Iterations

Small Is Still Significant

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Lately I’ve been feeling the weight of how complicated everything seems — I even wrote a bit about it in the last Iteration. It seems that the scale of it all — the speed, the certainty, the volume — can often make even small efforts feel almost invisible. I’ve caught myself wondering whether the things that I make or the conversations I have matter in any “real” way, and honestly, that unsettles me. And I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt that.

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You Have to Start Making Decisions

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Towards the end of last year, I started thinking about building a new website for myself. Not just another vanity site (although I’ve built plenty of those), but more of an archive of the various things I’ve done over my career and a hub where I can share stories around what I’m thinking about and what I’m working on that aren’t dependent on The Algorithm. After years of inconsistent, and if I’m being honest, fairly half-hearted efforts to play the social media game, I’m finally done. I have no more interest in chasing likes or followers or the ever-elusive “brand deal.” I just want to make stuff in my quiet little studio and write about what I make — but also, and maybe more importantly, about what others are making, doing, and thinking about. In fact, in many ways, I kind of want my making to be a byproduct of what others are making, and maybe that includes you.

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Let Go Lightly

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0400

About 18 months ago, I started seeing a therapist. I had gotten to a place that I’ve only really been once before and Adrianne encouraged me — actually, she implored me — to talk with a therapist. She once said to me, “Every day, I’m terrified that I’m either going to come home and not find you, or worse, that I will.” I’m not going to lie, that hit pretty hard. I knew I was in a dark place, but we often think that we are the only ones who know just how bad it really is — that we are somehow hiding it from the rest of the world. It’s not true, of course, but that was me in that moment, and to hear the person I love the most in the world say that to me…let’s just say that it shone a light on the dark that I felt surrounded by. So for the past year and a half, I’ve been having the sessions and doing the deep work of unlearning what I had learned and letting go of some of the limiting beliefs and behaviors that have seemed so hell bent on keeping me out of the light.

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The Weight of Waiting

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 19:00:00 -0400

It took a bit to fire up, but once it did, the familiar rumble of my Dad’s 1974 Ford F100 took me right back to my childhood summers. As Art slowly backed the truck off of the trailer, Adrianne commented, “It’s smaller than I thought it would be, given how large it looms in your history.” Indeed, I thought. One of my earliest memories of this truck is of waking up on the bench seat at Buckskin State Park on the Arizona side of the Colorado river. It was cold that morning — though it was light, the sun hadn’t yet crested the red rock hills that bordered the campground to the East. Dad and my stepmother Linda were both awake after having spent the night in sleeping bags in the bed of the truck. Dad had made a small fire that was crackling and popping and I remember the faint smell of coffee on the chilly morning air.

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Long Hot Summers / The Story Of The Style Council

Style, Stunts, and a Tiny House

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:00:00 -0400

I’ve shared this story before, and regardless of whether it’s true or just the stuff of photographic legend, it’s so good that I think it bears repeating every so often. The story goes that a photographer was presenting his portfolio to the great Jay Maisel. He asked Jay how he could take more interesting pictures, to which Jay immediately replied, “become a more interesting person.” It may sound trite, but I think it’s often easy for makers to become myopic in terms of the types of things that inspire them. Painters are often looking at other painters, photographers look at other photographers, musicians are often listening to other musicians, and so on. If you’re always looking (or listening) to what’s familiar, the odds of you arriving at something that’s unfamiliar (even if it’s only unfamiliar to you), are pretty slim, which is why it can be helpful to look outside of your comfort zone for inspiration. I’m interested in almost everything so as you might imagine, my feeds are pretty eclectic. While I’ve gotten away from posts like this over the years, I think I’d like to jump back in and offer up an occasional look at some of the things that have caught my attention, and might catch yours.

LINKS

Mubi interview with Lee Pace

The incredible tiny home of Masato Igarashi

You can find all of the links I mention in this Iteration on my Substack.

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Making and Money

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:00:00 -0400

For a long time now — years, in fact — I’ve leaned toward the belief that I deserve to be paid for the creative work I do. And to be clear, I don’t think that’s unreasonable, at least not from a certain point of view. After all, in a capitalist system that’s sort of how it works, right? You do a job, you earn money, you buy things. On the other side, goods and services cost money and we generally accept that premise. Cars, houses, a gallon of milk, a bucket of chicken — whatever it is, we accept that acquiring those things is transactional. I exchange the money I earn for the thing that you produce. The same goes for services like electricity, gas, your phone bill, or internet access. That’s just how the system works. But there are gray areas. Some types of goods and services seem to be more or less exempt from that agreement — namely creative ones. Music, movies, and software often fall into that bucket. And, to make it more personal, art.

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I Buried Another Bird

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

Yesterday, I had a heart-wrenching experience. I was out for a morning walk with Adrianne and Cooper when I spotted a bird flailing in the grass under a tree. As I got closer, it struggled to escape, its life force fading away. When it finally stopped moving, I knelt down and tried to comfort it with a damp leaf (Adrianne advised against touching it directly due to the bird flu). Watching it die right before my eyes was incredibly painful. I still don’t know what happened, but it clearly had endured some serious trauma. Tears welled up in my eyes as I confessed to Adrianne, “I hate this.” She replied, “I know, but in its final moments, you showed it kindness and love.”

A NOTE: I know this isn’t the usual fare for Iterations, but I think quiet moments like this can be just as important as the big existential ones. I have dozens of these types of vignettes — sometimes it’s just me taking notes on my life and the observations and feelings are just for me, but other times, like this one, I think they are worth sharing.

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Little Beasts and Other Pleasures

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Last week, I got a text message from my friend Michelle, who works at the National Gallery of Art. “Lunch tomorrow or Thursday?” followed by “Come see the movie in Little Beasts. It starts at the top of every hour. I would love to discuss it with you.” Not only was Michelle one of the first people I met when I first visited DC in 2014, since then, she’s become a close friend and the National Gallery has come to be my happy place in DC. In fact, some of the best art and photography shows I’ve ever seen, including Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (Catalog), Gordon Parks: The New Tide, 1940-1950 (Catalog), Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Catalog), The 70s Lens, and Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper (Catalog), to name just a few, have all been at the National Gallery. I’ve also learned about artists I’d never heard of before, like Rachel Whiteread, Philip Guston, James Castle, and Elizabeth Catlett, among others. And in nearly every case, when I’ve had the chance to walk through a show with Michelle, through her knowledge and experience of art and materials, I’ve come away with a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation of the nuances of both art and artists.

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The Ballad of the Benches

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Whether it’s a sheet of old plywood resting on a couple of sawhorses or a fastidiously crafted hardwood masterpiece, the workbench has long been the centerpiece of studios, workshops, garages, and maker spaces of all kinds.

Of the many standout features of our house, I think I was most excited about the multiple basement spaces that I would be able to use as studios for the different things I do. The previous owners were makers — she was a painter and he was a woodworker whose wood shop occupied one of the basement spaces. When we bought our house in 2016, I remember telling Adrianne that I wanted to make one of the spaces my paint studio and that I would make some benches “on day one.” Well, day one didn’t happen, nor did week one, month one, or year one. In fact, it’s taken me nearly nine years to finally build benches for my studio. So what happened?

See the photos I reference in this episode on Substack: The Ballad of the Benches

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It’s Still Just a Tool

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The other day, I was going through my archive of work ahead of a website redesign, and I found a blog post that I wrote in 2014 that’s sort of an homage to my all-time favorite camera and how after finally acquiring one, I couldn’t bring myself to actually use it. Ten years later, I think the post is still relevant to how some photographers and artists have a tendency to fetishize the tools they use. I know that was me once. For what it’s worth, I think photography is unique in that, because it’s art and science, the potential proficiency of the craft often gets conflated with having the “right” gear. The irony is that it really is the purposeful practice of using our gear, whatever it is, that allows us to get better — to see better. I bought my first SLR in 1982 and I have enjoyed taking pictures ever since. Over the past 40+ years, I’ve used a bunch of different cameras and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them for different reasons. But the one thing that they have in common is the ability to look at the world through a viewfinder — and for me, that’s where the marrow is. As convenient as it is to have an iPhone camera in my pocket that captures fantastic pictures, I love the restriction of a viewfinder and I always have. It lessens the visual noise of the world (to a greater or lesser degree depending on what lens I’m using, of course) and it allows me to practice seeing. In fact, it demands it, doesn’t it? After all, you’re only given a tiny swatch of the world, surrounded by black. What you put in that swatch is up to you, whether you’re observing a scene or creating one from scratch. Photography allows us to impose a point of view on the world around us, or to build one from our imaginations that shows a world we want to see.

See the photos I reference in this episode on Substack: It's Still Just a Tool

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It’s Okay to be Disappointed

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0400

I love making things, whether that means making a conversation with someone or making a piece of art or writing, and getting to do that fairly unfettered is a massive privilege and it’s not wasted on me. That said, it’s okay to be disappointed in what you make — and maybe not disappointed with the end product itself, but in the reception or how it gets received. It’s okay to be disappointed that other people don’t love it as much as you do — because you poured yourself into it, so of course you love it. But then when you release it into the world and the world just shrugs, it’s okay to be disappointed with that.

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Going Back to Move Forward

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:00:00 -0400

NOTE: To see the photos that I reference in this episode, see the post on my Substack.

On one of our recent morning walk and talks, a group of photographers and I were talking about how much worse Instagram has gotten over the past few years in terms of exposure and engagement. We all agreed that it seems like most photographers we’ve spoken to about it have very similar feedback. Subscribers, reach, and engagement are all a fraction of what they used to be. And the platform that was once all about sharing images no longer seems to care about images at all — instead they prioritize short-form video in a desperate attempt to compete with TikTok and YouTube. But in the process, I think the platform has lost its way and has just become a vapid mechanism to spoon-feed ads to users. To be clear, there are still a bunch of terrific artists and photographers on Instagram — which is the main reason I haven’t left — but that’s not what gets served up to me by the algorithm. Even the people I follow are in my feed less and less, which makes very little sense to me. I’ve told you “this is the work I’m interested in” and yet that’s not what you give me. So the whole experience just keeps getting more and more disappointing — and we haven’t even talked about the “Tech Bro” leadership, which is a whole other thing.

