Vemödalen

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes

A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our culture.

Photographers have a word for that wistful feeling: vemödalen.

Vemödalen—the feeling everything has already been done—was coined by the Swiss blogger John Koening, whose Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines "emotions we feel, but don't have words to express."

According to Koening, vemödalen is "the frustration of photographing something amazing, when thousands of identical photos already exist."

Those thousands of precedent photos turn mine into "something hollow, pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."

By this definition, vemödalen (a word doubtless derived from the Swedish vemod, meaning "melancholy") is a kind of weltschmerz that mistakes every work of art as another flat-pack item from Ikea.

It's easy to understand where vemödalen comes from.

Unoriginality is baked into human existence, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger proved in Being and Time.

Heidegger calls the self of our everyday being the "they-self" (Man-selbst).

The they-self is a conformist and unoriginal way of engaging with the world.

Heidegger claims that I am not myself as I go about the tasks that preoccupy me every day. 

I am, instead, the they-self, a worker among workers, a productive citizen, a member of the crowd.

The they-self, he says, represents "concerned absorption in the world we encounter. 

"The 'they' prescribes our way of interpreting the world."

In other words, I don't encounter the world: they do. 

"It is not 'I', in the sense of my own self, that 'am,' but others, whose way is that of the 'they,'" Heidegger says.

While being a they-self feels comfortable, Heidegger insists, remaining one is a choice: a choice to surrender your soul to the "dictatorship of the they;" to surrender, sheepishly, to conformity, mediocrity, practicality, and ingenuousness.

In a real sense, Heidegger says, we wear a disguise our whole lives: the disguise of the they. And that disguise—that inauthentic self—tricks us into believing "there's nothing new under the sun" when, in fact, everything under the sun is new every moment of every day, if only we open our eyes to it.

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"It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die," Oscar Wilde once wrote. 

"Most people are other people. Their life is a mimicry."

Above: Orange. Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches.

Time is On My Side

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

— Somerset Maugham

I don't care for many aspects of aging.

The mysterious sore knees and feet and back muscles.

Pretty women calling me "Sir."

Automatically getting the senior discount.

Those things suck.

But one noticeable aspect of aging pleases me immensely: discovering the power of patience.

Without patience, I could never have made painting my second career.

Because painting consumes time—tons of it. (I just spent 30 hours painting a single eye and am not finished with it yet.)

"Patience is bitter," Rousseau said, "but its fruit is sweet."

Why I had to grow old to at long last discover patience puzzles me.

Maybe I lacked the patience to look for it.

Maybe I had no time for patience.

What eluded me, I think, was knowing that patience wields power impatience lacks.

Patience is a weapon.

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. "But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all."

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying that age, if you're lucky, brings with it a sobriety that's missing in youth and middle age. (No surprise, some AA groups recite an "extended" Serenity Prayer that adds, "Grant me patience for the changes that take time.")

English borrowed the word sobriety seven centuries ago from the Latin sobrius.

Sobrius meant not only abstemious, but calm, steady, unhurried, still.

In a word, patient.

Age means, though vastly finite, time at last is on my side.

Above: Five of Five. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.

Sunday Painters

If people call me a Sunday painter
I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week.

— L. S. Lowry

Thanks to the critics, Winston Churchill and Bob Dylan share the label "Sunday painter."

A label neither deserves.

Lacking degrees from accredited art schools, both took up painting in their late 30s, when they were already celebrities. Both sought a new field that challenged them afresh, because celebrity had failed them. Both were determined to succeed.

If those are shortcomings, tell me where to sign up. 

No one who studies painting in earnest wants to be called a Sunday painter—a hobbyist, a dabbler, a dilettante, a wanna-be. 

Even if useful, in a world of ready critics and trolls the label can lacerate the very thickest of skins.

Fortunately, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-blooming painters I've encountered aren't put off by critics and labels. 

And, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-bloomers I've met have these things in common: they're self-confident, having already flourished in another career; they so love what they're doing, they can't be deterred; and they're vigilantly self-critical.

These late-bloomers also share what developmental psychologist Carol Dweck calls the "growth mindset," the belief that competence in any endeavor increases with effort and repetition.

There are Sunday painters, to be sure; unabashed optimists who are blind to their faults, deaf to advice, blissfully ignorant and content with gaucheness.

They're in it for fun, not to sweat over details.

And, more often than not, they'll move on once another "bright and shiny object" crosses the path.

The rest will keep trying and failing and trying and failing... until one day they don't.

Starving Artist

Creativity is not something we think a person should go “all in” on. Because, odds are, you’ll starve.

― Jeff Goins

Effective today, I'm going on a diet, to rid myself of the "Quarantine 15." 

It's hardly the first time I've fasted, and likely won't be the last. 

So I'm officially―and literally―becoming today a "starving artist."

That's because, in addition to the start of my diet, today marks the launch of my new website: Robert Francis James

If you like the paintings you see, buy one; help keep me from continuing as a starving artist.

The prices are affordable and include framing. 

The best thing you can do during a lockdown is decorate your space. 

And original art makes fine decoration.

Painting "Challah" by Robert Francis James

Surface Notation

An artist is making something exist by observing it.

― William S. Burroughs

The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.

He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."

[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]

Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.

I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."

It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.

The good news? 

Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.

Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."

Promise to watch over myself. 

That's about the best I can do.

Painting "Social Distancing" by Robert Francis James

Weeds

Once in a golden hour, I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower, the people said, a weed.

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

My war against the weeds is going slightly worse than Afghanistan.

Ecologists defend weeds as nature’s way of nourishing the soil and protecting it from erosion. But weeds' spiky proflicacy spooks me―nearly as much as bugs do―and so I engage in an endless ground war against them.

A costly and unwinnable war.

I'm also fighting another unwinnable war: the war against critics. 

While I sow the web with words, hoping like Tennyson they'll flower, my critics see only weeds.

It's easy, of course, to trash an act of creation; much harder to attempt one. I take comfort in the thought. I take comfort, too, in the fact that critics have sometimes been splendidly wrong.

Chicago Tribune critic H.L. Mencken called The Great Gatsby―today considered a literary masterpiece and F. Scott Fitzgerald's definitive work―"no more than a glorified anecdote" when the book appeared in 1925. Mencken thought Gatsby was a "clown," and the other characters worthless and boring. Although Fitzgerald's writing is stylish, Mencken conceded, "this story is obviously unimportant."

Nearly 30 million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold since 1925.

Critics also sneered at these novels when they first appeared: As I  Lay Dying, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Catcher in the Rye.

“I've been all over the world," Leonard Bernstein said, "and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” Nor have I.

Now, back to the weeds.

Want to Be Hot?

Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Blame Trophy Communism: in our everybody-gets-a-trophy culture, self-criticism is hard to come by. Which means a lot of weak work gets off the drawing board.

If you're a Trophy Capitalist, on the other hand, you don't worry: you know the market weeds out weaklings.

But self-criticism should be encouraged, if only to grease the market's skids.

Feeling shame about your work is just part of the game and—as an old boss of mine always said—"If you want the name, you gotta play the game."

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a Zoom meeting led by Andrew Wyeth's granddaughter and chronicler, Victoria. 

I asked her whether the artist ever destroyed work he wasn't happy with. Her answer was immediate: yes, like clockwork, every spring and fall Wyeth built a bonfire in his yard and burned work he wasn't happy with.

He didn't want it in the world.

Unless it stifles good work, self-criticism strengthens it. Don't sweat your missteps, but, please, don't be so naive as to think they deserve a trophy.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and  difficulty," Teddy Roosevelt said.

You want to be hot? 

Build a bonfire.

Encore

Yippee! I've sold two paintings. 

And launched an "encore" career.

I'm heartened as well to learn "it takes only a few people to make a career," according to New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz.

