John and Bob's Take on Creativity

The idea of a blank canvas is daunting to some and promising to others…

You stare at an 18x24” field of nothing(1), and it has a tendency to stare back. For some this may be the journey’s end, but I sincerely hope that won’t be your experience dear reader. 

A major pillar of ARTspot’s philosophy, as well as my own, is not that everyone can be an artist but rather that everyone is an artist. For someone who’s dedicated a significant amount of their identity to the arts(2), I don’t spend a lot of my time casually painting. This philosophy of creativity helps to sustain me during periods like the past three years(3) when it’s been a struggle to sit down and just be creative in the ways I often used to. 

t art doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t even really need to be anything beyond an experience or a process. Art can look like so many different things, and I look to two different philosophies of art and creation to guide myself: those of Bob Ross and JRR Tolkien.

Although they both worked in different fields, both Bob Ross and Tolkien had something in common: the belief that all people ought to have access to the act of creation. From Tolkien, we see the idea of “sub-creation,” as outlined in his very long poem, Mythopoeia(4), or that all humans have been endowed with the ability to imagine and create. Granted, his belief in this was derived from his understanding that his God made humans in their image. We, through “refracted light,” could endlessly combine and recombine ideas and ought to keep that tradition alive and well.

Bob Ross, on the other hand, looked to explore creativity through visual mediums. While stationed in Alaska(5), he learned techniques to quickly paint the empty(6), snowy landscapes that were so new to him. Bob Ross took his newfound philosophies about art back with him after leaving the military. Everyone could be an artist if they wanted(7). Everyone should be an artist to teach themselves how to use the “happy accidents,” to their advantage in life. It’s absolutely unreal how many of his off the cuff remarks made during 31 seasons of free, televised instruction. He kept his palette and tools simple, just enough to get the job done. He didn’t just make art more accessible to more people, but also desirable and fun! 

Saint of Former Drill Sergeants, Rescue Animals, and Happy Accidents

In my own creativity, and how I’ve continued to work with people who come through ARTspot(8), I’ve synthesized these two philosophies(9).  Everyone could, and should exercise their creativity; it’s one of the coolest and most radical things we as human beings can do. Be receptive and curious about the creativity of others, but if you don’t exercise it yourself, then all you have is others exercising theirs on you. Art should be accessible(10) as widely as it should be participated in. 

Anyone who’s ever made the critical mistake of walking into ARTspot on a day I’m working the floor and started self-deprecating their creative ability has gotten an earful(11) that I think would have made Bob Ross proud. Technical skill in art, like many other things, is a learned skill acquired through repetitive practice. Bob Ross completed over 30,000 paintings during his life. Tolkien, a university professor, published 29 books, translated 36 more, and contributed to many periodicals. Just starting with creativity is the hard part, then continuing on is also the hard part, but wherever you end up is where you want to be(12). Just make art!

(1) I hardly ever work on anything larger than 9x12”. Art doesn’t have to be big to be cool!

(2) The other part of my identity is being very, very queer.

(3) Coincidentally that’s also been the amount of time the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the USA! For some, this has been the opportunity to set aside the traditional responsibilities of the before times to get in touch with creativity. For many others, the stress, worry, and expendability in the workforce has been a major obstacle to creativity. 

(4) This is a verbose smackdown of C.S Lewis, a friend and compatriot of Tolkien, who said in a conversation that myths were nothing but “lies breathed through silver,” or essentially worthless ramblings with little to no value (assumedly except for the Bible and the myths accepted as truths therein). It feels pretty wild to compose a seven page poem in heroic couplets used by Enlightenment English philosophers, but I guess these are the things you do for friends. If you ever have a fundamental disagreement with a friend, I suggest composing a poetic smackdown to get your point across or maybe a riddle.

(5) This probably isn’t news to many people at this point, but Bob Ross was a master sergeant in the US Air Force. He worked in a medical office but also had to be that guy who screamed at you for being late, being messy, or otherwise a bad example of military discipline. As someone who grew up rescuing little Floridian critters and nursing them back to health, that had to have really sucked, and he decided he never wanted to raise his voice again after leaving the military. 

(6) Something I realized while researching this entry is that neither people nor evidence of active humanity ever appear in any of his paintings. Occasionally you’ll get a happy little cabin, but never with smoke coming out of the happy little chimney. 

(7) One of my favorite bits of Bob Ross wisdom is “I really believe that if you practice enough, you could paint the Mona Lisa with a two-inch brush.” Aside from thinking that’s true, I think it’s a concise summary of his outlook on art..

(8) Customers, visitors, tourists, fellow employees, or otherwise.

(9) I’m a certifiably larger-than-average Tolkien nut. My mom read us the entire Lord of the Rings when I was, like, six or something. Despite the problematic aspects of his works, most everything he’s written has spoken to me in some way. I run a lot of Dungeons & Dragons games in a variety of settings, and feeling confident in my ability to create a world in which an interesting and meaningful narrative can play out is integral to the success of those games. Bob Ross, on the other hand, I only really started looking into during his resurgence of popularity in 2015-2017 because I wanted to host an impressive oil painting date with my now-partner babe despite not knowing anything about oil painting. I also watched a lot of his show when I was sick with COVID last year and couldn’t move, which was nice.

(10) I was recently accepted into my very first art show as an Adult™, and my accepted work was made with ballpoint pen on printer paper, crumpled and forgotten probably in my car for a few months, moved between two houses, stuck in a frame, and photographed for submission on the last day it was open. Yes, I do sell art supplies that are varied, beautiful, and expensive, but to make visual art you never need more than a mark-making device and something to make that mark on. In some cases, you don’t even need that. Idk, go stack some rocks on top of each other in an interesting way or something, look at it, and knock it down. You’ll have a great time, I promise. 

(11) A soft-spoken, but passionate earful.

(12) To quote Amanda Palmer from the absolute bop that is the Ukulele Anthem: “Quit the bitching on your blog / Stop pretending art is hard / Just limit yourself to three chords / and do not practice daily

On haus, two haus, red haus, Bauhaus

What Does art do for us? What’s the point of it all?

And what does an art school that only existed for Fourteen years have to do with it?

Have you ever found yourself at a museum of contemporary art wondering “why is this art good?” or more accurately “why have so many different people all decided this art is good?” You may not even have to be in a museum to experience this symptom. We live in a world, thankfully, surrounded by art for better and for worse. The buildings we walk by, the cups we drink from, and the advertisements we skip past aren’t always good art, but what if they were? Or worse yet, what if they were all weren’t?

Something special happened in Germany in 1919. Life was changing for many, and many had never returned from a war that was promised to last no longer than two years and be the war to end all wars. In the midst of this reshuffle, an architect from Berlin was recommended to restart and head a combination of two premiere German art schools that had languished during wartime. Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus school, and within a few short months this school began educating razor sharp artists and craftspeople like a machine.

Bauhaus doesn’t really have a mega-perfect English translation, but loosely it means “House of Architecture.” Bauen: to build. Haus: House

The school’s founding manifesto pulled no punches and is steeped in analogies between the crafts and a literal spiritual awakening(1). 

Throughout his tenure, Gropius promoted the Gesamtkunstwerk (ge-samt-KUNST-werk), or comprehensive artwork(2). This divergence of more traditional aesthetic philosophy may be interpreted almost as a criticism of creativity, but in practice it prompted creative people not to view the only path available as an artist to be cloistered in a studio. In addition to a foundational education in the fine arts, the school taught courses in everything from cabinetry to costuming, textiles to typography, and ceramics to carpentry. Its aim was to elevate the design and craft of the world we create around us and reduce the gap of class between craftspeople and artists. At Bauhaus, art was design and design was art.

As with many things of the period, this experiment in creativity was diminished and then destroyed entirely by the destabilizing rise of far-right politics(3). In 1933, after relocating several times, the school was forced to close. Artists, whether staff or students, were compelled to either conform to the new regime or emigrate. Lucky for us now, many chose the latter option. The design concepts of the Bauhaus were welcomed internationally, took root, and continued to blossom.

The artists of the Bauhaus never quite managed to attain their ideal of the comprehensive artwork. This radical idea did, however, succeed in combining the creativity of artists with the practical applications of craftspeople(4). With a focus on creating for mass production and communication, this way of thinking had set everything up for us to enjoy the many beautiful aspects(5) of the relatively beautiful world in which we live today.

Think what you will about the current mass production of consumer goods(6), but communities today would have a difficult time maintaining current expectations of comfort solely by the cottage industry that met these needs before. In this previous era, the craftsperson could create artisan work for everything from a bowl to a building. To meet those needs today, we rely on the mass manufacturing that the Bauhaus planned for a century ago.

There’s a lot to like and dislike about the modern movement of art that peaked throughout the 20th century(7). Regardless of opinion, these ideas do create a through-line to the ubiquity of design around us today. Regardless of what we may like as individuals, we can count ourselves lucky for the efforts of the artists around us(8).

(1) “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to the crafts! For art is not a “profession.” There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination.” -Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto (1919)

(2) I had a professor in college who taught scenic design for the stage as well as general design communication. It’s safe to say he was obsessed with the Bauhaus school and probably just wanted to teach architecture specifically because that’s what he usually did anyways. Despite initially feeling like he was a crazy person, I eventually really began to understand where he was coming from, and now here I am writing an incredibly condensed soapbox piece on why the Bauhaus is the best and saved the 20th century from mundanity. I think that studying Bauhaus design and philosophy was particularly helpful in academic theater, since a work of theater succeeds or fails by the collective efforts of every designer, actor, and the director trying to keep everyone on the same page. Although generally no single person oversees all these disparate aspects, the end product is a comprehensive artwork meant to be seen as a single piece. 

(3) The Nazis were super into art and design as long as it, and everything and everyone else, never disagreed with them and made them look super cool and smart. A tall order.

(4) Art was, and still is in many regards, a practice reserved for the higher classes. As a huge generalization, typical people have had to work at other tasks to generate enough wealth to feed themselves and their families. On the one hand, we saw artists like Van Gogh and Vermeer who constantly sat at the edge of destitution during their careers, yet since about the 1600s the work of creating art had shifted from accomplishing a physical task to an intellectual one. This is all on top of the shift in humanist philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries away from justification of ‘nobility by birth’ to ‘nobility by character and culture.’ I think the Bauhaus ideal of bringing art and craftsmanship together again is quite a beautiful conclusion to that arc at the start of the 20th century.

(5) I feel like I keep managing to talk around this point in the main body without ever really hitting it right on the head, so here it is: We are so lucky to live in a world with artists, and everything that threatens to devalue the arts also risks such an egregious cascading effect. If you follow the thought through to its conclusion of what a world without art would be like, it’s pretty horrible. There would be no need for color, we would all be either dressed the same or for whatever specialized task we were expected to do. There would be no need for advertisements as there may be only one tool available to accomplish a task. No television. No music. It all sounds incredibly silly, like the Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because there’s something in us deeply attuned to aesthetics. I don’t think we’ll ever really achieve this nightmare situation, but I’m always disappointed when the job of a creative is replaced by something else or when the most resources go to projects simply meant to achieve the best return for investors rather than contribute to culture in a meaningful way. The focus of art in design that spread from interwar Germany may have done a lot towards saving us from a blander world today, but artists need to be allowed to continue doing our part!

(6) If you wanted MY two cents, I’d love to see consumer goods able to be used for a longer period of time. Things made by dedicated craftspeople generally last SO much longer, but paying them a fair rate is incredibly prohibitive for many consumers. I just spent the weekend with some people in the 1%, but for me, there’s unfortunately no choice to be had between a mass manufactured bed frame that will break in five years versus a handmade one that would last a lifetime. This is kinda like that argument about a poor person having to spend more on many pairs of cheap boots compared to a rich person spending less on a single pair of more expensive boots. Products, clothes, computers, and everything else designed to be obsolete or in tatters in a matter of months or years is bad for the people at the end of the supply chain as well as for the planet.

