Free Idea Factory

Go out side right now, look up, and draw! You see so many things that you could possibly draw when you just look up into the sky! From buildings to trees the possibilities are endless! I say Draw and Enjoy!

Was at a reading in an art gallery last night and while checking out their lighting set-up I had an idea for a way to do an art show. Hang the work like normal, but, instead of the normal lighting, the gallery should be as near to total dark as possible. When visitors arrive to view the work, they are given miner’s helmets with forehead flashlights on them. I can picture the beams moving about the gallery, the pieces with more than one viewer lighting up with more light, the show’s overall visibility shifting and changing with the way the viewer’s line of sight changes.

Not exactly illusions of grandeur, but always wanted to write the Biggest Poem in the World. 500m letters, 1 mile long phrases, about two or three miles out from a busy airport, so that it can be read from the air. Might help nervous flyers.

With the ubiquitousness of camera phones these days the time is ripe for a photoblog that consists of documentation of bathroom graffiti. I know there’s blogs out there documenting street art (Wooster Collective is my favorite), but this more behind-closed-stall-doors work is in need of the same treatment.

start a poem or story or doodle what have you and mail it to buddy a. buddy a will add a bit and pass it to buddy b and so on. could be just two people or more…

a variation of this is to play the surrealist exquisite corpse game thru the mail…via postcards or letters.

i love the idea of mail art.

Take something that you really value, that you personally have made (a poem, a painting, a sculpture, what ever…) and break it. Discard it and don’t look back. You can always remake something (though you will need to learn to become comfortable with it being slightly different (for better or worse).

Often times I have found that clinging on to ‘a masterpiece’ (and most of the time it’s really not, though it may be a personal triumph, which is surely nothing to discount) inhibits you from producing 10 new things of which 4 might be to your liking. And maybe 2 are of equal or greater merit than the first object you parted with. That’s a 50% increase in masterpieces!

When we hold onto past ideas too tightly, it may very well inhibit us from coming up with new ones. Creativity involves a need to develop. Being creative involves an element of never being completely satisfied. That’s not to say that the process won’t be rewarding though. Nothing is ever really done in my opinion as far as art goes. But it can be developed enough to share with others. When that’s the case, finish out the body of work or move on to the next idea.

This idea was born out of experiences I had with Skip Sensbach of Green Dog Pottery in Dallas, Pa. He was the one who introduced me to breaking pots, sculptures, and a host of other things I liked. My favorite piece that I broke was a 2 foot tall wine cask that was shaped like a womans leg with fishnet stockings.

Variation:
To reduce the wasteful element of breaking something of value (which I’m personally OK with because of what it may yield) you can give away the object as well. Or you can break it and reuse those broken pieces to make something even cooler if your up for the challenge.

Attach large pages together at their four corners with jewelry loops to create one enormous sheet that will move in the wind beautifully. Write something on those pages, or paint them. A quilt of words. Hang it out on someone’s clothesline in the middle of the night. Sneak off.

Hi folks
Sometime may get round to this. Project involving printing the word `HERE` in large letters on a piece of cloth, placing it in various places in the landscape and photographing it. Use the map reference as title for each piece.

and paint a dead tree blue.

to be done by a group or alone or with imaginary friends, if you desire

take your cameras out into the wild and look for as many instances of the alphabet in nature as you can find. you can decide whether you want to include artificial examples, such as letters found on signs and billboards or just natural ones.

for example check out the minimalist concrete poetry of mIEKAL aND, a look at rock formations and caves, the physical substance of language