It takes as few people as 12:

• One dealer who pushes your work and "who’ll be honest with you about your crappy or great art."
  

• Six collectors. "Even if you have only six collectors, that’s enough for you to make enough money to have enough time to make your work."
  
  
• Three critics "who seem to get what you’re doing."
  
  
• Two curators "who would put you in shows from time to time."

"Surely your crappy art can fake out 12 stupid people," Saltz says. "I’ve seen it done with only three or four supporters. I’ve seen it done with one!"

It doesn't take a village to succeed.

At Jasper Johns' very first show, the Museum of Modern Art bought three of his works. The artist also landed on the cover of ARTnews.

Elizabeth Peyton’s breakthrough show took place in an empty room in the Chelsea Hotel, where visitors could see 21 of her charcoal-and-ink drawings. 

"According to the hotel ledger, only 38 people saw the show after the opening,'" Saltz says.

"It doesn’t take much."

Today Peyton's works sell for a million dollars. 

Painting by Bob James

Ads Need Instant Meaning to Register

If a sign is not necessary, then it is meaningless.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

A fundamental law of advertising—a law too often ignored—goes:

The more you try to say, the less you get across.

How many times have you seen mind-boggling ads like this?

What's the advertiser promoting, you wonder. 

A family of ales? A bar? A restaurant? 

None of the above.

It's a trade show. 

But is it the cloud computing industry's "premier show?" Or is it the cloud computing industry's "global show?" You decide. The advertiser can't.

Confusing ads never register with readers.

"Ads need to have 'instant meaning' to stand a chance," says a recent report from brand consultancy Kantar Millward Brown.

"When developing ads based on an idea or feeling you want to communicate, make sure these can easily be grasped," the report says.

"An idea or impression has a better chance of landing, and influencing, what are often superficial future purchase decisions."

Careers

Like it or not, life is a series of competitions.

― Harvey Mackay

When career first appeared in English in the 16th century, it was used to refer to a jousting field or racecourse. Knights who jousted were said to "career" at tournaments.

The word came from the French carrière, also denoting a racecourse, which came from the Latin carrus, meaning a chariot.

It wasn't until the 19th century that career came to mean the "course of one's professional life."

For a fortunate few, careers are smooth, steady, genteel affairs.

But for most of us, they're pretty brutal, halfway between a joust and a chariot race.

McGuffins

The main thing I've learned over the years is that the McGuffin is nothing.

― Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock named the mysterious―and incidental―thing that triggers frenzy in a film the McGuffin.

Famous Hollywood McGuffins include the toy sled in Citizen Kane, the transfer papers in Casablanca, the black statue in The Maltese Falcon, the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz, and the government secrets in North by Northwest.

Directors love McGuffins.

Managers do, too. Consultants call workplace McGuffins administrivia, which The Urban Dictionary defines as, "mindless bureaucratic tasks imposed on workers by management in order to crush the soul and prevent one from achieving anything useful or fulfilling."

McGuffinish time-wasters are inescapable. The seven worst are:

• Deciphering thoughtless emails 
• Learning seldom-used software platforms 
• Attending purposeless meetings 
• Assembling management reports 
• Explaining the obvious to untrained people 
• Explaining what everybody heard, but no one else wrote down 
• Redoing good work 

If McGuffins like these are triggering frenzy during your day, my advice is:

• Tackle urgent and strategic chores first
• Handle things once
• Identify the one or two biggest time-wasters and eliminate them

Until you learn to deal with workplace McGuffins, you'll never get off the crazy-making, value-destroying treadmill.

Magic Beans

Nobody can "soldier" without coffee.

― Ebenezer Nelson Gilpin

Coffee fuels every worthwhile enterprise. It has for 500 years.

Voltaire drank 50 cups a day, despite his doctor's warnings. So did Balzac, who once said, "Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

Kant, like clockwork, drank a cup after dinner every evening. L. Frank Baum drank five, every morning, loading each with cream and sugar. Kierkegaard preferred to add only sugar to his―30 cubes per cup.