One of the photographers in the conversation asked whether I’d tried Flickr as an alternative. I told him that I used to be pretty active on Flickr — especially when I was still teaching Photoshop — but honestly, I don’t think I’ve logged in since 2017 or 2018 when SmugMug bought the platform. I said that I’d really been enjoying the upswing in artists and photographers on Substack so I hadn’t really considered other alternatives, especially one that in my mind had been all but dead for years. Still, he encouraged me to give it a look and later that afternoon, I was kind of amazed to see that my old login credentials still worked. The homepage feed looks different than I remember it, which is probably a good thing. What surprised me the most is that when I clicked on “Photostream” in the “You” dropdown, I still had more than 300 photos that I was sure I had deleted, but I’m so glad that I didn’t. It was amazing to see some of the things that I was focusing on from 2007-2011. Most of the photos are of architectural details, which I still love to photograph, but many of my photos from that time are street portraits and I remember the stories around every one of them.

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LINKS
Better Than Ezra
Kevin Griffin From Better Than Ezra Advice On Songwriting
Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED
Kevin Griffin (Wikipedia)
The Greatest Song by Kevin Griffin

Get Out of Your Way

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:00:00 -0400

Reinvention is tough. Disrupting old patterns of beliefs or behaviors is tough. Even when we finally decide to disrupt the flow of familiarity, the fear of the unknown that awaits us can be paralyzing. I know that it has been for me. But one of the things that my therapist routinely encourages me to do is to sit with discomfort — to force myself to pause and breathe and stave off the instinct to move into “fight or flight” mode. In sitting with the discomfort or the pain or fear, we reduce its power and we might be more able to move through it to whatever is waiting on the other side. For me, I think that’s the possibility of making more work that I find interesting, finding an audience that will value it, and becoming more connected with a broader community of artists and makers.

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Gather Ye Rosebuds

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:00:00 -0400

Yesterday, Adrianne and I went out to one of favorite little coffee shops to have breakfast and spend the morning working. About an hour in, I had this urge to check Instagram, which I rarely do, especially lately. In fact, I haven’t really done much online or on social media since the election — I actually leave my phone home more often than not — but for whatever reason, I stopped doing my Morning Pages and picked up my phone and checked Instagram. The first post I saw was a story from Wesley Verhoeve. It was a photo of my friend Pableaux Johnson with a caption that read, “Rest in peace, Pableaux Johnson. Beloved by so many, a true culture documentarian, and a New Orleans treasure.” I was stunned and, in the moment, I honestly didn’t understand what I was reading. My first instinct was to respond to Wesley with, “Wait what? Pableaux is a friend of ours. What is this news?” Wesley responded, “He passed away. I’m sorry to bring you this news. I discovered it this morning from various other posts.” After a brief search, a story on on nola.com confirmed it with, “Beloved New Orleans photographer, foodie Pableaux Johnson dies after collapse at second line.” I just sat there in stunned silence as I felt my eyes well up with tears. Adrianne looked up and said, “What?” I just held up my phone so that she could see the story. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Is that real? What is that?” She grabbed her phone and began searching for confirmation.

I re-watched Dead Poets Society recently and in learning about Pableaux’s death, I was reminded of the first stanza of this poem which was featured in the film.

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
By Robert Herrick

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

LINKS
Wesley Verhoeve
Pableaux Johnson
Beloved New Orleans photographer, foodie Pableaux Johnson dies after collapse at second line
Red Beans Road Show
Share Your Favorite Memories of Pableaux Johnson

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A Different Kind of Perfection

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve held off on posting this Iteration because I just didn’t feel like it was that important in light of what’s happening in California. But after some reflection, I actually think that it is important, because art and making are still important. Hope is important. Helping people to feel just a little less alone and trying to connect with them wherever that may be is important and it’s what I try to do with these Iterations. I write about my thoughts and experiences in the hope that it may help you navigate your own.

LINKS
American Red Cross
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
The Animal Wellness Foundation
The California Fire Foundation
Dark Matter
Labyrinth
Blake Crouch
Apple TV+
Texas Shakespeare Festival
Alabama Shakespeare Festival

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Time for Deeper Work

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 19:00:00 -0400

I don’t know about you, but this is by far my least favorite time of year. It really starts around Thanksgiving, but this stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Day is particularly brutal — and it’s not just because I spent the first 48 years of my life in Southern California and still haven’t gotten used to the cold of the East Coast, but yes that. And it’s not just that I’ve lost both of my parents and Christmas has never been quite the same, but that’s part of it too. It’s more that I find it extraordinarily difficult just to be present. I feel caught between looking back on the previous 12 months and looking ahead to what I would like to do differently (or better) in the year ahead (but in all likelihood won’t, at least not to the degree that I tend to expect from myself). I suspect that I’m not alone in at least some of this. When I shared this with a friend, they responded, “Yeah, I feel the same way. But also the feeling and fear of the inevitable sameness as the previous year(s).”

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The Marrow is in the Process

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, I took the train down to DC to meet up with my friend Richard Boutwell to walk through a show at the National Gallery called The '70s Lens. The show features the work of a bunch of fantastic photographers, many of whom I’d never heard of, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go through it with him. Richard is a terrific photographer who specializes in western landscapes, mostly New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In fact, for years his grandfather was a park ranger in Joshua Tree, so he knows the park like the back of his hand. But as talented as he is behind the camera, he’s an even better printer. Richard has probably forgotten more about printing — both in the darkroom and digitally — than I will ever know. On top of that, he’s got an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photographers. As we were walking through the show, he was telling me all about this picture and that — why they are considered important, and in some cases, how the various photographers influenced each other’s work. It was similar to walking through exhibits with my friend Michelle — who is a paper conservator at the gallery — in that the additional context helps me connect with the work in a different and often deeper way.

LINKS
Richard Boutwell
The '70s Lens
Hollyland wireless mics
David Bowie: Full Interview (1995) | MTV News
OTP (episodes 177 and 352)

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Kubrick on the Morning Zoo

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:00:00 -0400

Recently, I picked up a copy of Barry Lyndon on Blu-ray. It’s one of those movies that I’ve had on my watchlist forever, but for whatever reason it just kept slipping through the cracks. As I was researching some of the other Criterion movies I was thinking about picking up, I saw a story about Google’s new AI-integrated NotebookLM and decided to try an experiment to see what (if any) insights AI might have to offer around Barry Lyndon. The results were both exciting and a little terrifying.

LINKS
The Criterion Collection
NotebookLM
Technically awesome, emotionally distant — Kubrick movie review (1975)
YouTube search results for "Barry Lyndon"
Making Barry Lyndon
How Kubrick Achieved the Beautiful Cinematography of Barry Lyndon
Achieving Perfection - The Cinematography of Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick's Meticulous Editing Process (Behind the Scenes)

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The Ritual of It All

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 05:00:00 -0400

Saturday night, Adrianne and I spent the evening at the home of our neighbors Raj and Trupti helping them, along with about 60 other friends and family members, celebrate Diwali, which is the Hindu festival of lights. It’s hard to explain how incredible it felt not just to be invited into their home again, but to feel so welcomed by the other guests and to get the opportunity to participate in an event that is a deeply meaningful part of their culture.

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The Other Brave Thing

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:00:00 -0400

On Saturday, Adrianne and I took an impromptu trip into DC after seeing an interesting post pop up in my Instagram feed. The post was about an open studio event at the 52 O Street Artist Studios, which is a four-floor building that features “50+ Artists & Creative Businesses.” I’ve loved visiting artists’ spaces for years. When I was still living in California, I would regularly go to The Brewery Arts Complex for their open studio art walks, which were always fantastic. The Brewery is the largest live-work arts complex in the world, and for me the “live-work” aspect is really what sets it apart. There’s a similar complex in Alexandria, Virginia, called the Torpedo Factory that I also enjoy going to, but it’s a very different experience than The Brewery was. The artists only work at the Torpedo Factory and I think the fact that the artists at The Brewery work and live in the same space gives you a deeper insight into who they are beyond simply seeing the work. That additional context can make an enormous difference in how or how deeply I connect with the work.

LINKS
52 O Street Artist Studios
The Brewery Arts Complex
Torpedo Factory
Dave Lefner
DC Arts Studios
Deep Natter
Process Driven

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When the Thing is the Thing

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:00:00 -0400

What you’re hearing (if you’re listening, rather than reading this) are the sounds of me unboxing a new keyboard — specifically, an Apple A1048, commonly known as simply the Apple Keyboard. What makes this keyboard especially interesting to me is the period of time in my life that it reminds me of — that and the fact that this particular keyboard has been sitting unopened and unused in a box in central California since 2003. I found it on shopgoodwill.com, where it was listed in “new or gently used” condition. When it arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was it in the original box — which wasn’t mentioned in the description — but it was also in the original unopened plastic packaging. The last “new” thing I bought on Goodwill was a Starbucks Barista espresso machine to replace my Saeco Via Venezia that finally gave up the ghost after more than 19 years of daily service and literally thousands of shots of espresso. And just like the keyboard, the Barista was unopened and unused, still in the original box, neither of which were mentioned in the description.

QUESTIONS
What are some of your favorite or most meaningful objects?
Hit reply, leave a comment, or email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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How Does it Feel?

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:00:00 -0400

Last week, I released a video review of a new book from Prestel about Gregory Crewdson. It was significant for me, not just because Gregory is one of my photographic heroes — although yes, that is part of it — but because it was the first project I’ve done in quite a while that was really just for me. I’ve been on a bit of a “creative hiatus” for the better part of a year and I’ve only done a few videos before this. So more than anything, I wanted to see if I could pull it off and have it be interesting and feel like me, rather than just another YouTube photo book flip-through. And before I get too far into this, I want to thank Andy Adams at FlakPhoto, without whom it may not have even happened. Andy is a good guy and if you’re at all interested in photography, he’s well worth a follow.

