Unleash your creative superpowers!
(Pic #1) “Piglet” in her best days. Rest In peace, my princess.
(Pic #2) Piglet, days before the end.
(Pic #3) Piglet sunbathing under the bougainvillea.
(Pic #4) Mukluk in the garden.
(Pic #5) Mukluk and Piglet — peacefully coexisting.
When I first saw the video above, I thought it was going to be an affirmation of one of the methods I use to break through creative malaise. A random assignment, with a 10 minute deadline. Turns out it affirmed something even more fundamental.
My husband likes to say I have a secret weapon in every workshop I teach, whether for C-suite executives, or inner city kids. It’s what he calls “relentless exuberance.” Watch this video for a minute. You will see a photographer in a strange enviornment, one he has to bend to his creative will in an incredibly short period of time.
But he does it brilliantly. How? Relentless exuberance. It’s as infectious as any disease they have ever studied at the CDC. Everyone around him catches it. Suddenly for all those students, his mission is their mission. They are his co-creators. Firefighters say that a particularly fearsome blaze creates its own weather system, increasing its destructive power exponentially. Watching this video I realized it’s true of positive energy as well — and the creative output resulting from that firestorm of excitement is a truly beautiful thing.
(Pic #1) Pipes and pumps at Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California. Not your standard post card view of the historic tourist attraction. (Photos by Josh Kaplan)
My husband says I’m an art snob. But not in the way you might think. He accuses me of only liking art in which you can’t recognize a single object. In my world, that means abstraction.
Guilty.
Whenever we venture out, with cameras in hand, I respond to urban decay and funky erosion before I get all pumped up about Renaissance paintings or figurative priceless antiquities. Even on a recent visit to the iconic Hearst Castle in San Simeon, my attention was drawn to the pipes, pumps and detritus around the sprawling grounds. (Pic #1 and #2)
(Pic #2) Hearst Castle windows and ledge sediment. Now that’s art.
And yes, we are talking about the massive property of William Randolph Hearst, the eccentric multi-millionaire who, at one time, owned one-fourth of the world’s most valuable art — much of it bought from castles and manor houses throughout Europe after World War I.
(Pic #3) Gilded everything.
The grounds are packed with ancient and medieval works of art. The estate’s interiors are constructed with the finest Italian marble. 500-year-old Flemish tapestries decorate the main parlor, and 2000-year-old Roman statues adorn the opulent swimming pool frequented by Hollywood’s royalty the 20s and 30s. For Hearst: an enduring monument to himself and his raging ego.
(Pic #4) Ornate or overdone?
The art collection and the grand architecture (Pics #3 #4 #5) while worth millions, is so over the top, gilded, and so gaudy — that it became abundantly clear to the both of us that there was a distinct difference between wealth and class.
Fortunately, there were plenty of worn walls, crumbled sidewalks, and miles of graffitied overpasses and out-buildings on our way up north and back (Pics #6 #7). It made me smile, and wonder what Mr. Hearst would have said to the guys who “re-decorated” these shabby sheds…. and left us with hundreds of roadside Rothkos.
(Pic #5) Hearst’s main parlor, with tapestries, ceiling carvings, and overworked everything.
(Pic #6) Funked out farmhouse near Oxnard, California
(Pic #7) Straight from the street, Fillmore, California