Bach, Bacon, Franklin, Johnson, Proust, Mahler, Sartre and Camus guzzled coffee all day long. Bach wrote an opera about coffee-drinking. Franklin marketed his own line of beans.

Beethoven drank coffee as his breakfast, brewing it himself. His recipe called for 60 beans per cup, which he'd count out by hand meticulously.

Teddy Roosevelt drank a gallon of coffee a day, sweetened with a new invention, saccharine. His son said TR's favorite mug was “more in the nature of a bathtub” than a cup.

Gertrude Stein adored coffee nearly as much; she called it a "happening." Patti Smith reports in her memoir she can drink 14 cups with no effect on her sleep. And Margaret Atwood so loves coffee she has her own brand.

Cartoonist Flash Rosenberg understands coffee's pivotal role better than anyone: “I believe humans get a lot done, not because we’re smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee."

The Great Rule of Foresight

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling

Most ventures, products and ads fail. Mind-blindness, tone-deafness and overoptimism are the chief reasons why.

Nothing's fail-proof, but you can look positively clairvoyant—especially when no one's sure which direction to take—by presenting lots of ideas.

When asked, for example, to name a new product, create a campaign, or write a major headline, I strive to present clients at least 10 ideas.

I try not to fall in love with any one, but to think of all as straws in the wind.

"Throw straws in the air to test the wind," said the 17th century Jesuit Baltasar Gracian.

"By finding out how things will be perceived—especially from those whose reception or success is doubtful—you can determine a great deal about their chances of turning out well, and decide whether you should proceed in earnest or withdraw entirely.

"By trying people’s intentions in this way, the wise person knows on what ground he stands. This is the great rule of foresight in asking, in desiring, and in ruling."

The Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

― Charles Bukowski

A Freudian psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, dreamed up the term "writer's block" in the late 1940s. His remedy, naturally, was the "talking cure." At today's prices, that costs $300 a session.

Fine, if you can afford it.

A fiction writer like Stephen King cures writer's block less expensively.

King simply goes for a three-mile stroll, and conjures up another unhinged politico, demonic pet, or zombie retiree, to move a gridlocked story forward.

B2B writers can't use that trick (although walking is good for everyone).

You'll find lots of nutty advice (climb into a sleeping bag, or listen to pink noise, or down a martini), but the best cure for writer's block, in my experience, is a three-step technique I learned from copywriter Bob Bly:

• Locate a project you wrote that's similar to the current project
• Make a copy of the file and open it
• Start rewriting your own copy

You'll not only avoid writer's block, you'll quick-start the new project. Don't have a similar project? Then swipe another writer's and start to rewrite that.

Try it. Don't wait til writer's block besets you.

On Labor and Genius

A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at.

— Oscar Wilde

Not only will it drive innovation and equality, a universal basic income will spark genius. Or so thought Oscar Wilde.

In his 1891 essay, "The Soul of Man under Socialism," Wilde envisioned a world where automation relieves everyone from work; and a guaranteed income, from competition, "that sordid necessity of living for others."

Spared work and competition, everyone is free "to realize the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world."

In a world without work and competition, everyone "is perfectly and absolutely himself"—free to be, Wilde says, an ingenious individual. Poet or scientist, student or shepherd, playwright or theologian, fisherman or child, "it does not matter what he is," Wilde says, "as long as he realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him."

We'd call it authenticity.

Wilde also thought accumulated wealth to be a "nuisance," because its possession "involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother."

Accumulated wealth drags down the wealthy, because "the true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is," Wilde says.

"In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it."

Pleasing the Gods

Several years ago, I hired a cabinetmaker to construct half a dozen cherrywood built-ins with adjustable shelves. Handsome, beautifully-crafted things.

I noticed the man was finishing every edge of every shelf―all 60 of them―and asked, "Why bother to finish all four edges, when you can only see the one facing you?"

His reply was dour. "Because I see them."

It's delightful to encounter mortals who won't run in the race to the bottom.

The sculptor Phidias was commissioned in 440 BC to create statues for the roof of the Parthenon. 

After the installation, the city accountant refused to pay his bill.

"These statues are on the roof of a temple on the highest hill in Athens," the accountant complained. "Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round―for sculpting back sides nobody can see."

"You're wrong," Phidias replied. "The gods can see them."

There's danger in the race to the bottom, as Seth Godin says: you might win.

And whether you do or don't, the gods can see you.

Admit You're a Hack

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative,
original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

— David Ogilvy

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, wants you to believe storytelling is hack work.

"I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device," he says. "But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner. Content marketing is a job, not an art form."

I suspect Baer doesn't know that Faulkner, with over a dozen dependents to support, wasn't above sports writing, travel writing, and movie scriptwriting (he's credited for, among other films, The Big Sleep).

But I get Baer's point: marketing's kind of storytelling ain't art-making; it's hack work.

"I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective," Baer says, "thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not.

"The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. Content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise."

Or, as my agency's website says, "“It’s not creative unless it sells."

Either It Looks Like a Miracle or It's Stupid

My ad agency years taught me never to show clients work that, for all purposes, couldn't be released as is.

Showing anything less than finished work gives clients little to evaluate. And showing anything less destroys the magic.

So I was gratified to hear an actual magician, Teller, express this principle to the host of NPR's This American Life.

Teller describes how he labored for months to incorporate the legendary "floating ball routine" into Penn & Teller's show.

Teller worked alone at night on an empty stage in a darkened theater, week after week, testing move after move after move, to make the trick fresh. He tested different props; built a stage set; abandoned it, and built another.

Only when he'd perfected the routine did Teller show it to his partner.

"Why didn't you just show Penn something rough?" the host asks Teller. "Just something with the moves you'd been inventing?"

"No, no, no!" Teller insists. "That's the thing about magic. You can't look at a half-finished piece of magic and know whether it's good or not. It has to be perfect before you can evaluate whether it's good.

"Magic is a fantastically meticulous form. Magic is an on/off switch. Either it looks like a miracle or it's stupid."

Writers are All Vampires

Writers are all vampires.

― Herman Wouk

Writer Trisha Richards asked me where I find ideas for blog posts. 

Novelist Herman Wouk provides the answer.

When it comes to sources for ideas, I'm indiscriminate; an equal opportunity vampire.

More or less in rank order, I derive ideas from:

• Nonfiction books
• Bloggers
• Everyday conversations
• Everyday experiences
• $#*! my spouse says
• Print articles
• White papers
• Fiction
• Movies
• News programs
• Fantasies
• Memories
• Dreams
• Songs
• B2B events
• People and things not otherwise listed

Whenever an idea for a blog post comes to mind, I always write it down.

Immediately.

Sometimes I grab a napkin or a piece of trash; most often I send an email to myself.

Writer Neil Gaiman says there's no lack of ideas; only of attention to them.

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."

What Comes Naturally

Certain readers resented me when
they could no longer recognize their territory.

— Jacques Derrida

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the most influential thinker of the past fifty years, twice failed his university entrance exams.

On his first attempt, he turned in a blank sheet of paper.

On his second, he turned in essays the graders called "unintelligible."

Above one of Derrida's essays, the grader wrote, "You seem to be constantly on the verge of something interesting but, somewhat, you always fail to explain it clearly."

Above another, the grader wrote, "An exercise in virtuosity, with undeniable intelligence, but with no particular relation to the history of philosophy."

As it turned out, Derrida's writing never became any easier to comprehend.

Whatever the audience's reaction, you might do better just to be yourself.

DID YOU KNOW? Judy Garland was cast as Annie Oakley in the 1950 film Annie Get Your Gun, but was fired (as was director Busby Berkeley) two months into production.