A few months ago I started seeing a new therapist, and part of what we’ve been working on is something called Somatic Therapy, which I’ll include a couple links to in the notes if you’d like to learn more about it. Basically, somatic therapy focuses on the body and how emotions such as trauma and anxiety manifest as physical sensations. When I’m sharing a particular story or experience, my therapist will sometimes interrupt me and ask me to focus on how it feels to talk about or relive the experience — and not emotionally or existentially, but physically. It’s been fascinating to start noticing changes in my breath or heart rate or feel tension start to develop in my hands and shoulders when I’m sharing something disturbing or painful. On the other side, and this is where the video fits in, we’re working on identifying objects, memories, and pursuits and activities that give me joy or pleasure and naming or defining what those things feel like.

LINKS
Gregory Crewdson video review
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic Experiencing Therapy
The Difference Between Reacting and Responding
What is Internal Family Systems?

Permission Granted

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:00:00 -0400

Last week, I gave myself permission to do something that was a: pretty far outside of my comfort zone and b: completely unnecessary. If you read or listened to my last Iteration, you know I’ve been wanting an Elektron Digitakt for years, but would never allow myself to get one. Well, they say that fortune favors the bold, so I finally took the plunge and bought one. I had been lurking in the classified listings on Reverb for months, favoriting “mint” condition Digitakts, only to watch them sell to everyone but me. A couple weeks ago, a new listing popped up that caught my eye because the device appeared to be brand new. I reached out to the retailer — a music store in Tulsa — and asked about it. The owner got back to me the next day and said that it had never been taken out of the box, so I clicked the “Buy Now” button and eagerly awaited its arrival.

WATCH THE VIDEO

LINKS
Elektron
Reverb

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The Illusion of Control

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:00:00 -0400

Sunday was my birthday and as I begin my 58th trip around the sun, I’ve been reflecting on some of the things I’ve learned over the past half-century or so. I’m not talking about skills per se, though I have racked up a fairly impressive list. I think one of the things that has both helped the most while also being the most frustrating is the realization that in the vast majority of cases, control is an illusion. And when I say control, that could mean a job, our health, the art we make, almost anything — and a few things have happened recently that have really solidified that for me.

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It’s Time to be Self-Centered

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:00:00 -0400

I’ve been thinking about something for a while and I’m not sure whether or not it’ll land, but I’d like to try stringing together a few ideas. I think it’s time for us to embrace being self-centered, but not in the way that you might think. Typically, when we refer to someone as “self-centered” it’s not a compliment. It often refers to someone who is egotistical and only thinks about themselves or whose only concerns are their own wants, needs, or even interests. But I think there are ways we can reframe the idea of being self-centered as a positive instead of a negative.

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The Joy of [Re]Discovery

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 17:00:00 -0400

Whether you call it a slump, a funk, a downturn, a slowdown, a struggle, a breakdown, a nosedive, a stall, a meltdown, a plunge, or just stagnation, I’ve been in one for a while. While I have multiple journals that are dappled with notes, sketches, and the beginnings of ideas, I haven’t actually recorded a new show or finished a new painting in months. Even this newsletter has taken a hit on consistency after more than 130 weekly entries. I know the situation will come back online — or at least I believe that it will — but at the moment, my normally overflowing trough of creativity is experiencing a bit of a drought. And here’s the thing — I know that I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’ve talked with a number of people who are experiencing if not the same thing, something very similar — and it’s not just people who identify as “creatives.” There seems to be a common feeling that we’re on existentially shaky ground or in unfamiliar territory and we feel like even the few things we thought we had some control or agency over are slipping. I know that’s true for me and for several of my friends. Maybe it’s also true for you.

QUESTIONS
Have you ever come back to a creative pursuit that you previously stepped away from? How did it go?

Hit reply, leave a comment, or email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Know Thy [Creative] Self

Tue, 28 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

For the past few weeks, maybe even the past month or so, I’ve been on sort of an Ethan Hawke deep dive. I like Ethan Hawke as an actor and while I haven’t seen everything he’s ever done, I really like Training Day and I would probably put Dead Poets Society and Gattaca in my top 20 — actually, maybe top 30. I know some people find him pretentious, but whenever I’ve seen him interviewed, he always seemed like a good guy. A few years ago, he did a TED Talk called Give Yourself Permission to be Creative that popped up in my feed recently, and watching it again reminded me how much I resonate with a lot of the same ideas he has about creativity. For example, one of the first things he says in the talk is “…a lot of people really struggle to give themselves permission to be creative, and reasonably so, we’re all a little suspect of our own talent.” I think we’ve all felt the same way at one point or another in our lives. I know I have. Whether it’s Imposter Syndrome or the nagging voice of Resistance, occasionally doubting our own talents and gifts seems to be par for the course when trying to live a creative life — and that’s before we even get to purpose, which is a completely different animal.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

LINKS
Give Yourself Permission to be Creative | Ethan Hawke | TED
Maya and Ethan Hawke’s Closet Picks
In the Screening Room with Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke
What No One Told Ethan Hawke About Being Famous
How Ethan Hawke Ended Up In Taylor Swift's New Music Video

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The Five-Pointed Star of Why

Tue, 14 May 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The other day I was on the phone with my friend Neale James and we were talking about a recent episode of his podcast The Photowalk, on which he was talking to our mutual friend Sean Tucker about creativity. “I invite you,” Neale begins the episode, “to imagine a five-pointed star. Now on each point of the star, I’d like you to think of a word that’s important to you in terms of creativity or your creativity. Each is a kind of cornerstone of the why and even how you create as of today.” As an aside, if you’re not listening to Neale’s show, you really should give it a try. Neale is a terrific host and his episodes are masterclasses in audio production and atmosphere. Anyway, as we were talking about his episode with Sean, he asked what the points on my creative star might be. On one hand, “why do you create?” is a deceptively simple question that many of us spend inordinate amounts of time wrestling with — at least I do. I think that Neale’s clever addition “as of today” gives us a little wiggle room and leaves the possibility open that these five terms don’t have to define our making for all eternity, but rather just for now. It’s one of the reasons that I love this as an exercise. While the creative process itself is important, I think that checking in with ourselves around why we create is equally valuable — maybe even more so because it allows us to square what we’re making against why we’re making it.

QUESTIONS
What are some of the points on your creative star?

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

LINKS
My archive of paintings
Dorothy Simpson Krause
inkAID
Father Bill Moore
Shepard Fairey

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Connection, Collaboration, and Creative Maturity

Fri, 03 May 2024 14:00:00 -0400

If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you probably know I’m a big Nine Inch Nails fan and have been since 1990 when I saw them open up for Peter Murphy. The other day, I was watching a terrific video with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross breaking down some of their most iconic tracks. One of the more fascinating aspects of the video was how much Trent talks about process and how important the “feel” of the music was and still is. “When we write music,” Trent says, “it’s coming from a place where its main intent is to have you feel a certain way. It’s not coming from a love of melody and a joy of intricate chord progressions or technical wizardry.”

I love this because he’s not just chasing easy likes or trying to impress the audience. Instead he’s focusing on how the work serves the overall project and on the relationship between the work and the audience. It’s not a “look at me” type of thing, like a gratuitous guitar solo or a vocalist who takes every opportunity to sing an unnecessary run. That’s not the point, which I think speaks to a level of creative maturity that’s important to cultivate as any kind of artist.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Can a Podcast Change Your Life?

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:00:00 -0400

Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If you’re a longtime listener, you may think you’ve heard this before, and you’re right, you have. But this time it’s different. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up.

In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends. As they got more popular, we put up a simple web page called Faded & Blurred that had details about the upcoming walks. It pretty quickly evolved into a full-blown site, complete with a blog, spotlights on some of our favorite photographers, and a podcast called Q&A@F&B, which was a series of long-form conversations with photographers who were willing to sit down with me for an hour and talk about their work. In addition to getting to talk with photographers like John Keatley, David duChemin, and Ibarionex Perello, I also spoke with Bill Wadman for the first time. Bill and I hit it off straight away, and in 2012, when he was thinking about doing a weekly photography podcast, he started auditioning potential co-hosts. He reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested. I said sure, and my audition ended up being the first episode of OTP. For the next 6 years and 325 episodes, my Tuesday mornings were spent recording the show, with me in Rancho Cucamonga, California—at least to start—and Bill in Brooklyn, New York.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Art as a Verb

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know he’s considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly I’ve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me. Anyway, one of the posts that came up in my feed contained a quote by him that goes:

“Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.”

LINKS
Conversation with an Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)
Richard Serra on his Drawing (2011)

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Can AI and Artists Coexist?

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

After recording last week’s episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video that’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called “AI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.” The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt out—and this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.

LINKS
Juxtapoz article
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
AI algorithms
Discussion on Threads
Gagosian

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Tool Up!

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0400

About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and I’ve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been added—especially Object Select, which I’ll come back to in a minute. But even after such a long hiatus, it was still so familiar that straight away it got me thinking about why I stopped using it, and in a broader sense, about some of the decisions we make around the tools we use.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Swimming in Molasses

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:00:00 -0400

I started this Iteration on February 29th—Leap Day—and for me it was a good day, which, frankly, I really needed. In the last Iteration, I talked about how difficult 2023 was for me and in the week or so since I shared it a lot has happened. Probably the biggest thing is that I’ve started going to therapy. I’ve danced around it for a long time and I think it just got to a point where I could no longer keep pretending that everything was okay—that I was okay— and that whatever was “wrong” with me, I could either fix it or just keep pushing it down. Neither of which is true, of course.

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A Sabbatical in Retrospect

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:00:00 -0400

I’m not going to bury the lede—2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years I’ve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobody’s fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, there’s a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, “I’m sick of the sight of this place. Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country A through K" rack out on the street and go work at a Virgin Megastore and never come back.” I can definitely relate to that and it’s kind of where I was at the end of 2022. But I thought I would give it one more year to see whether I could come up with some new ideas and new work and maybe figure out a way to navigate the changing landscape of trying to eke out at least a partial living by being creative. And I know that phrase “being creative” is pretty loaded and it means different things to different people. For me, by and large it means painting, writing, and podcasting, or some combination of the three. Photography is in there somewhere too, but I’m still not really sure where.

