5 A Month Club: January


I've spent much of my adulthood meticulously planning large scale art projects, that require the perfect setting, material, design, set up etc. with the result that I never actually get them started, much less finish them. In an attempt to route this unhealthy all or nothing (which has proven to be more nothing than all) work-flow, I've decided to force myself to output five art projects every month. The categories are:

1. Painting
2. Film Making
3. Writing
4. Music Writing
5. Sculpture

All mediums which I'm notoriously slow and obsessively perfectionist at.

So the deal is that by the end of each month I have to finish something in each of the five categories NO MATTER WHAT. The deadline is the most important aspect of the projects. Even if the film is five seconds long, or the writing is a three line poem or the music is a catchy 20 second jingle, it's of no matter, all that matters is that 5 projects get done every month.

Of course I'll still be obsessing and noddling my large scale projects, but at least this way I'll have stuff coming off the presses regularly in the mean time.

The inspiration came from two sources. The first was a book a read a while ago about art and creativity wherein a sculpture teacher conducted an experiment with his class, and split them into two groups, the first group he said he would grade entirely on one sculpture, and didn't care what else they made. The second group he said he would grade purely based on the weight of the clay they used up throughout the semester, the more clay the better the grade. Interestingly enough he found that the best sculptures always came from the second group. Because they weren't worried about perfection, and instead got lots of practice throwing pot after pot, until they inevitably improved, faster than the group that obsessed about a single pot the whole time.

The second source of inspiration is from my own experience where I find that once I get started on a project, no matter how dumb, or small, or irrelevant, I always find opportunity to exercise creative new impulses and ideas, and end up getting really into the project and tend to be happy with the outcome. Usually an external source is required to get the ball rolling, like helping someone else do something, but in this case I want to be my own catalyst for project creation.

So below are the results of the January installment of the 5 A Month Club:


Film:



Song:




Painting:



Sculpture:





Writing: