July 31, 2011
Relaxin’
Hugh MacLeod
I'm a cartoonist.
I sell limited-edition prints.
I wrote a book.
I'm CEO of Stormhoek USA, which markets South African wine in the States.
I also draw private commissions.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
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NY NY |
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Archive for July, 2011
July 28, 2011
Permanent State
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I first drew this in 2004. A wee doodle that I thought very little about at the time. Yet over time, the simplicity of the message seems to have resonated with a lot of people.
Any fool can be a burnout or a calcified dinosaur. Reinvention is much harder. And to keep doing it, again and again? MUCH, MUCH harder.
But that’s what makes it so worth doing…
July 27, 2011
The Avant Garde
From Wikipedia: “The term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard or literally the advance guard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority.”
I just think it’s kind of funny, a picture of this dull, unremarkable guy getting all despondent because he’s not “cutting edge” or whatever.
But I don’t think one chooses to be ahead of one’s time. It kinda just happens, with all the other crap, otherwise known as Life.
Which is where the humor in the cartoon lies…
July 26, 2011
Technology
This cartoon was originally a personal business card I designed for Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist.
He wanted a card that he could hand out to both techies and “civilians”, both at business and social events.
It’s a common theme among most of my peers– we’re totally consumed by our careers, yet we still have the other parts of our lives to fit in somehow.
How do we do that? I have no idea. Does anybody?
July 25, 2011
Everything Is Marketing
This has been doing the rounds for the last decade or so: the idea that marketing is not just some appendage to be bolted on externally, but something more central and baked-in.
But of course, you can take that idea too far.
You can make it a silly idea.
No idea is so good that it can’t be made silly, with just a little application. Heh.
July 17, 2011
One Small Step
[Image via Wikipedia]
[This is a cross-post from my friend, the business coach and former VC, Jerry Colonna. Originally posted on his blog here.]
I’m pretty sure it was a Philco. I know I was five and half.
It’d been a typically hot summer day where my best friend Marcus had spent much of it carving our initials in the hot, soft asphalt of East 26th street and floating wooden Popsicle sticks at the gutter river rushing out of the open hydrant. July 20, 1969.
My father calls out from the front window of our ground level apartment. ”Jerry!” he shouts, “Come inside.” The tone means either I’ve done something wrong or something important is going on. I hope for the latter.
I come inside and find my parents, my brothers, and my sister gathered around the Philco (or was it a Dumont?). Neil Armstrong is just stepping down the ladder of lunar landing module.
I thought of that moment years later when, after deciding to go into work a little late that day, I watched the Challenger first lift off and then explode.
And I thought of it again a few weeks ago as Hugh MacLeod talked about going to watch the last Shuttle take off. When I saw his drawing, his take on what this all meant, I understood a little more about my own experience.
Watching that one small step on the static-ky, shaky black and white TV, with the tinfoil on the antenna to get a slightly better reception, I realized I had been inspired in small ways to live a life that would always push against the limits of my own fears.
Hugh’s “Incredible Times” drawing implicitly challenges me to see more clearly, to articulate more dearly, those folks who inspire me to see the incredible, the unbelievable. Fortunately, I can see it in the everyday.
I see it, for example, in the client who discovers a tumor that needs to be removed from her liver or the friend who’s tumor is in her breast. I see it in the client who – despite the gnawing, aching fear of never being able to be good enough to please a parent – still goes in every day making, as I am wont to say, “incremental progress that is directionally correct.”
We do ourselves a disservice when we look only to the extraordinary for affirmation of the incredible. We set ourselves up, then, to see that our struggles with the pathology of every day are somehow less then. And, of course, that then reinforces our own gnawing aching fears that we are never enough.
It helps to see the incredible inspiration in the man, the artist, whose demons were so ferocious that his only solace was to drink, smoke, and sleep in a kind of hazy denial of life. When that man wakes (albeit with the shock of a fearsome medical diagnosis) and begins the painful process of reclaiming his body, and through that act reclaims his souls…well, when that happens, boy howdy, we do live in incredible times.
So Hugh is right: there is work to be done. But I think the work is not getting people to romanticize our heroes but to see the incredible in the simple act of getting along, of growing up, of becoming more and more wholly, utterly, ourselves.
When Siddhartha woke up and became the Buddha, the awakened one, he didn’t wake to see the triumphant earthly gods and goddesses. He awoke to the utterly breathtaking beauty of the everyday person facing the truth of the pain and fear of life; facing that truth and choosing to move ahead, regardless. That feels like one heck of a small step.
July 16, 2011
Possibility
This is one of my favorite drawings I did at TED Global.
A wee sketch, complete with the #DewarsTED hastag.
“Possibility”. A riff on the great Charles Schultz line, “I carry the burden of a great potential”.
I didn’t think too much about it at the time. But as the days progressed, the cartoon started to haunt me.
The burden of a great potential. Anyone with half a brain (or half a soul) will be able to relate.
Knowing that it might never happen. And knowing that even if you do manage to make a decent go of it, it will never be enough.
That there’s still something else you still haven’t done, that there’s still one more piece of Creation remaining, that you haven’t managed to download. AND THIS WILL NEVER CHANGE. Welcome to being alive. Welcome to the human condition. That’s what TED is REALLY about, at the end of the day.
Terrifying, isn’t it?
[Full disclosure: I was attending TED on behalf of my client. Dewar’s Whisky, who were a sponsor of the event.]
Ow. I’ve got a TED-ache.
[The Dewar’s cartoon I did for Maajid’s talk etc.]
[View from my drawing tablet: Downstairs in the chill-out room.]
[I’m still in Edinburgh, and like everybody else, still recovering from a very intense week at TED Global. Here are some notes from an incredible event, in no particular order:]
1. “An idea is not something you HAVE, an idea is something you DO.”
I attended TED on behalf my client, Dewar’s Scotch. The idea was to create cartoons that gave justice to the Dewar’s idea, “Some things are just worth doing”.
Which ties in with the TED idea, “Ideas worth spreading.”
Which ties in with one of the great themes in my work these days, “The Unification of Work and Love”.
I’m currently running with the thought that, an idea is not something you HAVE, an idea is something you DO.
i.e. Ideas are all very well, but without some sort of action to follow, they’re not much use. Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum.
Nobody reading this, including me, want to spend their whole life, sitting on their ass, thinking big thoughts but actually doing nothing.
2. You’ve heard of live-blogging, yes? Well, I was “live-tooning”. Drawing cartoons on the spot, trying to capture all the ideas that were flying at me at 200 mph. Over four days, I drew dozens of them. The cartoon above was one I did for Maajid Nawaz. He gave a great talk on how to fight extremism on a global level:
Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia.
One of the points Maajid made was how movements require four elements in order to be viable: Ideas, narratives, symbols and leaders. So I ran with that. Click on the link and watch the video to hear more.
At the event, I gave Maajid a hand-drawn copy of the work above, poster-sized. He was a very gracious man, I thought.
[Maajid’s TED video…]
3. Then there were the “Conversation Pieces”.
While talking to the polar explorer, Ben Saunders, I had the idea to make a drawing WHILE talking to him. A real-time conversational doodle. as it were. A “Coversation Piece”, as it were. Above is a picture of him holding the final result.
It’s a question that never gets old: Here you are, surrounded by all these amazing people and ideas, now how do you use what you do (in my case, my cartoons) in order to interface with them? Meaningful interaction with other people– THAT’S what makes work interesting, NOT the money.
4. Ow. I’ve got a TED-ache.
A TED-ache is what they call it: When your brain is so stuffed with all the ideas and stimuation and conversation flying around for four days nonstop, your brain can no longer keep up with it, your brain kinda wants to explode.
I came away with enough material to fill MONTHS of blogging, MONTHS of catooning. Like everybody else at TED, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed yet supercharged.
It was an amazing experience: Hundreds of insanely bright and creative people, doing insanely interesting things. Quite a contrast to the usual mass-elevator-pitch that most conferences have become.
And now, somehow, I’ve got to do the event justice, both on behalf of myself and Dewars’. Like everybody else who attends, it’s not the event that matters, it’s what you take away and apply to your own life in a meaningful way that matters. I would be lying if I said I didn’t find it daunting.
I’ve said it before many times before on this blog: We are incredible beings living in incredible times, and as long as there is still one person alive on this planet who doesn’t believe this, then there’s still work to be done. TED re-affirmed this for me, in spades.
It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep because of this. Thanks to TED for making this happen, thanks to Dewar’s for being such an awesome client.
5. This is only the beginning. You have my word. Rock on.
[Bonus Link:] The 23 Amazing TEDWomen Speakers Of TEDGlobal 2011. Yep. I met some of them. Yep. “Amazing” would be about right…
July 13, 2011
This is my message from TED Global: “ALL ART IS SMALL ART”
I’m at Ted Global, on behalf of, Dewar’s Whisky.
I’m drawing tons of cartoons, based on my experiences here.
To be honest, there’s so much fantastic stuff here, coming at me at 200 mph, it’s hard to keep up with it in real time. It’s a good problem to have, I would say…
THEREFORE:
1. You can follow the action is pretty easily. Just follow #TEDglobal and #dewarsted on Twitter.
2. This is my message from TED Global: “ALL ART IS SMALL ART”. Big, important stuff is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS preceded by small moments of genius. Watch all the TED videos if you don’t believe me. All the world’s great human-caused tragedies (not to mention, all failed expensive marketing campaigns) were caused when the people in charge tried to bypass the small stuff and go straight for the big stuff. Five Year Plan, Comrade? Great Leap Forward, Comrade?
3. And this is also my message fro Dewar’s: “ALL ART IS SMALL ART”. All great marketing starts that way. And more importantly, stays that way.
Rock and roll…
Greetings from Edinburgh!
[A photo of whisky barrels taken yesterday at the Dewar’s distillery in Aberfeldy.]
I recently arrived in Edinburgh for the TED Global conference.
My client, Dewar’s Scotch Whisky, is sponsoring the event, so they got me along to live-draw some cartoons for them.
In my mind, the great task for humanity in the 21st Century is what I call “The Unification of Work and Love”.
In other words, learning how to make work MORE than just something to pay the bills with, but to turn it into something that expresses who we truly are.
That’s really what TED is all about, for the speakers on the stage, for the people in the audience, for sponsors like Dewar’s, and yes, the subject of a great many of my cartoons.
So I’m pretty excited. I hope to be blogging more about the event as the week continues. Obviously, there’s a lot here worth writing about.
The Unification of Work and Love. The Holy Grail for so many of us. Bring it on!
July 4, 2011
In Praise of “Small Art”.
A friend of mine was in Paris last week, where she went and checked out the massive Anish Kapoor sculpture, Monumenta 2011, now on exhibit at Le Grand Palais.
This got me thinking…
I like Kapoor’s work. He makes very big art.
I, on the other hand, make very small art i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. And the prints aren’t too large, either.
Though I like a lot of “Big Art”- Kapoor, Serra, Gormley, Smithson etc etc– I’m pretty happy I stuck with “Small Art”.
Small Art can impact another person on a meaningful level, just as powerfully as Big Art. Fifteen lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias had as much impact on me as fifteen hundred pages of Tolstoy’s War & Peace did, as much as I loved the latter.
And Small Art is A LOT less hassle to make.
And you can make more of it. More often. Without bankrupting yourself or putting your life on hold for months on end.
And perhaps more importantly, there’s the “Personal Sovereignty” angle. With Small Art, there’s no need to wait for someone else to deem it worthy beforehand, no need to wait nervously for the rich patron, the movie studio exec, or the illustrious museum director to give it the greenlight. There’s no need for the politics or the schmoozing or the bureaucracy.
Or the sleaze and corruption. The Big Art world is rife with that, as we all know full well.
With Small Art, you just go ahead and make it, and then it exists, and the rest is in the hands of the gods. Your work is already done, and you can get to bed at a decent hour. And not lose any sleep over it, either.
Hey, it worked for Joseph Cornell, Saul Steinberg and Edward Gorey… three artists who I rate WAY higher than Kapoor or Serra.
And what is true for Art is probably true for your thing, as well. Worry less about how BIG you want your business to be, instead think about how much LOVE you actually want to give out while your still have time left on this earth. “Meaning Scales”.
Exactly…