If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.

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Another February 5th

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 21:00:00 -0400

Today is February 5th and it would have been my dad’s 83rd birthday. I normally mark the day by posting a simple message like “I miss you, Dad” on Instagram or Twitter, when Twitter was still a thing and I was still on it. Today, I want to do something a little different and tell you a story. My dad could be tough and for a big part of my adolescent life, we butted heads. A lot. At one point, it got pretty bad and we actually didn’t talk for a while. It seemed like we were often at odds with one another about something, but maybe that’s just how I need to remember it. When he got sick, we got another chance to get good and let all of the things that once seemed so important just melt away. As heartbreaking as it was to see him deteriorate like he did, I really am grateful for the time that it allowed us to spend together. We managed to get to a place where we respected each other, not just as men, but as father and son. We spent a lot of time on the front porch—often in silence. We watched a lot of westerns and we talked about some of the things that went unspoken for decades. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. I was holding his hand when he died in 2013 and while I was extraordinarily sad, when he took his last breath I was also grateful. He had fought as hard as he could for as long as he could, but now his pain was over and he could finally rest.

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Details, Obstacles, and Opportunities

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 21:00:00 -0400

A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a set of wireless mics. I had been wanting and maybe even needing a set for a long time as a way to record the random conversations I seem to have with people out in the world on any given day. I’d been looking at them for a while, but I saw a review that Curtis Judd did—who was one of my favorite audio YouTubers—and I thought, “I'm just gonna get these. They'll be fine.” I had been going back-and-forth between the Røde Wireless Go IIs and the DJI Mics and then saw these Hollylands and thought, “You know what? I'm just gonna get them. The reviews are great (but specifically because I trusted Curtis).” So I bought them and they were just packaged so well and the design of the packaging was so well thought out—and borderline meticulous—that I decided I needed to do a video about it and talk about why those kinds of details are important—at least important to me.

LINKS
My video “unboxing” of the Hollyland Lark Max mics
Hollyland Lark Max - 2-Person Wireless Microphone
Curtis Judd - Hollyland Lark Max Review

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Starting Out Heavy

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 18:00:00 -0400

If you’ve spent any time around me at all, you know that I have opinions—lots of them—and I have since I was a kid. Sometimes when I would offer my unsolicited thoughts on various things, my mom would respond with “Oh, there he is…my little critic.” The thing is it’s not just criticism. Not always, anyway. More often than I generally care to admit, I find myself feeling personally offended, either by the design or functionality of a product or service or by someone—whether I know them or not—who simply doesn’t do something the way I think that it should be done. And to be clear, it’s not that I think that I’m better as much as I think that the way I do certain things is. I’m not right all the time and I have no problem admitting that. But when I am and I think that you’re not, I’ll happily tell you. I think it’s something I inherited from my dad—or maybe it’s a trait of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Either way, while I think I’ve gotten better about not being so critical (at least publicly), letting go of the behavior can be a mixed bag.

LINKS
Sean Tucker
The Meaning in the Making
The Man in the Arena
Simon Sinek
Start with Why

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Have Yourself a Holly Jolly…

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 20:00:00 -0400

Well here we are again, nearing the end of one more trip around the sun and I for one cannot wait for it to be over. Christmas used to be my favorite time of year, but that was really because of my mom. She would start decorating the house around Thanksgiving, and when I say decorating, I don’t just mean putting up lights—our house looked and smelled like a Hallmark store. Yes, there were lights, but she also had all sorts of ornaments, figurines, and little holiday town squares and villages. She wrapped or swagged garland everywhere she could, displayed her favorite Christmas cards from years past, and sometimes you could barely see the actual Christmas tree because it was absolutely covered with lights, decorations, and tinsel. Lots of tinsel.

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It’s Not Always an Obvious Connection

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 17:00:00 -0400

Back in the late 70s, there was a terrific documentary on the BBC called Connections. It was hosted by historian and author James Burke and now that I think about it, I don’t remember whether I watched it on PBS or I borrowed VHS copies of it from my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Copeland who also loaned out copies of Cosmos. And to be clear, I’m talking about the Carl Sagan version, not the Neil Degrasse Tyson version. Regardless, the show was all about tracing the connections between things that on the surface share nothing in common. I found it fascinating and I think it inspired me to start looking deeper at the world around me to try to see how things might be related.

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Remapping the Road Ahead

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 10:00:00 -0400

As we get into this Iteration, I’d like to take a minute to let you know about some changes that I’m working on that will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months. Iterations will still be weekly (mostly), but I’m going to mix up the types of posts I’ll be including and treat it more like an old-school blog. For example, you may have noticed that the Blips have been getting more substantial in terms of the research I do and the number of links I include. They started out as a just few links to things that I saw or found interesting during the previous week and have been evolving into something more comprehensive and hopefully more interesting and inspiring for you. Moving forward, they’ll still be part of their own section on Substack, but I’m going to lose the word “Blip” and the number in the naming convention of the titles to alleviate any potential confusion that comes with having Blip number 47 alongside Iteration number 124. I’m also going to be adding reviews into the mix—and that could mean books, movies, music, or the tools I use (like cameras or my favorite pencils)—so file numbering will be even more unnecessary. As you might expect, they’ll also typically include some sort of backstory and lots of links for you to explore. The more “existential” essays (like last week’s Learn to Love the Process) will continue, but won’t be quite as frequent.

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Learn to Love the Process

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Over the past few days, the photography world has been buzzing about the “global shutter” on Sony’s new flagship A9 III. I’ve listened to various YouTubers andinfluencers talk about it as if it’s the second coming. They’re saying “it’s the most remarkable camera I’ve ever used” and calling it a “a game changer,” insisting that “it will change photography forever.” But here’s the thing: for 99% of photographers, it won’t change anything. If this is all Greek to you, let me back up a minute and briefly explain what a global shutter is—and I promise that this Iteration is not just about photography.

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Let It Incubate

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 16:00:00 -0400

They say that one of the best ways to solve a problem—at least a creative one—is actually not to think abut it. After all, how many times have you been doing something like taking a shower or going for a long walk and you find yourself having one of those eureka moments where suddenly the solution to a problem you’ve been wrestling with forever seems so clear? It happens to me a lot and it’s one of the reasons that taking walks in the forest behind our house has become a daily ritual. Trying to be present in something other than active problem solving allows our brains to continue working in the background without us trying to consciously force a solution. The act of stepping away from a problem is called the “incubation period” and it’s been studied for decades. In his book The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas proposed that the creative process is made up of four stages: Preparation (the acquisition of knowledge to some task), Incubation (the background process that occurs when conscious attention is diverted away from the task), Illumination (the moment the creative idea flashes into sight or being), and Verification (when the creative idea is subjected to evaluation)." While there have been dozens of studies documenting and validating the importance and effectiveness of the incubation period, last week I experienced another example of it firsthand.

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Revisiting My Infrastructure

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -0400

As I was working through the recent redesign of my website—which you can read about or listen to in the last Iteration—I started to look at some of the other software I was using to see whether what I was using still made sense for the projects I’ll be doing in the coming year. I think it’s sometimes easy to get into a routine of using tools that are “good enough” that we just don’t look for potentially better options. I know that’s been true for me.

About eight years ago, I ditched Photoshop completely and started using the Affinity suite of Photo, Designer, and Publisher, which by and large have been great. There are a few features I miss, but nothing that’s really kept me from doing the work that I needed to do.

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Go Forward, Move Ahead

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Last week I did a soft-launch of my newly redesigned website, which in an of itself isn’t all that unique since I’ve resigned my website dozens of times over the years. What is unique—or at least different—is the overall focus of the site and the process I went through putting it together this time around. I started by asking myself a relatively simple question: do I even need a website? The most common answer is “Yes, of course,” which is often followed by “especially because you’re an artist.” But I actually know quite a few “creatives” who don’t have their own websites. Some rely on a strong social media presence, some have gallery representation that drives sales of originals or prints, and others just have a storefront, so that a dedicated personal site isn’t really necessary.

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The Time I Designed a Dog Backpack

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 14:00:00 -0400

Next month is the tenth anniversary of my dad’s death, so naturally I’ve been thinking about him a lot. Last year, I completely forgot about it, which I tried to tell myself was actually healthy, but I just ended up feeling guilty about forgetting. If you’ve been following me for a while, or you’re an OTP listener, you know that my relationship with my dad was often difficult, to say the least. But as I’ve been thinking about him lately and how I’ve talked about our relationship in the past, I feel like maybe I’ve been a little incomplete in how I’ve portrayed him. I loved my dad, no matter how close or how far we were in the moment, and the truth is that he’s just as responsible for my creativity and to an extent my curiosity as my mom and my stepmother were.

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Objects in Motion

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 14:00:00 -0400

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about inertia and motion and how it applies to my creative practice. We know that Newton’s First Law of Motion says that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless some sort of external force acts against it. Conversely, an object at rest will tend to stay at rest. But I would argue that the Fist Law also applies to intangibles like thoughts and ideas. For example, this week has flown by. Actually, the past couple of weeks have and I think it’s because I’ve been working through so many ideas and potential projects—and I’ve been working on them differently than I have in the past, which I think is what’s making all the difference. And to be clear, when I say “working,” sometimes that means just letting an idea go until it needs to be addressed. For some things that means now, but for others, that may mean next year.

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Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

A Bunch of Potential Somethings

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:00:00 -0400

Are you overwhelmed? Do you ever get overwhelmed? Man, I do. All the time. My brain is always on and processing—either trying to process existing ideas or trying to figure out where to put all of the new ones that I haven’t had time to really think about. And it doesn’t stop. It’s all day, every day. There’s always a bunch of potential somethings bouncing around my head. And let me be clear—I love it and I’m grateful for it, but it is overwhelming and exhausting trying to keep track of it all and figure out where to put all of those ideas.

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Almost Back to Normal

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 16:00:00 -0400

I’m still not quite 100% myself, but I wanted to share a quick update. Yesterday was day 12 since testing positive for COVID, and it was the first day that I finally tested negative. Both Adrianne and I had very mild cases, especially compared to some of our friends and family members who really had a it bad. I had a temperature of 100.8 for one day and, other than feeling fatigued and brain fogged for the past week or so, that was pretty much it. Adrianne had it a little worse than me, but not much. The most frustrating part was continuing to test positive for days after the symptoms had subsided. And according to the latest from the CDC, you can continue to test positive for 90 days.

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Even Unicorns Can Get COVID

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:00:00 -0400

I know I’m a little late on this Iteration and I apologize for that. As you can hear, my voice doesn’t sound the way it normally does and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it sounds better.

In the Iteration I was going to do, I was going to talk about finding that thing you live for, that thing that you love, that thing that lights you up. But I have to postpone it because I’m just having a hell of a time stringing two thoughts together. Even going through this right now, I’m live without a net, as it were. I don’t have a script or any outline like I normally would have when I record one of these. For this one, all I have is COVID and apparently have had it since sometime over the weekend—and let me tell you, it is not fun. Don’t listen to all of those stories telling you how great it is and how all the cool kids are getting it. It’s a lie. I’ve been vaxxed and vaxxed again boosted and, you know, while all of that probably means that it’s much less severe and means that the odds of me needing to go the hospital are much less, it still sucks.

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

40 Years in a Phone Call

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 10:00:00 -0400

This Iteration was going to be about some of my recent musical explorations into things like VCV Rack and the Arturia MiniFreak (which I may actually end up selling), but instead I’d like to share a recent story with you that sort of blew my mind.

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Montgomery County Agricultural Fair

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Fried Dough and Photographs

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

When I was a kid, one of the things I would look forward to every year was going to the fair. The LA County Fair was massive and in elementary school we always got free tickets—I think they were stapled to our report cards, but I could be wrong. Although I moved around a lot as a kid, it seemed like we never lived very far from the fairgrounds, which are right next to the Pomona Raceway. My dad would take us there to watch the NHRA Winternationals every year and see people like “Big Daddy” Don Garlits and Don “The Snake” Prudhomme drive like bats out of hell down the 1/4 mile. I remember reading that at one point the LA County Fair was the largest county fair in the nation, but I don’t know if that’s still true. That said, to a 10-year-old, it was huge.

QUESTIONS

What’s your favorite part of your creative process?

Do you give that part of your process the time it deserves?

Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com

LINKS

Santa Anita

Maryland State Fair

Olympus EM1 MkII

12-40mm f/2.8 Pro lens

Jerry Uelsmann

Bob Burridge

CONNECT WITH ME

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) | Official Red Band Trailer | Utopia

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Art is Everywhere

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 20:00:00 -0400

Over the weekend, Adrianne and I watched a fantastic new documentary by Anton Corbijn called Squaring the Circle. It’s about Hipgnosis, the legendary design agency in London formed in the late 1960s by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, or “Po” to his friends. I knew I was going to love it before I even saw the trailer because so much of their work has been etched into my brain over the past four decades of my life. The work they did for Pink Floyd alone would have made them industry icons, but they also worked with Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, T Rex, Yes, Genesis, 10cc, and a ton of other bands over the course of their 15-year run.

LINKS

Anton Corbijn on Squaring the Circle, Hipgnosis, Album Covers & Kurt Cobain

Category:Album covers by Hipgnosis

Storm Thorgerson | Designing The Impossible

Storm Thorgerson, Pt. 1

Storm Thorgerson, Pt. 2

CONNECT WITH ME

22 consecutive dates at the Hammersmith Apollo

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

I Don't Care What You Think

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve come to the conclusion that I can no longer care what you think about my work. And it’s not that I don’t care about you as an audience, but if I’m worried about you liking what I make while I’m still making it or even in deciding what to make, I’m not putting 100% of myself into it. By not caring what you think, I get to put 100% of my ideas, my skills, and my experience—not to mention effort—into what I’m doing, and ultimately that’s better for everyone.

LINKS

Kate Bush

The Kick Inside

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

To AI or Not to AI?

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve hesitated to really talk much about AI, mostly because I’ve been on the fence about whether I think it’s got the potential to save us or destroy us, and depending on who and what you read, it seems like it’s 50/50 either way. It’s just too soon to tell and I think these technologies are being adopted so quickly that we haven’t given ourselves enough time to think about the ramifications or the potential. Instead, everyone is rushing to become an armchair expert so they can monetize it into oblivion before they even understand it. Honestly, a lot of the talk around AI feels like a YouTube short that promises to teach you how to make thousands of dollars a month from affiliate marketing and drop shipping. Still, some of the image generation tools are interesting and I’ve been wondering whether or not there’s a place for AI in my creative workflow. I know there are a ton of legal and even moral and ethical questions that I still need to sort out for myself, but for the purposes of this Iteration, I’m going to put those aside and just focus on the tools themselves.

LINKS

Stable Diffusion

MidJourney

MidJourney Timeline

CONNECT WITH ME

I Almost Quit, Then I Read Rick Rubin’s Book

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Finding a New Openness

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

I know we’re only a little over the halfway mark, but if I could recommend one book as my “must read” of 2023, it would be Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Seeing, despite the fact that I haven’t actually read it from cover to cover. Let me explain. I started to read it from the beginning but within just a few sentences, I knew it was going to be more of a reference book than a “read it once and move on” kind of book. So I just leave it on my desk and whenever I need a creative boost or a little blast of existential insight, I’ll pick it up and flip to a random page and read for a bit. Sometimes I flip to something new, while other times I end up reading something I’ve read before, which I think is a perfectly reasonable solution given the often-esoteric tone of the wisdom contained within it. My mom used to say, “you’re not ready to hear until you’re ready to hear it,” which is really a variation on the adage “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” That’s exactly what makes this a book that begs a second (or third or even fourth) reading.

LINKS

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin in conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

CONNECT WITH ME

152° at Persian Gulf International Airport

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Summertime Stories

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 10:00:00 -0400

This is my eighth summer living on the East Coast and aside from the heat, I am still not used to the humidity. Actually, I don’t think I ever will be. I spent the first 48 years of my life living in Southern California and starting when I was about 4 until probably my freshman year in college, I spent most of my summers in Arizona, which was hot but not humid. The landscape and the people left an indelible impression on me and though I can’t see myself ever going back—at least to live—I’ll always be more drawn to and more at home in the desolate beauty of Arizona and the American West.

LINKS

Buckskin Mountain State Park

The Spy Who Loved Me

Wetbike

CONNECT WITH ME

My Mixcast 4 long-term update

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

In The Making

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

I’m going to try something different, so I really don’t know exactly where this Iteration is going to go. I thought I’d just put on some music and write whatever came to mind. At the moment, Dark Star by Crosby, Stills, and Nashis playing in the background, which I love despite not really being a CSN fan. Adrianne found the album at this little record store in DC a few weeks ago that’s across the street from our favorite ice cream shop.

LINKS

My Mixcast 4 initial review

David Carson nucollage, vol. 1 review

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Starting to Write the Sequel

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

This has been sort of a weird week for me. Friday would have been my mom’s 79th birthday and for the past 14 years, not a day has gone by that I don’t think about her. Sometimes only a little, other times, I think about her a lot. I miss our Sunday brunches at Molly’s, though Molly sold the place years ago. I miss her smile, which I can no longer remember without looking at a photograph. Mostly, I miss her optimism and her goodness. I miss her advice and her belief in me and her unwavering faith in something greater than all of us that allowed her to see that people were basically good if we could just get out of our own ways and accept one another for the brilliant beings that she believed us to be. I need that right now.

LINKS

Grand Theft Auto: https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v

Skyrim: https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/skyrim/

Zelda: https://www.zelda.com/

Red Dead Redemption 2: https://www.rockstargames.com/games/reddeadredemption2

On Taking Pictures: http://www.ontakingpictures.com/

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Beyond Broad Strokes

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0400

How do you know when it’s time to rethink or refresh your personal brand? It’s something I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about lately. But before we dive into that, I think we first need to answer another question and that is what does “personal brand” even mean? According to Gary Vee, “Your personal brand is your reputation.” Another way he put it was, “Your brand is about how someone feels in the moment when they interact with you or your business.” On the other hand, Harvard Business Review says that your brand is not your reputation, which is based how other people see you, but rather how you want people to see you. Reputation is certainly part of it, but it’s not the whole picture.

LINKS

Gary Vee article: https://garyvaynerchuk.com/5-strategies-for-personal-branding-online/

Harvard Business Review article: https://hbr.org/2022/02/whats-the-point-of-a-personal-brand

The Futur: https://thefutur.com/

Rethinking My Website: https://jefferysaddoris.substack.com/p/rethinking-my-website

It's Not About a Watch: https://jefferysaddoris.substack.com/p/its-not-about-a-watch

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

It’s Not About a Watch

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 07:00:00 -0400

Earlier in the week, a post came up in my Twitter feed that stopped me in my tracks before sending me down a rabbit hole that I think I may be in for a while. It was a post about a watch—or at least the possibility of a watch—by a designer named Sebastian Stapelfeldt, who publishes under the name Carl Hauser. It’s a terrific 3D render that looks like something out of one of Syd Mead’s sketchbooks, which is one of the reasons it caught my eye. If that reference doesn't mean anything to you, Syd was an industrial designer and illustrator who is probably best known for his work on Blade Runner and Tron. I think first discovered his work in the late 70s, about the same time that I first saw the work of Frank Frazetta. Both of these guys were huge inspirations, though Syd's influence didn't really show up in my work until the mid-90s.

LINKS

Carl Hauser: https://www.carlhauser.com/

Carl Hauser (Twitter): https://twitter.com/crlhsr

Syd Mead: https://sydmead.com/

Frank Frazetta: https://www.frazettamuseum.com/

Imagine 3D: https://archive.org/details/imagine-3D-for-DOS

MS-DOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

Siggraph: https://www.siggraph.org/

3D Studio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max

Softimage XSI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XOxGqs0Ck8

Maya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Maya

Lightwave: https://www.lightwave3d.com/

Universal Studios: https://www.universalstudios.com/

Blender: https://www.blender.org/

Ton Roosendaal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_Roosendaal

Blender 1.0: https://www.blendernation.com/2020/08/21/blender-1-0-rises-again/

Blender stories: https://www.blender.org/get-involved/user-stories/

David duChemin: https://davidduchemin.com/

David's post: https://davidduchemin.com/2023/06/having-not-gone-farther-on-regret-creativity/

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Getting Out (Of My Head)

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0400

As an independent creative, I spend the bulk of my time alone, which means I’m typically in one of my studios in the basement of our house. I have two spaces that have been purpose-built and tweaked over the past few years to fit the different aspects of my creative practice. The analog studio is where I do all of my painting and collage work and the digital studio is where I do everything else that doesn’t involve paint, which means research, writing, design, podcasting, and recently a bit of sound design and music. The studios share a common wall that has a double door so I can move quickly from one to the other depending on what I’m working on in the moment. While there are still a few more tweaks to make, I love these spaces, especially since my previous space (if you can even call it that) was a 4-foot section of counter in the laundry room. That said, it’s still a basement and all of the things that can work in its favor can also work against it, depending on the mental space I’m in. If I’m particularly inspired, being apart from the other goings on in the house is a welcome detachment that can really allow me to focus. But if I’m in the weeds, those feelings of detachment can easily translate into feelings of loneliness and isolation, both of which I tend to struggle with anyway.

CONNECT WITH ME

Nikon F2: https://emulsive.org/reviews/camera-reviews/nikon-camera-reviews/the-nikon-f2-an-everyday-camera-for-the-21st-century

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

It’s Just Stuff, Right?

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 06:00:00 -0400

In this Iteration, I want to talk about things, specifically the things in our lives that take on a particular significance because of what they have come to represent and how difficult it can be when we let them go, either by choice or by circumstance.

A few days ago, Adrianne and I bought a new car and to say that it was a challenge would be a bit of an understatement. To be fair, the actual car selection process wasn’t too bad—especially compared to how long it’s taken me in the past (see Iteration 37). But trading in my 2010 Honda Fit proved to be extraordinarily painful—so much so that I had a bit of a meltdown at the dealership and wound up texting Adrianne from the parking lot telling her that I couldn’t go back in and that I just wanted to go home.

LINKS

2010 Honda Fit: https://www.edmunds.com/honda/fit/2010/review/

William Eggleston: http://egglestonartfoundation.org/

Angels Landing: https://www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/angels-landing-hiking-permits.htm

YashicaMat 124G: https://www.lomography.com/magazine/91134-yashica-mat-124g-a-twin-lens-classic

My Substack: https://jefferysaddoris.substack.com/

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

A Momentary Lapse of Perspective

Mon, 29 May 2023 10:00:00 -0400

I was sitting in my studio the other day, looking at some of the 100+ paintings I’ve done over the past few years and out of the blue I thought to myself, “I hate all of these.” Adrianne walked in a few minutes later and asked what was going on and I said, “I think I hate everything I’ve done.” Adrianne being Adrianne then asked, “Do you really hate it or is it something else?” I didn’t answer immediately, but of course it’s something else, right? It has to be. But that’s how it came out in the moment. To be clear, I don’t love every piece I’ve ever done—I don’t think any artist really does—but I certainly don’t hate every piece either. So what is it that’s really going on?

LINKS

Picasso: https://www.pablopicasso.org/

The New Propaganda: https://projects.jefferysaddoris.com/

Grid Variations: https://projects.jefferysaddoris.com/

Sean Tucker: https://www.seantucker.photography/

Josef Müller-Brockmann: https://www.grapheine.com/en/graphic-design-en/graphic-designer-muller-brockmann-swiss-style

Reid Miles: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-blue-note-album-covers/

Robert Rauschenberg: https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/

Robert Motherwell: https://www.wikiart.org/en/robert-motherwell

My Substack: https://jefferysaddoris.substack.com

CONNECT WITH ME

Jerry Seinfeld on Howard Stern

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Consistency Matters

Mon, 22 May 2023 08:00:00 -0400

This is Iteration number 100 and before we dive in, I want to say that this one is a big deal for me, not because it’s number 100—although, yes, that—but more because it’s about what it’s taken for me to get here and what I’ve learned about consistency and my own creative process.

If you’re an artist or maker of some kind and you’re on social media, regardless of the platform, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the importance of consistency. It’s one of the two main things that the algorithm rewards—the other one being time on platform. The problem with platforms is that you either are consistent or you aren’t. There’s typically no space for flux because the algorithm doesn’t care about nuance—it cares about numbers.

LINKS

Iteration 25

On Taking Pictures

Deep Natter

Iteration 97

My Substack

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Uncertainty of the Purchase

Mon, 15 May 2023 09:00:00 -0400

This Iteration was originally going to be a story that bordered on a rant about trying to buy a new mouse from Amazon that went a little sideways. I’ll share some of the details in a bit, but the short version is that it took three attempts to get it right and I’m still not totally convinced that there isn’t some shady merchandise being sold as “real” by the world’s largest retailer. The best part of the thing was the title—I was going to call it “The Tale of the Mouse.” Clever, right? But as I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, I think it’s really about something bigger and I think it’s something that nearly all of us can relate to—and that is how and why we buy the things we do.

LINKS

Musgrave Pencils

Logitech MX Master

Logitech M720

Logitech M720 (Best Buy)

Keychron

CONNECT WITH ME

Microsoft Designer - Stunning designs in a flash

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Prompt. View. Repeat.

Sun, 07 May 2023 12:00:00 -0400

You don’t have to look far to know that AI is everywhere and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. It’s in the news and on social media. It’s what your colleagues are talking about when you’re at work and what your friends are talking about when you’re not. And no matter what you do for a living or for recreation, it seems like AI is going to either disrupt it completely or at least affect it somehow.

I’ve been following the development of some of the more popular AI platforms from the wings for a while now. I’ve tried ChatGPT, and I recently did an experiment with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to see how they would handle prototyping ideas for a personal project I’m working on. Even though the results weren’t exactly what I wanted, they got me thinking about what I did want in a different way and ultimately gave me some new things to think about and iterate on in my sketchbook. While I can absolutely see the potential power of AI, I can also see some of the potential cost—and that’s what concerns me.

LINKS

AI Art Generator – Adobe Firefly

DALL·E 2

Midjourney

Stable Diffusion Online

ChatGPT

Rick Beato on AI

Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem

CONNECT WITH ME

Quentin Tarantino on writing

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Ideas Never Stop

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 17:00:00 -0400

In 2018 I released a book called Photography by the Letter. It took three years of research, writing, re-writing, designing, and re-designing, and while it wasn’t as financially successful as I had hoped, it was one of the most satisfying projects I’ve ever done. After shopping it around to a number of publishers—all of whom passed on it—we self-published a limited print run and released it simultaneously as an eBook. Opening up the first box of books from the printer and seeing those three years represented as actual objects was a very emotional experience. I sent a copy to Ted Waitt at Rocky Nook, who had been incredibly helpful and supportive while I was writing it. He responded with a lovely email that read, “It is really quite beautifully designed and very well printed. I honestly cannot think of a self-published book that I have seen better production values on. Nicely done!” The book has gotten hundreds of glowing reviews like this, and none of them are wasted on me. As proud as I am of what we accomplished, I remember telling Adrianne that while I would love to write another book, I’d never do another one like Photography by the Letter. The technical nature of the writing was hard, dry, and way outside of my wheelhouse, which is why it took multiple passes to get it right. Still, I loved the process as a whole and have had the idea of writing another book in the back of my head ever since. The question is, which one?

LINKS

Write what you know?

Brian Eno on ideas

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Rethinking My Website

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 18:00:00 -0400

A little over a year ago, after getting a very disturbing email from my then web host saying that they were closing shop—without including an end date, mind you—I decided to try an experiment with my website. Rather than simply move my existing Wordpress installation to another web host, I built a new site using a platform called Carrd (affiliate link) which, according to the website, is perfect for building “simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.” And while that’s mostly true, there are features that allow you to fake displaying multiple pages on a single page and paid features that can add even more functionality. You can also set up subdomains to stand in for additional pages—which is what I’ve done to display multiple bodies of work—and for the past year or so, it’s done exactly what I’ve needed it to do.

LINKS

Carrd (affiliate link)

CONNECT WITH ME

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Creaking Back to Life

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

For years I’ve wanted to do some sort of legacy project that would allow me to explore and somehow acknowledge and maybe even come to terms with my family history. As many of you know, I come from a family of railroad workers. In fact, I’m the first and to my knowledge the only male in three generations of my family not to work for the railroad. At the beginning of 2019, I started laying the groundwork for a project that would not only allow me to lean into my family history but that I could also use as a starting point for something much bigger that could end up being the legacy project that I had been looking for. Unfortunately, COVID shut the world down and because the project really had to be done in person, most of the connections I made up to that point and permissions I had secured became moot. I got really upset about it because I loved the idea and it had taken me a long time to get there. But how I wanted to do it was completely disrupted and since at the time nobody had any idea how long the lockdown would last, I put the whole thing on hold, and it’s been there ever since.

CONNECT WITH ME

Documentary about the piano that was damaged by the 2011 tsunami

Twitter: @jefferysaddoris

Instagram: @jefferysaddoris

MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Finding Dots to Connect

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Last month, we lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was an absolute monster of an artist and since hearing the news I’ve been going back and listening to a bunch of his catalog, which is not only massive, but it’s also incredibly diverse.

There are certain artists whose work allows you to see the world differently. If they’re really good, they might even allow you to feel it differently. Ryuichi Sakamoto was one of those artists. He worked across multiple musical genres and he was able to tap into and even affect different aspects of the human experience. I think the first piece of Ryuichi’s music I heard was Forbidden Colors, which is a vocal version of the theme to a film he scored and acted in alongside David Bowie called Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It was also the first of what would be decades of brilliant collaborations with former Japan frontman David Sylvian. A friend in college had reintroduced me to David, who I was familiar with from Japan, but it was his solo record Secrets of the Beehive, which featured Forbidden Colors as a bonus track, that introduced me to Ryuichi and I’ve been a fan ever since.

LINKS

Yellow Magic Orchestra

Brandon Stosuy

async

Asia

Roger Dean

Tales From Topographic Oceans

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Joyspotting

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 22:00:00 -0400

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of trains and have been since I was a kid. My dad was a railroad man for the Southern Pacific, as were his two brothers, my grandfather, and his father before him. So you might say that trains are in my blood. I remember my dad sometimes taking me to work with him and I would get to ride on the caboose while he did his shift. Of course this was back when trains still had cabooses, which they phased out in the early 80s. My dad really wanted me to go into the family business and he even set up an interview where basically all I had to do was sign some papers and I would have been in. But when I got to the interview, I couldn’t get out of my car. I could see the trajectory of the life that would mean and it just wasn’t the life I wanted. When I told my dad about it, he was furious with me. And understandably so. He took my response to mean that I thought I was too good for the life that was good enough for three generations of the men in our family. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t that the life wasn’t good enough for me, it was that the life just wasn’t right for me. I wanted something different, not better, and he just couldn’t understand that at the time. All this to say, I still love trains and will occasionally even go out of my way to see one, but my love absolutely pales in comparison to someone I’ve been following on Instagram for the last couple of months.

LINKS

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

I Just Didn’t See It

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0400

In the last Iteration, I talked about how seeing the Philip Guston show at the National Gallery left me feeling a little envious of such a strong personal story, something that my own work just didn’t have. I talked to Sean about it over the weekend and shared some of what I had been feeling and he was quick to disagree saying that he thought my work was very personal. He said that in his opinion, my work is a reflection of how I see and experience the world. To him, all of my anxieties, my fears, even some of my childhood traumas are all right there on the canvas. “I know you don’t see it,” he said, “but what could be more personal than that?”

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Philip Guston - Wikipedia

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

A Story About Story

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 18:00:00 -0400

On Friday I went down to the National Gallery of Art and man I came home in a funk. Usually, I come back super charged up and wildly inspired and just ready to get back into the studio, but Friday was not one of those days. I went down to have lunch with my friend Michelle and after lunch we walked through the Philip Guston show that just opened. I had never heard of Guston before and seeing his work was a very dramatic experience. So much so that after Michelle had leave to get back to work, I ended up going through the show again and taking a little more time on some of the pieces that really resonated with me the first time through. Before you enter the actual show, there’s a short video playing on a loop that gives a little background on Guston’s life—specifically his childhood as a Jewish immigrant in California, where the persecution of Jews and Blacks by the KKK caused massive trauma that would stay with him for the rest of his life and feature heavily in his art. On top of that, three days after his tenth birthday, his father hanged himself in the shed outside their house and Guston was the one who discovered the body. As a means of processing his childhood trauma, he taught himself to draw and at 14, he started to paint.

LINKS

National Gallery of Art

Philip Guston Now

The Guston Foundation

Stedelijk Museum

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

It’s a Numbers Game

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 11:00:00 -0400

A few days ago, I read a quote by the great art critic and author Jerry Saltz that goes, “Do not ask what a work of art means. Ask what a work of art does to you. Art is not a thing, or a noun. Art is a verb. Art is something that does something to you.” I’ve been thinking about the quote ever since and how it really came to me at the perfect time. First of all, I’d already come around to thinking about art as a verb, which I mentioned in a previous Iteration. But the other reason that the quote really resonated is that I’m getting ready to (finally) put my paintings out in the world and I’m thinking about value and worth—specifically financial value and worth.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

An Alternate You

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0400

For the past several months, Adrianne and Sylvia and I have been watching Fringe, which is terrific show and was one of those shows that I never missed an episode of when it first aired. One of the cool things about rewatching it now is that it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten a lot of the smaller plot points so that in many ways it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. If you’re unfamiliar with Fringe, it’s a sci-fi show that originally came out in 2008 and was created by JJ Abrams, who also did Alias, Lost, Star Trek, and a ton of other things. Fringe centers around a special division of the FBI that investigates all sorts of paranormal phenomenon—think of it as The X-Files meets The Twilight Zone. It’s one of those shows that you find yourself talking about after watching an episode, which I absolutely used to do with friends when it first came out and it’s what Adrianne and Sylvia and I still do now.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Consequences of Process

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:00:00 -0400

A couple days ago I finished the last—at least for now—of a series of paintings I’ve been calling Cell Damage. I’ve posted a few of them on Instagram and over the past several days I’ve been doing an informal post mortem and really looking at them as a body of work to try to determine what worked, what didn’t, and why in each piece. I tend to think of my work in series, rather than as individual paintings, so when I finish a series—or at least get to a point that I want to take a break—I like to look at the whole thing and try to pick out a theme or a narrative or maybe just a technique that I’d like to take in a different direction. In that way, I think that all of my work is connected, though it may not be obvious at first.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Interestingness of Everyday Experiences

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:00:00 -0400

“Sometimes disengaging is the best way to engage.” That’s a quote from Rick Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Before I actually sat down and started reading it as a book, I would flip to a random page and read just what was on that page—and I actually think that with this particular book, that’s a perfectly acceptable way to approach it. First of all, the chapters are short—some are only a page or two—and between them are little one or two line quotes like the one I just shared and honestly, there have been a ton of these little thoughts and ideas that have sent me down rabbit holes or connected the dots between things that I have already been thinking about.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Best Antenna

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0400

This Iteration is a little different. Earlier in the week, I went into DC to visit a friend at the National Gallery and I took a few notes before and after—just a few thoughts that were in my head on the train ride in and out of the city. I love DC and whenever I go into town, regardless of why I’m there, I always come away recharged and inspired and just generally happier. Adrianne says that I should start doing it once a week. Maybe she’s right.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Vengeance, Vision, and Voice

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 20:00:00 -0400

"Art used to be in charge of us. You used to buy a whole album not even knowing what songs would be on it. Now, we have everything on demand. At your fingertips. In pieces. You think half the people that are posting quotes from Oscar Wilde have ever read one of his plays? Or posting photos of Audrey Hepburn have actually seen the film that it’s from? Not a chance."

That was an excerpt from a monologue—and it’s just one of several really terrific monologues—from a movie that Adrianne and I watched the other day called Vengeance. I don’t want to give away too much of the movie, but I will say that each of us had some expectations going into it and we couldn’t have been more surprised at how much we ended up enjoying it. In fact, it’s the first movie in quite a while that we’ve talked about multiple times after watching it. The other thing we’ve been talking about is The Last of Us on HBO, but I’ll save that for another time.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Finally Ready To Hear It

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:00:00 -0400

This month has been incredibly productive for me, both in terms of the painting I’ve been doing in the studio and in the amount of writing I’ve been doing. I’ve got multiple paintings in the works and I’ve started sketching out the framework for an entirely new body of work, which, if I can pull it off, will be different than anything I’ve done before. I feel like I’m still riding the wave of momentum that started building over the last couple months of 2022, after coming to some pretty terrific—and in some cases pretty profound—realizations around my work and where I see myself going over the next year. Looking forward is not something I’ve historically been very good at. Looking back, on the other hand, is something I do really well—often to pick at the scabs of some imagined shortcomings where I think I’ve failed myself or others. I just can’t think about 3 or 5 or 10 years out like some people do, especially since I’ve spent so much of my life not being able to see a 10 day plan, let alone 10 years.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

One Why Does Not Fit All

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 14:00:00 -0400

Before we get started, I’d like to ask you a few questions. There are no wrong answers here, I’d just like to get you thinking about them because they’re part of what has inspired this particular Iteration.

Do you believe that you should ever compromise when making your art?
Are you the only audience that matters when it comes to your art?
Is there a difference between art and product? If so, should the approach to making those two different things be different?

While you’re thinking about the answers for yourself, I’ll share my answers to each of the questions. And keep in mind, these answers are just for me and your mileage may vary. I’m actually going to answer these in reverse, and I think by the end you’ll understand why.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Getting Back to Books

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 21:00:00 -0400

One of the first books I remember reading was The Outsiders by SE Hinton. Just to be clear — The Outsiders wasn’t the first book I ever read; not by a long shot. Even as a child, I had a pretty good sized library, which included classics from Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Margaret and H.A. Rey. But The Outsiders was different. It was the first book I can remember that really resonated with me and made me think about language. In fact, it may be the book that began my love affair with the written word.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

It’s All Kind of Connected

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 16:00:00 -0400

I’ve been listening to a lot more music lately—and not just in the background while I’m doing something else, but in the foreground as its own activity.

Growing up, my mom always had music playing in the house. She was a huge Motown fan, so I grew up listening to Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, and way too many others to mention. She and my dad were also big Elvis Presley fans. I think my dad sort of wanted to be Elvis, which probably wasn’t all that uncommon for men in the late ‘60s. My mom and her friend Carol actually used to wait outside Elvis’ house in Brentwood, hoping to catch a glimpse of him coming or going. Although they never saw him there, they did get the chance to go to a party he hosted in 1969 at the International Hotel in Vegas, but that’s another story.

LINKS

Ulla Straus

Billow Observatory

Lisa Bella Donna

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Once More Around the Sun

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 18:00:00 -0400

Adrianne and I were out walking Cooper earlier and I asked her whether there was a single event that made her 2022 memorable. She thought about it for a moment as we walked and said, “Honestly, I can’t think of anything. Can you?” I tried to scrub through the previous twelve months in my mind and I drew a blank too. Nothing stood out. I mean, there are a ton of things that came to mind, like another year of Covid, another year of humans failing the environment, Congress, the Supreme Court, Brexit, China, Russia, Ukraine, Twitter. I could go on, but none of the things I would come up with feel very personal. They affect all of us in one form or another. When we got back to the house, Adrianne asked if she could read me a poem that one of her friends sent her. It’s an anonymous poem that was on the Plague Poems Twitter feed.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Relentless Repetition

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 10:00:00 -0400

The other day, Paramount Pictures put up a ten-minute mini-documentary showing some of the preparation and training that Tom Cruise and the production crew went through to perform just one of the insane stunts from the next installment of Mission: Impossible. I say just one because I’m sure that the film is loaded with them. I mean, it’s a Tom Cruise movie, so there can’t be just one, right? There might be one that everyone talks about, like hanging off of the side of an Airbus as it takes off, or flying a helicopter through a 360-degree corkscrew dive, or performing 106 HALO jumps with a broken ankle just to get three shots, or…well, you get the idea. To say the man is focused is an understatement. Whether you love him or hate him, when it comes to leaving it all in the frame, I can’t think of another filmmaker more dedicated to the craft of making movies and entertaining audiences than Tom Cruise—and he’s been doing it for decades.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Tactile Buzz

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0400

This is the sound of me writing. Specifically, it’s the sound of me writing this Iteration. I’m using a Slate Gray Pilot Prera fountain pen with a medium nib, loaded with my favorite ink: Namiki IC-100 in blue/black. While I typically sketch and jot down ideas on paper, I do most of my actual writing in an app called Bear, which I’ve used for a number of years. But for the past several weeks, I’ve been going back and forth on getting a new iPad to replace my aging second-generation iPad Mini along with an Apple Pencil so that I could potentially retain the feeling of analog writing on a digital device. What I found is that while the mechanics of writing on the iPad might be the same, the feel isn’t even close—and that’s where it falls apart for me.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

A Jump Jet and a Job Well Done

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 16:00:00 -0400

For several years in a row starting when I was in junior high, my dad used to take me to the Point Mugu Naval Air Show. Military aviation was something we had in common and the Point Mugu show was always terrific. That was the show I first saw the F-14, the F-15 (which, at the time was the only jet that could actually accelerate on a vertical climb), the F-16, and even the SR-71, which is still my favorite aircraft of all time. Anyway, one particular year—and this might have been around 1979 or 1980, as we walked around the show, we overheard people talking about the Harrier, which neither one of us had ever heard of.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Mind the Gap

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0400

The other day, I was sitting in our sunroom watching a video interview with Simon Sinek, who I absolutely love. If you aren’t familiar with Simon’s work, there are a ton of terrific videos on his YouTube channel—I might start with Why is Your Origin Story or Be the Idiot—and I can’t recommend his book, Start With Why, highly enough. It’s a deceptively simple question that I think many of us have a hard time answering when it comes to talking about the things we make or want to make. Anyway, I was watching this video and in it Simon was telling a story about Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike. Basically, using running as a metaphor, Phil was illustrating the meaning behind their famous “JUST DO IT" slogan and how it has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with trying. As Simon said, “when Nike is at their best, they celebrate the ones who do, not the ones who win.” When the video finished, Adrianne, who was sitting at her computer across the room, asked, "do you know about the knowing-doing gap?” “No,” I responded. “What’s that?” She spent the next few minutes explaining it to me and encouraged me to go do some reading about it online, which I did and, wow, what an eye opener.

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Lean In and Let Go

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Over the past month or so, I’ve been seeing a lot of Quentin Tarantino clips pop up in my YouTube feed because about a month ago, I clicked on a video of Quentin being interviewed by Charlie Rose. When it finished, the algorithm showed me another, which I also clicked on. Since the algorithm got what it wanted, it started showing me more clips and occasionally I would click, and here we are a month or so later with me having watched about a dozen clips and interviews with Quentin Tarantino. Full disclosure, I like some of Tarantino’s movies, but it’s his approach to making movies that I find fascinating. Recently he was quoted as saying that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was his best movie, to which someone on Twitter almost immediately replied “He’s wrong. It was Pulp Fiction.” I can’t say I disagree. But regardless of what you or I think of any of his movies, he makes exactly what he wants to see and if we don’t like it, that’s on us, not him. He was very clear about that fact in one of the interviews I watched. The interviewer asked him whether he had an audience in mind when he made his movies. Almost without skipping a beat, Quentin responded, “Yeah, me. I’m the audience.”

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Making Space(s)

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 17:00:00 -0400

When we moved into our house in 2016, I told Adrianne how much I couldn’t wait to convert two of the downstairs spaces into studios. “Day one,” I told her. As is often the case with home projects, things don’t always go to plan and day one is now year six and the spaces, while functional, still aren’t done.

LINKS

https://blogstatic.io/

https://transistor.fm/

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Are You a Department Store or a Boutique?

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 11:00:00 -0400

The other day, for the first five or so minutes of one of our daily live walk and talks though the forest, I spoke what may have been the most coherent and compelling rant-slash-sermon I’ve ever done but, for some reason, my mic wasn’t working on my phone and none of it went out to the listeners.

LINKS

Making Waves

The Sound of 007

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The Greatest Chef in the World

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

What's Creativity Worth?

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Being creative is hard. Really hard. Actually, let me rephrase that. Being creative isn’t so bad. In fact, if I’m honest about it, the being comes pretty easily for me. As my wife and most of my friends will attest, I have ideas all the time, sometimes great ideas. The ideas themselves aren’t the problem. It’s what to do with them that’s the problem. The doing is where I get stuck, specifically on the business side of the doing.

LINKS

Ben Proudfoot (Twitter)

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Rothko: The Color Field Paintings

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The In-Person Impact

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 16:00:00 -0400

Last week, I took the train into DC to visit the National Gallery of Art, which is by far one of my favorite places in the city. Regardless of the show or exhibition, I always come home energized and inspired. Sometimes, I’ll even go down just to sit in the “Rothko Room” for an hour — and I know the official name is Tower 1 of the East Building, but I think Rothko Room sounds much more poetic. On this particular trip, I was there to see The Double, a show that a friend who works at the gallery called “life changing” — which is saying something considering she’s one of the top paper conservators in the world and has seen some pretty incredible work over the course of her career. The show really is fantastic and features work by some of my favorite artists, including Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; and it begins with a pair of American flags by Jasper Johns displayed opposite Double America by Glenn Ligon.

LINKS

National Gallery of Art

Rothko Room

The Double

Double America

Episode 59 of Deep Natter

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

The Medium is Irrelevant

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 14:00:00 -0400

The other day, a friend of mine texted me a link to a podcast, along with a single sentence that read, “If I could be a small fraction of the photographer Sally Mann is, it would really be something.” Now, this friend is a terrific photographer but, like so many of us, he sometimes gets stuck in the rut of comparison. I get it. I really do. Sally Mann is an iconic photographer, but one of the most challenging—and I think harmful—things we can do to ourselves as artists is to unreasonably compare ourselves and our work to others.

Question:

Do you compare yourself or your work to others? If so, how does it affect the work you make?

LINKS

Sally Mann : https://www.sallymann.com/

Robert Rauschenberg: https://www.wikiart.org/en/robert-rauschenberg

David Carson: http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/

Shepard Fairey: https://obeygiant.com/

Bastille: https://www.bastillebastille.com/

Quarter Past Midnight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1VzzNbfPaM

John Dos Passos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dos_Passos

Nick Hornby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hornby

The Paris Review recently posted (or, maybe re-posted) a fantastic interview with the great James Baldwin. In it, he talks about what inspired him to became a writer, why he left America for Paris, and some of his inspirations. If you aren’t familiar with James Baldwin, I recommend his novel The Fire Next Time or I Am Not Your Negro, which is a documentary based on his unfinished novel, Remember This House.

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Productive Disruption

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 17:00:00 -0400

For the past several months, I found myself feeling more and more overwhelmed by my own expectations around the work I was producing. I started feeling the weight of some of the narratives in the work—greed, power, corruption, the failure of capitalism—a realization prompted in part by a conversation with my stepmother who, when looking at a recent painting of mine simply responded, “Wow. That’s really dark, honey.” Being so close to the work hadn’t really allowed me to see it for what it was becoming, but taking a step back pulled it into very sharp focus. The subject matter, as well as the supporting research required to make it, was really starting to get to me.

LINKS

Station Eleven on HBO Max

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Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Putting My Self First

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 16:00:00 -0400

One of the most difficult things about being a freelance creative is that you’re basically always on the clock. Sure, you can wait for inspiration to strike, but in my experience, you’ll end up waiting more than making. As Chuck Close famously said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” While I understand what he’s saying, and may even agree with it to an extent, sometimes it’s not that easy. I think there’s a middle ground where instead of simply waiting for inspiration to strike, we can think about the purpose and intention we want to bring to our work before embarking on the uncertain journey of making it.

LINKS

Maarten Rots

The Practice by Seth Godin

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

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The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Is Happiness a Choice?

Wed, 25 May 2022 12:00:00 -0400

I was texting with one of my oldest friends recently after she got back from a trip to Italy and at one point in the conversation, she asked whether I was happy. “I’m grateful, but I don’t think I’m happy,” I responded. “And maybe that’s just the way I’m wired. I’m not generally unhappy either, although there are moments of each. It’s just not consistent.” There were a few moments of onscreen silence and she came back with, “Maybe don’t ask yourself if you’re happy (and neither will I—sorry!) and just be. Did you ever read Siddhartha?”

LINKS

Siddhartha

Enneagram

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Photography by the Letter

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MUSIC

Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Simplify

Tue, 10 May 2022 14:00:00 -0400

After receiving an email from my web host informing me that they would be closing down and I was to remove my files and secure hosting elsewhere “ASAP” (no closure date was given), I went into a bit of a panic.

QUESTION

Are there recurring distractions—creative or otherwise—that you can easily resolve or take out of your path that might give you more time or better focus?

A FEW EXAMPLES

1. Remove distracting apps from your phone.

2. Schedule time for ideation or creative thinking.

3. Consider whether you can establish a new habit or pattern to take a regular/daily but unimportant decision off your plate.

LINKS

Carrd

Iterations on Substack

Attention!: The Power of Simple Decisions in a Distracted World

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