(7) Speaking from personal experience. We can each have our own personal interests that inform what we like and don’t like. I have a hard time getting anything from uninspired prints thrown together en masse and available at big box stores, but it’s rare that I’ll be in a museum or gallery room and see absolutely nothing worth seeing. Even if it’s just an aspect or two of someone’s work. 

(8) If you’re an artist reading this, thank you for whatever it is that you do. If you’re an underappreciated artist, doubly so. If you're not an artist, SURPRISE you actually are. I don’t make the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How to Win Friends and Influence (Among the Crows)

What is it like to get in tune with the place you live and work?

Poptart, my weird orange cat, has been sitting with me and taking up her half of the chair for the entirety of writing this entry to the blog. As sleepy co-author, she still deserves some credit. Especially since we both like to watch the crows building their nests (likely for different reasons).

It’s been three weeks since I made a big move from Lynnwood down into Edmonds, and I’m starting to feel pretty well set up. We’re painting the walls(1) one by one as we get to them, my bedroom is close to being in its final form(2), and we’ve been making good use of the Coleman hot tub we put behind the house. We have plans for the backyard that I’ve been looking forward to(3), but even moreso I’d been anticipating getting to walk to work.

When I realized that a change of residence was in my near future, I started the well-practiced routine of asking my friends and partners for any leads on housing. Rental markets aren’t ever really that friendly, but my options were particularly limited. I didn’t want to live right in downtown Edmonds and be tied to the store at the hip(4), but I also wasn’t particularly interested in going even further afield with this move than I already was(5). Luck and a lot of lifting and scheduling and such landed me a place about a half hour walk from the store, and I couldn’t have been happier.

I used to walk everywhere when I was in school in Bellingham. Granted, my world was a little smaller back then, and I barely even used the car I’d gotten on the cheap(6) until after graduating. Walking was a time to sit with my quiet mind, hum my way through songs that’ve been trying to be heard, and see the world far more slowly(7) than I possibly could while focusing on driving with all the perils and speed it brings with it.

Views from my walk to work

I had been looking forward to this because, in the past, walking for extended periods almost daily was good for my mental health. A forced reset in stillness as I make my way slowly to my destination. What I didn’t count on as a matter of fact was the company I’d end up keeping.

I’d noticed the first couple of times I walked that several of the copses of trees along the route were alive with sound. There had been crows I knew that frequented the quiet road out front of my mom’s house(8). Had I found some of my very own?

There’s a surprisingly robust body of literature online surrounding the topic of befriending crows. In short, though, they like to latch on to the same things as me: patience and routine. They have a stronger taste for peanuts than I do, so I decided to trade a bag from Winco (unsalted) for friendship. In just three weeks, they’ve grown from initially trusting that the food wasn’t going to hurt them to congregating in the tree in my front yard when I leave for the day. I sometimes whistle for them(9), but it’s not my intention to treat them as pets or have them treat me as their only source of food. Still though, it’s lovely to see a crow go absolutely nuts for nuts and call out to its family. Soon three or more crows are all joining in its happy dance. For the next few hours at least, they have one fewer thing to worry about.

The crows are just one thing that I’ve gotten to be more in tune with as I’ve settled into my new spot so close to Edmonds. I’m getting to be more in tune with the store and able to jump in as needed when needed at shorter notice. I’ve worried a lot over where I want to be and live, but I think for now I’m happy.

A bonus picture of my outfit for Crow Fest 2022 in Bothell this past October. It’s not even a big deal, but me and my friends DID win best group costume this year.

(1) If every wall is an accent color, then they’re all equally special.

(2) The lump on the back of my head from assembling my bed frame has just about receded. The chunk of wood that was knocked loose by my head is gone for good.

(3) I’m going to gush just a little bit that my partner and I have plans to start growing a reasonable amount of our own food. We’re just about to start turning up ground to plant, we’ll hopefully be set up to keep quails here soon enough to hatch them soon, and next year they offered to build me boxes and frames to keep bees. Homemade encaustic paints anyone?

(4) I love the store a lot; I wouldn’t be taking over ownership if I didn’t. I do value having a bit of distance though while still being close enough to run in at short notice if needed.

