Episode #1: Intro to The Artistic Method

Transcription:

Everything a person does, there will always be a first time. It takes time to develop proficiency and even mastery. It takes dedication and commitment to cultivate those skills that develop over time and there’s no shortcuts.

This is the first podcast ever for The Artistic Method. It will not be perfect and I find that perfectionism kills creativity. Especially in the beginning. I always embrace imperfections on allowing things to not be perfect. For instance I am at my home studio today at my house. Only its not a studio it is just a room at my house.

Joining me today my English bulldog Bella. She is always making the worst noises you can imagine. You may hear her in the background licking her paws. There’s no stopping her. She is a force to be reckoned with and she’s so stubborn there is no way to tell her to stop licking her paws and get any type of positive response from her.

So we are doing the podcast with the background noise and that’s fine with me. I don’t care but I wanted to get this first one out-of-the-way because it’s been snowing.

There is about 14 inches of snow where I’m at in Texas. I just took the tape measure in the front yard I don’t know what the averages are but it snowed a lot for Texas. We are not prepared to deal with this type of weather so we don’t do what people do up north. In Texas we just we just become hermits in our house and hide hoping it will go away. Pretending it is not there.

It can be fun for some of us. We don’t get to see this type of weather very often. But it can also be terrifying.

Many people have been without power for days. Texas has its own power grid apparently and it’s not capable of handling these extreme cold temperatures with everyone ramping up the heat. There may be something underlying to that they are not telling the public but from what I understand there’s not enough electricity to go around and they’re doing rolling blackouts that are lasting three days in some major metropolitan areas like Houston Dallas and Austin.

So anyway it’s been a time for me to hang around the house and hang out with family and I’ve enjoyed that during this time. Also to say I’d like to launch my podcast and my art course that I’ll be I’ll be hosting on joelwrightart.com. For my podcast I’ve always had this idea that I would like to interview other artist and when I can’t do that I do have things to say about philosophy of art, art methodology, approaches to doing art and living a creative lifestyle which I’ve done for over 20 years.

I’m drinking some green tea this morning I was clearing my throat. A little bit about me once again I am Joel Wright and I am an artist. I started as an artist when I was a young kid. I guess all kids are young but I was a young kid when I started drawing and I tried painting. I wanted to paint when I was younger and I watched Bob Ross paint on PBS channel 13.

And he did these landscapes. Everyone knows who he is, he does landscape paintings with happy trees and happy clouds. My trees and clouds were not happy… they were not happy! I couldn’t keep up with these 30 minute episodes. I didn’t have a way to record at that time so I had to try and paint along with him in real time. I punched through many canvases. I could not complete the work and oil painting is slippery when you paint wet on wet there’s challenges.

I just couldn’t overcome as a kid watching Bob Ross and so Bob Ross was the source of inspiration but also frustration for me. I let that go of that so I just drew with pencils and charcoal for many years and as I got older I started learning how to paint slowly and over time just learning on my own self taught.

Eventually I found myself in a tattoo shop but before I go into that I’ll just go into my own personal history just briefly. My father said “hey son I realize you want to be an artist and that’s fine and everything but you can’t make a living being an artist so you will have to try and find a job. Being an artist is not a job my mother was very nurturing and she told me “hey son, you are an artist or very talented you can do this you should pursue your passions”.

So that’s the duality in my upbringing with my mother and my father and I listen to my father.  I said “OK, this is probably true. I’m not going to be able to make a living being an artist so I’m gonna go out and find a job”.

 I think my very first job was as a janitor at a Methodist church.  Actually a beautiful church and I enjoyed hanging out there. The Stained glass windows were so pretty when the sun would come in and all those colors were scattered across the sanctuary. It was pretty amazing and my boss there was a good dude. An older guy. He retired from whatever he did in his career and was just taking care of the church out of love.

He expected me to do certain things in the church and I did for the most part but I was a binge drinker back in those days. I would be fine for a couple weeks but then I would tie one on for two or three days straight and I fell asleep in the pews in the church. He woke me up “what’s going on? I can’t leave you alone and you be sleeping. It’s not gonna work!”. I did that too many times until I lost my job at the church.

 Anyway that started a string of jumping from job to job. I had somewhere in the area of 250 jobs! 250 jobs! Just going from one to another. I’ll go into that more in some other episode, this is just my first one I don’t have to cover everything in the first episode but just know I had many jobs.

It didn’t work out for me at all until one day I was hanging out at the tattoo shop. There’s a story behind that as well. I was hanging out at the tattoo shop, Steve’s tattoos and body piercing and I was drawing up Tattoos for the shop owner. He was busy and had more demand than he had time so he outsourced create work to me.

So I started out drawing and eventually I did a tattoo on myself and it wasn’t very good but it was good enough that when I told people I was giving out 10 free tattoos they were lined up to get their free tattoo from me. In my learning phase, called an apprenticeship and I did those 10 free horrible Tattoos and eventually I believe my 11th or 12th one I made my first dollar from tattooing.

I had made money from selling paintings before and the tattoo shop owner paid me to create these drawings that he was tattooing for people before I started tattooing.

Tattooing is a medium onto its own. You could be very skilled at drawing or painting and know everything about it which will help you but when you go to the tattoo medium you’re starting from ground zero. Tattooing is unlike any other medium and it works for some people it doesn’t others. It’s strange because it can work for people that have no artistic talent but they’re very good at tattooing. And I thought that’s odd it’s the only medium like that.

See you to have the tattooist and then you have a tattoo artist and I don’t get too heavy on classifications. But I mean these are self proclaimed titles. Tattooist considered themselves just a tattoo artist and not artist and then you have people that consider themselves artists and tattoos are a medium that they use and it may not be the only medium but they use and that’s where I fit in. I work in many different mediums like painting, sculpting tattooing, graphic design, and web design, video editing.

There’s really nothing off-limits for me in the creative space. I never found my place in life until I started tattooing and selling paintings. For me there’s no other option. I have no other option. My livelihood 100% comes from my creative efforts and nothing else will work for me and I have extensively tested that. I used the scientific method to determine I am not capable of doing anything but being an artist. It is all I’m good for but having that as the case in my life has caused me to increase my commitment level of course. It is very strong and my dedication to creating art is very strong because there is no other option to me.

With The Artistic Method I hope to really get a magnifying glass and look into my own artistic method and the artistic methods of other people. I want to know their core philosophies and why they got into art and what they feel their purposes is and the artistic medium of their choosing and what they hope to accomplish. What their goals are and what’s the latest project they are working on. I want to know and I think it’ll be useful for everyone to share these things.

That is my idea for my podcast. If you’re interested in being on this podcast I would love to have you. You can contact me and we will determine the date that we can do interviews in person. I don’t really like the zoom meeting type of approach and believe that there’s sound quality is a better in-person.

It’s a strange time we’re living in so if we have to do zoom meetings we can do it but I just prefer to meet in person.

You may hear my dog snoring in the background but it’s been an enjoyable podcast. I’m looking forward to what comes from this. I could sit here trying to define it but of course life never works that way. There’s a lot of uncertainty and unknown elements but I am looking forward to putting time and energy into this creative project.