The Lardner Report

Unleash your creative superpowers!

How Our Cat Unearthed My Creative Past

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(Pic #1) “Piglet” shuffles my trashed collection of art, and brings it back to life.

I had a wonderful epiphanic moment this week. A moment that was born of my insanely competitive nature, and brought into focus by my 14-year-old, deaf, asthmatic cat.

(Pic #2) Cumulus Pac Man  / Acrylic on board.

My husband recently went on one of his organization binges. The result was that his home office was spotless, everything in its place. Usually, I just get jealous that he has a pristine work environment, but this time, I got competitive. “If he can clean up his office, I can organize my art studio even better.”

So I did. I went through everything, organized and cleaned. When I finished, I had this huge pile of old paintings, collages, and drawings — some were half finished, and some had fallen victim to the inner critic, and were long ago consigned to the junk heap.  I dumped them on the living room floor, prepared to banish them once and for all.

(Pic #3) Test / Ink and dress patterns on board.

That’s when the cat came in. (Pic #1) As she often does, Piglet wanted to lie in the most inconvenient place, and that was right on top of the pile. At some xenical point, she began to play with the paintings — pawing and shuffling, shuffling and pawing. When I came back out, she had uncovered some of the artwork which had been hidden deep in the stack. (Pics #2, 3, 4, 5, 6) So I was forced to look at it again.

Suddenly I saw it all differently; maybe none was a masterpiece, but then again, some were actually okay. I had convinced myself that the time I had spent on those paintings was wasted, because I was not satisfied with the results. With the passage of time, I actually now really like some of those cast-aside pieces.

(Pic #4) Beverly Zen / Collage on board.

And more important, here is the epiphany: the time I thought I had wasted on those paintings, was actually time wonderfully well spent. Looking at that discarded art with a fresh set of eyes has inspired me. Right now I am loaded with ideas for what I want to paint next. And I have a clean studio in which to do it.

(Pic #5) Woosh / Acrylic on paper.

(Pic #6) Utility box, St. Petersburg, Russia / Photo, collage.

Knowing When To Stop

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Guest post by Josh Kaplan

Did you ever watch Happy Days? I always used to be so envious of the Fonz, his confidence, his certainty that he was the absolute coolest guy in the room. Watch.

Everyone in this scene is trying to make sure they look their best before going out to face the world. Everyone except the Fonz. He takes one look and realizes nothing could improve on what he is seeing in the mirror.

Not many of us ever feel that way.

When you have been married long enough, you begin being able to understand the complex emotional tableau hidden in a simple word or phrase. One example in my house is the word “f**k.” When spoken forcefully, when it is the only word in the sentence, when it is delivered not with anger, but dissapointment, and self-recrimination, usually means only one thing. “I was working on a painting – it was really working, but I kept painting, kept adding layers, trying to make it perfect, and now it sucks.”  I’ve been through this with Lonnie a hundred times. It’s not unique to her, it is part of the yin and yang that lives close to the surface in any creative person’s soul.  The inner-critic, the subconscious naysayer that can cripple artistic expression.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for self-criticism. Bad things can happen when an artist reaches a point where the ability to judge one’s own work is silenced by success, or ego, or Jack Daniels. If you are looking for a tangible example, listen to a couple minutes of the Beatles “You Know My Name.” (Listen below.)

I think we would have all been better served if Lennon/McCartney had listened to a whispering voice of self-doubt.

But that’s an exception, for the most part our “inner critic” is just a roadblock between us and artistic viagra creation.

Yesterday, I saw what I considered a watershed moment in my house. One of the things Lonnie likes to do, is take one of my photographs, and use it as the literal canvas for one of her abstract pieces. Here’s an example  (Pic #1) — a shot I took of a rusty old bumper at a local junkyard.

(Pic #1) Left: Close-up, bumper 1940s era truck. Right: Same photo, w/Neocolor crayon markings

I love when she turns one of those quick unremarkable grab shots into something so much more interesting with just a few strokes of a crayon.

(Pic #2) Close-up photo of rattan roof - ripped, applied to canvas.

Earlier this week, she became intrigued by a shot I took of the rattan covering on our patio. Again, unremarkable. Her plan was to tear away the unnecessary parts, glue it to a canvas, and paint around it. When I next saw the photo, it was in fact, ripped along the edges, and glued to canvas. It was also hanging on the wall, a finished piece without benefit of any greater artistic embellishment. She had stopped along the way, looked at it, and decided that simple was better, that nothing more needed to be done, and pronounced the work complete. BREAKTHROUGH!

She took the time to breathe, to live with the artwork for awhile and silence the voices always screaming at her to do more.  Maybe those voices will be replaced by other ones, more supportive ones. Maybe in the meantime they’ll just be supplanted by a simple mantra: STOP. JUST STOP FOR A LITTLE WHILE.  Give yourself time to appreciate how good the piece really is, before you race to make it better. You may find it was like Fonzie’s hair — perfect all the while.

The Art of Teaching Art

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(Pic #1) My own "sidewalk show" found on the street in Calabasas, California

How my high school art teacher changed the way I view – everything.

I remember the day I understood what it meant to succeed at a task – specifically a school art project. It wasn’t the grade — nor the obligatory oohs and ahs from my parents — it had to be something I felt inside. I didn’t know this until I was 15 – when my 10th grade art teacher, “Mr. Printz” tossed out a question that made me cry.

(Pic #2) Robert Printz, former Great Neck North High School Art Teacher

We were assigned a sculpture project, and I had chosen to make a plaster of paris oak tree in the middle of our living room in Great Neck, Long Island. I knew I needed something to hold the plaster onto the trunk, so I bought a roll of chicken wire and made what I thought was an adequate column, covered in traditional paper mache, and onto which I spackled the wet plaster.

Epic fail.

The plaster never dried, and by the time I had gotten the masterpiece to class, I had left a goopy white trail from my house through the halls of Great Neck North.  The project had become an oozing blob of white goo supported by a sickly crumpled wire foundation… resembling a little more of a Dr. Seuss character than I might have hoped.

I knew I had to submit the work, and had to speak about it.  I was paralyzed.  But Mr. Printz cut right through my consternation, and asked one thing:

“Lon, does this piece raise your blood pressure?”

At first I thought, well, yes, but only because I am completely humiliated.  I knew that wasn’t what he meant. He went on to explain that you know when a work is good when it sends you somewhere, speaks to you, makes you really feel something.

 I felt nothing.

Lesson learned: Appreciating a turn of phrase, a high note, a sidewalk show

From that day on, I have always tried to judge my work by this standard, and it has become a part of my psyche – an  internal mechanism of sorts — for appreciating and exploring art: in literature, in music, and on canvas.

It’s why I get so excited reading certain descriptions of nature in a Robert Frost poem, hearing the late jazz great Susannah McCorkle sing “Waters of March” or finding an unexpected artistic jolt on the sidewalk while I’m out for a jog. I’m now recognizing — and savoring — when I do feel my blood pressure rise.  It’s what’s supposed to happen when you do your best work, and appreciate the beauty of art around you.

In describing blue butterflies, I love that Frost uses the phrase “flowers that fly.” (See poem above.) I still get misty when McCorkle slips into the Portuguese chorus, and just last week my blood steamed up when I saw this Mondrian-style cement block (Pic #1) on a sidewalk in Calabasas.

It’s a wonder I have time for anything else. Thank God for that, and for a sobering critique from Mr. Printz.

“Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”

— Tina Adderholdt