacher, Ari Voukydis, said last week: “Be in the scene you want to be in.” In other words, if you find yourself in the middle of a scene that sucks, remember that the scene is what you make it (this is improv, after all – we’re making it up as we go).
Like so many improv lessons, this advice applies to life, as well. Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who still, after many years, feels like he’s stuck in a job that has no relationship to who he wants to be on this earth. He’d leave, but he doesn’t know what else he wants to do. He works it over and over in his head, but never reaches a convincing conclusion. Meanwhile, time ticks by…
As another improv teacher, Topher Bellavia, once told me, “It doesn’t matter what choice you make. It only matters that you make a choice, and commit to it.” This also applies to life offstage. So often we think there’s a “right” choice, and we remain paralyzed, terrified of getting it wrong. But people: these lives? They’re ours. They’re made up of the choices we make, and the things we do. If you don’t want to be someone who works at a law firm – don’t be that person.
I know, it’s not that easy. We have the voices of the naysayers in our heads — parents telling us we’re being naive, “friends” telling us we’re lucky just to have a job. Sure. But to apply another improv principle, the notion of “Yes, and”: one thing can be true, AND another thing can be true. We can be lucky to have a job, and we can give thanks for our good fortune every morning; AND, every day, we can feel deep in our gut that this job is not our true path in life, and we can take steps to find another one. Gratitude and desire are not mutually exclusive.
So: write the book you want to read; be in the scene you want to be in; live the life you desire.
“In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, ‘If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination,’ and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”- Brian Andreas
Related Links:
- An Accident of Hope, a blog by Summer Pierre, the author of The Artist in the Office: How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week (this blog is where I found the Salinger quote above)
- On Seeking Fulfillment, a post from my previous blog, Creative DC (“Finding fulfillment isn’t about finding a magic bullet – a ‘dream job,’ a perfect city to live in, a perfect mate; instead, finding fulfillment is about developing the ability to know what you want, and the will to go get it.”)
Improv Lessons for Freelancers
My husband, Jordan, and I are leading a session at SXSW 2010 called “Improv Lessons for Freelancers.” (If you aren’t familiar with SXSW, you can read about it here.) Check out the audio promo we recorded, below, and help spread the word!
For the official session description, including a list of questions we promise we’ll answer, click here.
Art for a Paycheck?
Image by dogwelder on Flickr
Thanks to Alex for pointing me to an interview with designer and filmmaker Saul Bass, which he found on the Utne Reader website. In the interview, Bass – best known for his award-winning movie title sequence designs – riffs on the tension that professional artists face between aesthetics, on the one hand, and the need to make a living, on the other. Do you sacrifice commitment to aesthetics in order to satisfy a client? Bass proclaims,
“The fact of the matter is that I want everything that I do personally to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything or that the client thinks it’s worth anything or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things even if nobody cares.”
This is noble, to be sure, but it begs the question: how could such an attitude possibly be viable in a business context? If your work is beautiful, but your client doesn’t think it’s worth anything… does he pay your invoice? If not…how do you pay the bills? Perhaps Bass would have taken a different position earlier in his career, before he had the financial wherewithal to be such a purist?
I’ve worked with web designers who insist that anything they design for their day job is not art, even if it’s beautiful, because it isn’t theirs – it belongs to, and must ultimately serve, the client who hired them. They earn a living using their artistic skills to meet business needs, and they make art on their own time.
This arrangement seems logical to me. But I wonder if anyone would argue that it’s “selling out,” or that a real artist never sacrifices the purity of her vision for a paycheck?
Personally, I’ve chosen – so far – to keep my work and my art separate, rather than trying to get paid for anything that centers around my artistic abilities. On the one hand, this keeps me from having to compromise — doing cheesy improv, for example, just to satisfy a cheesy client — but on the other hand, I spend 40 hours a week doing something that isn’t my art. That’s 40 hours during which I’m doing something that I think is important (I’m lucky to work for clients whose work I care about), but that comes nowhere near providing me with the bliss I find through blogging and performing. Finding the right work/art balance is – excuse the pun – an art, not a science, and for me, it’s one that continues to evolve.
Here’s the Bass interview, if you’re interested:
