In my first tour of graduate school, I realized that I had to make rules for myself—maxims to guide me in my art career. Artists are rule-breakers by nature, and I realized that my wide-open mind was the very reason I had to prescribe some simple guidelines for myself. So I decided to create a set of maxims.
Having an important and firm maxim is like sticking to the rule for 17 in black jack. If your hand is 17, statistically, you should never hit. But if your hand is an ace and a 6, then you should always hit, because you can always fall back from 17 to 7. The analogy has to do with replacing impulsive thinking with consistent thinking. I developed my maxims because they are outside of my artistic impulses and emotions. They are simply the better thing to do, and I can trust them, many times, better than I can trust my brain. They require faith in the easily forgotten facts that they are founded on.
As I progress with my blog, I will publish my maxims, one by one. Some of them I invented myself and some of them I stole from others. Some I am still formulating. They are scattered on scraps of paper around my studio and files throughout my hard drive. Some are just simple rules that haven't morphed into a clever saying, yet. But as they germinate, this blog will be a great place for me to store them so I can refer to them as my career progresses, adding more as I go. I'll place a quick link to them in the list of categories to the right.
We artists are open-minded by nature, so it isn't that hard to change. For me, the rule-breaking artist, the best way was to make some rules for myself. And then try to follow them.