(5) If I had taken my budget and had to live on my own, I’d probably be looking at a 30-45 minute commute to Edmonds at least. I do love a long drive. I listened to the entire Witcher series of books while driving from Lynnwood this past year, but at a certain point I just don’t want to be giving that many hours of my life to sitting in a car burning fuel.

(6) My fantastic red Ford Escape was the only other car I owned, and I drove it all the way into the ground before giving it up for the care I have now. Someday I hope to have a car that isn’t 20 years old, but nobody is ever going to get rich selling art supplies.

(7) I think often of a Robert Frost poem, A Passing Glimpse (1928) with lines that include:

I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.

and

Heaven gives it glimpses only to those

Not in position to look too close.

(8) Agnes, the crow, went by as many different names as there were people who fed her, but that’s how I knew her. She was easy to recognize with a broken wing that prevented her from ever even attempting flight. As far as I know, she hasn’t been seen in at least a few months, which doesn’t look good for her.

(9) The same combination of notes every time. Patience and routine.

A Tale of Two Skates:

Running a serious business in a Very serious way

It’s a well-established fact…

…that ARTspot is one of the coolest spots in downtown Edmonds(1). That’s said not as a business owner, but as someone who was eight years old when the Wishing Stone opened a store in Edmonds down by the waterfront and there was finally something interesting to see in the early 2000s. I grew up in Edmonds(2). Despite traveling around a bunch and considering myself a somewhat worldly person I was always perplexed in my earlier twenties that I somehow always ended up back in Edmonds. I think it’s because I actually really like it here? Edmonds is really special to me for many reasons. One of the big reasons is the kernel of wonderful weirdness that lives in the community of artists that have made Edmonds their home(3).

To anyone outside that community, the arts may seem like a foreign concept reserved for others. The terrible truth, though, is that someone you know, and probably even someone you love, is an artist(4). And artists are weird. The weirder the better. Weirdness helps you find comfort in taking the risk of creating something genuinely awful. If you’re already weird then what do you have to lose? It’s ARTspot’s mission to provide artists with the tools and expert advice to find success in what they’re doing, but I also view it as an integral part of what we do here to encourage taking comfort in weirdness.

Just a normal guy doing normal things in a normal way.

Salvador Dali Walking an Anteater through Paris (1969)

To pivot the subject slightly, in the winter of 2021 we had all been weathering the COVID-19 pandemic to the point where the new normal felt pretty normal. It also kinda felt like we were still trudging through a swamp that fewer and fewer people wanted to acknowledge. It had been a weird time, but not in a particularly good way, and I hadn’t really made art or felt any creative drive in months by then(5). I was working at the art store, which at least afforded me the joy of being around other creative people and sharing in their joy, but it wasn’t a great time for me(6). 

My background in the arts is in costume design, which is all about nudging and pushing viewers’ perceptions for one reason or another. I was stuck in a major rut, so I decided to nudge my own perception as a viewer of myself. 

Wouldn’t it be fun to get really good at roller skating? (7)

So I’ve been wearing roller skates around the store almost every day for a year and a bit!(8) I started very slowly and cautiously after closing while running inventory reports, and to date I’ve never collided with a person or fallen on a display. My black Impala(9) skates, even when they were unadorned at first, were a great icebreaker for anyone coming into ARTspot with a serious attitude or expecting a serious store staffed by serious people. We take creativity seriously, but a big part of that is embracing the weird and wonderful.

These are my skates as of today! February 6th, 2023

Subject to change at an artistic whim. I could have taken a better photo of them, but I didn’t want to take them off.

By now, I’ve used POSCA acrylic markers(10) to cover my skates with more and more bits. Quotes from David Bowie and Ai Wei Wei(11), a Sex Pistols logo, and a guillotine for no reason in particular(12). They all wear off because the canvas in this case is something that gets used hard and regularly, and the only thing I always replace just the same is the bright yellow and pink of the Pistols. Acrylics are pretty durable, but if you think I skate hard at ARTspot, you ought to come out to the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate sometime for an 18+ night(13).

(1) Not for lack of competition! It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Edmonds as Deadmonds, and I think that’s only partially because of my advancing age. Though I must say there’s still nobody down here that sells Pokemon cards, which is what I primarily thought was cool at age 5.

(2) And Lynnwood a little bit. And what I think was unincorporated Snohomish County when I was really little, but I’m pretty sure there’s a Park & Ride and a Fred Meyer there now. I know it’s just going to get more pronounced as I continue to age in the same location, but it blows my mind how much this area has changed. There were horses down the street from my first house in Edmonds. Horses! In Edmonds!

(3) It’s lowkey very cool that downtown Edmonds was marked as the first Creative District in Washington. I think that opened up some funding for further cultural development. With all this development, I’m really hopeful that people from all walks of life will find ways to visit Edmonds, contribute to the culture here, and then hopefully help to enrich wherever they call home.

(4) It’s a pillar of the ARTspot philosophy that everyone has a creative side and a right to be able to access it. It may not take the form of visual art, but we love it when it does!

(5) I think the last bit of fun I had making art for a long while was back in April of 2020 when the business I was working at at the time (not ARTspot) was compelled by the state to send its workers home on lockdown as nonessential. I ordered, assembled, and painted a custom 3-D printed miniature of Darth Vader for a tabletop game I played hoping that I’d be able to play with my friends soon and impress them all. We’ve still not been able to get back together for a real game night.

(6) And I’m the author here so my feelings matter.

(7) Like, really good. Like Gene Kelly in It’s Always Fair Weather levels of good. I think about this routine a lot and marvel at how flat the street is despite being pretty sure it has to be a 1950s MGM soundstage. If any readers have ever attempted to skate a set of quads down an Edmonds sidewalk, you’d have a new appreciation for well maintained pedestrian infrastructure.

(8) Taking off my skates at the end of the day has become the worst part of any day. To go from gliding and swooping around with little effort to manually plodding around is such a wid shift. I haven’t needed to rearrange anything at ARTspot to accommodate my skating, but I totally have started to view the layout of things as a series of arcs and straightaways I can maneuver through, each with their own speeds to be able to stop nimbly to avoid something or someone.

(9) I am, unfortunately, not sponsored or affiliated in any way with Impala skates, but they do have some very cute designs and pretty good prices considering how well they’re built. If you or anyone you know may work for Impala or a similar roller skate-making company, please consider making more of your styles in sizes larger than a US Women's 9. All my fellow Amazonian transfemme skater babes will thank you and sing your praises until our deaths.

(10) I initially wrote this entire post as an Ode to POSCA, which felt a bit too much like a smelly sales pitch. That’s not really the goal of these posts, but if y’all ever want to listen to someone wax poetic about POSCA like Lieutenant Commander Data talks about his cat, please come in and speak to either myself or Vincent.

(11) “The purpose of art is the fight for freedom,” is a powerful reminder that art and creativity is not just for looking pretty or for making people happy. While curating the Intersections show last spring, I made a point to ask for and include art that I knew may spark an uncomfortable feeling for some viewers despite being shown in a setting that is ultimately safe for them. Art can be so many different things! Whether you’re making it (and you should) or seeking it out to take in through your senses, accept that it doesn’t have to look good for it to be good. I’m a huge supporter of making bad art badly!

(12) I’m a bit of a dirty anarchist, which is shocking I’m sure, but it puts me in an awkward position of also being a business owner raised up into the petite bourgeoisie by merit of knowing a lot about art supplies and coming from a family with access to enough capital to have started a business. I have a guillotine painted on my skates and also sometimes wear a guillotine necklace gifted to me by a friend when I accepted an ownership role to remind me that nobody is inherently better than anyone else and that everything is built on the efforts of others. Maybe all business owners, big and small, should have a little guillotine somewhere to remind themselves to keep humble and honest about the work they do.

(13) If you, like me, exhibit what the young folks are calling Main Character Energy, then maybe the 18+ Night at the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate is the place for you! As a certified freak, I’ve never felt less weird than when I’m surrounded by a bunch of people in their 20s-60s who all choose to go roller skating on a Monday night.