The Lardner Report

Unleash your creative superpowers!

The 10-Minute Task

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Committing to daily creativity.

Exploring color--10 minutes at a time

For nearly the last decade, I’ve conducted dozens of radical workshops on creative thinking for corporate executives.  My company is called “Creative Voltage” and we use abstract art as a learning tool. My clients include a sweet list of Fortune 500 standouts, and media giants. I also hold private experiential seminars for a number of prominent CEOs with a passion for art.

In my sessions, I encourage those top tier business minds to find time to create something–every day. It doesn’t matter what they produce—because these exercises are always about the creative process—not product. I can’t emphasize that enough.

It’s always a daunting task to step way outside one’s comfort zone—but in the end—the journey is always worth it. The only way to stimulate the right brain, from my experience, is to engage the right brain. And though I’ve taught hundreds of people how to do it, I still struggle with finding time to consistently ambien create my own art.

To celebrate the launching of my blog, I’m therefore committing to a daily 10-minute task–my own internal “creative zone.” At the start of each day, or the end of each night, I sit down at my art table and paint, or draw–just like I did when I was a kid—with no boundaries, no expectations, no judgment. Whether I ultimately like what I’ve created is immaterial.  I’m making art.



I encourage you to try this with me. Let me know how it feels. Let me know if it jumpstarts your creative process.  I’ll be posting some of these “abstractions” for you to peruse. Here are a few from my first week. I used my favorite Caran D’Ache water-soluble “Neocolor” crayons. I drew with my left hand though I’m a righty. I like the way it seems to naturally “disconnect” the work from my otherwise judgmental brain.

Give yourself 10-minutes. See what happens. Send me your scribbles. I used an iphone–it’s an easy upload.


Haiku in the Hood

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How one conceptual artist brought intrigue–and chuckles–to one Los Angeles  neighborhood.

Love this. Kudos to the city of West Hollywood.

Street sign switcharoo

Next time you’re trolling for a parking space near Santa Monica Boulevard, pay extra attention to the street signs. Scattered among the hundreds of “normal” signs—in standard colors and sizes with same “city authorized” font—you’ll discover a few that could make you slam on the brakes.

Look closer—you think you know what they say—but your brain probably can’t make sense of the text.

That’s because Los Angeles conceptual artist Rebecca Lowry is messing with your head.  As part of an exhibition from Gallery 825 and L.A. Arts provigil Month, Lowry has replaced the signs’ parking regulations with classic Japanese Haiku poetry, translated into three languages: English, Spanish, and Russian—representing the diverse population of the city.

Parking prank?

At the bottom of each sign, in small print, passersby can read the names of each original author.  The response is probably more than Lowry, a lecturer at the School of Architecture at USC, could have hoped for. WEHO city hall says it’s taken calls from residents reporting the fraudulent signs and placing blame on the “authors,” most of whom have been dead for more than four hundred years.

Now that’s art.

See story on KABC-TV News: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=7247751

“Surfing the Goo”

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Venus Paradise Coloring Set: An 8-year old's BFF

A psychologist friend once told me, when you’re looking at your choice for a career—“look no further than what you spent your time doing at 8-years old.” Now while that really makes sense to me, I shared this theory with a prominent Santa Monica art gallery owner, Bill Turner, and he said with a smile—“Then I guess I should have been a cowboy.”

For me, as a kid of the 60s, it meant obsessively coloring the numbered drawings in Venus Paradise Coloring Sets. I colored every day, and always asked by best friend Tana Klugherz if she saw any “white spaces” in my work—which would indicate I’d missed some spots. I knew that as I got older, I would see those spots in my earlier drawings, so I thought Tana could help circumvent that wretched experience. She was two years older, so naturally she would “see” what I didn’t. It was a happy day when she gave me the thumbs-up.

I remember the pencil colors and numbers. That vibrant turquoise was my favorite –Number 3.  Cherry red was Number 5, bright orange–Number 2. They were the kind of pencils artists describe as pigment-rich. The colors were saturated and easy to apply.

I recently tracked down Tana Klugherz (now Kamine) in New Jersey, finding out she had devoted her life and career to art.  She’s a successful graphic designer—and still loves it. She reminded me that as children, we used the word “Venus” as a verb. Most days we’d say to each other—“Do you want to Venus?”

I had forgotten viagra that– but I’ve never forgotten the absolute glee that “venusing” brought me.

Just talking about those days made me want them back. That could be why (despite a little detour into a 26-year career as a TV News reporter) I began running art workshops for inner-city kids in South Central L.A. in 1989.  It was there, in South Central–the city’s most beleaguered neighborhood—where I started feeling that jolt for color again, as kids splashed bold acrylic paints onto pumpkins at Halloween, and bunnies at Easter.

Apparently the kids–often hundreds at a time–and their parents, felt the same way I did. One mother wanted to express her thanks to us one Christmas and said, “I love when you bring that gold glitter. It makes me feel so rich.” I knew exactly what she meant.

Pure joy: Art workshop in South Central Los Angeles, 2009

Those kids just love to experiment with color—mixing them all together, until—even after you tell them it will end this way—the mess turns into a big pile of gray. But it’s not the end result that they care about—it’s the process. That feeling of pouring, mixing, thinning, splashing, squishing, and “surfing the goo” with all ten fingers spread open for the ride.

So now, all these years later–after decades spent obsessing about the “white spaces” in my life and career–I finally get it.  It’s about the simple, profoundly enormous joy of creating. Even if the road ends up turning gray, there are spectacular colors to see on the way.   So I am–metaphorically as well as literally–determined to “surf the goo” again–every day.