Everything that exists, whether live or animate, static or in motion, has a story to tell. All you need to do is take the time to listen – listen with your inner art connoisseur’s ear, which just, by the way, we all have.

The very device through which you’re reading this blog post carries decades upon decades to centuries of history, with its earliest form perhaps originating out of someone, somewhere way back in history stopping to think a little deeper about something which likely formed an everyday part of their ordinary lives.

For example, would we enjoy the convenience of air travel today if someone hadn’t looked up at the birds in the sky and wished he could fly? The very thought of what might have transpired when that person told others around him about his idea that man can fly surely must have one’s creative juices flowing like a raging river? Was there a village comedian at hand, for instance, who came out with another one of his creative jibes, perhaps later going on to collect all his jokes and tell them to an audience, giving birth to what we know as stand-up comedy today perhaps?

It is this way of thinking which will make one realise that life in itself is nothing but one huge canvass in which all manner of different artistic scenes are taking place, from the photo-worthy landscape you catch sight of while driving across the country to the Hollywood Blockbuster-inspiring story of an ordinary person with extraordinary dreams! Take a minute to stop, look around a bit and absorb the essence of the appreciation of art. It’s all around and is available completely free.

How do you think J.K. Rowling came up with the famous Harry Potter series? If you visit the likes of York and you happen to find yourself at the train station, you’ll realise that an everyday location with nothing all too special about it really made up just one of many components of a true work of art, which later went on to be adapted to the motion picture. If you visit London often and especially if you perhaps work there, you might have noticed some of the red phone booths, but had you looked at them with the eyes of someone with an appreciation for the true essence of art as it exists in everyday life, we might have been speaking about you in the same light as the likes of J.K. Rowling!

The best part is however, that it’s not too late…

You see it particularly with NatGeo Wild, where you’d be watching one show about something like a countdown of the deadliest killer animals or something like that and then you notice that some of the footage featured has in actual fact been used in a different show. It’s all about re-packaging and narrating it from a different point of view and I see nothing wrong it at all, don’t get me wrong. In fact, it’s the inspiration for this post in that as artists whose craft is what puts food on the table, basically what we’re doing is recreating a lot of what already exists and if you’re really good at what you do then you can find so many different ways to use one piece of footage, one jingle, song or sound bite and even one image.

That’s where all the content which is in the public domain comes to the fore as this is essentially a creative artist’s gold mine.

Sure, content which is in the public domain has probably been used and reused to death, many of which content’s use is even protected by something like the Creative Commons License (basically you can’t gain any monetary value out of your use of the content, as is), but if you’re a half decent artist of any sort then you’ll know that there are infinitely more ways it can be further utilised and reused.

Something as simple as using those free (or even a paid one) apps to convert a photo into what looks like a pencil drawing should have you licking your lips by way of what you can create with public domain images, for example.

Any half decent artist, however, likes to look at a final work they’ve produced and be able to say that they created it out of their own creativity, in which case public domain content should still be utilised for some inspiration. If you’re an animator for example and you want to create a space scene with asteroids flying past the earth maybe, how long is it going to take you to build up the required capital to buy a seat in a space shuttle set to orbit the earth next, if that is at all possible? Instead, you can dig into the open archives to get that much-needed inspiration in the form of some footage that was made public by the likes of NASA, for example, just so that you can get a good idea of how things work up there and so that your depiction of how it’s all supposed to work will be accurate in your animation.

Otherwise, there’s a whole lot you can do with public domain and free content as an artist.

His message went something like this: “Just because you enjoy food and you know how to use your smartphone’s camera, that doesn’t qualify you as a foodie!”

I beg to differ – although I would tend to agree with him to a certain extent. I believe that a foodie is someone who sees themselves as one, irrespective of the method through which they demonstrate their appreciation for everything that has to do with gastronomy. An assertion of oneself as a foodie is only strengthened by what you do in support of that assertion, which means you don’t have to have your own blog about food set up and maintained, on which you discuss all the dishes you’ve tried.

If anything I feel that self-proclaimed foodies who post and discuss their relationship with food over social networking platforms are the more authentic ones. This is not to say every single foodie blog is a farce – I’m just bringing to light what I believe to be two different channels through which foodies can express themselves, but one which is more authentic than the other.

The foodie who runs a blog will often feel pressure to come up with that next post, bedazzling it with all the bells and whistles in the form of professionally sourced stock imagery and the works, while the foodie who casually discusses the meal they had at a certain restaurant with their friends over their social networking platform is perhaps more genuine in the delivery of their experience. If they didn’t like certain aspects of the food, the service or even the venue, then they’re likelier to share those views than the foodie blogger who doesn’t want to spoil her literary work of art in fear of alienating potential sponsors.

Who am I right? However, I do have my own opinion on exactly what qualifies someone as a foodie, apart from their self-proclamation of it. So I have a little 2-step framework which outlines what qualifies someone as a foodie:

1. A love for food – you cannot proclaim yourself to be a foodie if you don’t love the experience of food, be it a love for the preparation process, the process of sourcing the ingredients, maybe even growing the ingredients or the process of giving your taste buds some work to do in helping you decide just how good something tastes.
2. A desire to share your experience – If you don’t harbour a desire to tell even just one other person about your experience of the food you had, then you really have no right to call yourself a foodie. So whether you write about it and publish it on your foodie blog or indeed if you share the experience over your social media platforms, you can only really call yourself a true foodie if you have this desire to share your gastronomic experiences.

Overall, anyone who has a passion for food could class themselves as a ‘foodie’ but in my eyes, a ‘foodie’ is the person who creates their own recipes from their favourite homegrown ingredients, like homemade pasta with leeks and garlic from their home vegetable garden!

And that’s why I’m not too worried about the looming threat of the robots which are supposedly on a drive to replace the many jobs people rely on to put food on the table. I mean sure, robots/machines are a lot more effective at completing certain tasks, which would make them the perfect replacement for many of the jobs a lot of people do, but there are just some things which simply require that human touch.

So if robots are all set to replace many of the other jobs, I really don’t believe they’ll be able to replace the jobs of artists as well.

I recently saw a rather interesting insert on some German tech show about how computers are being taught to essentially be “creative.” What happens is the basic principles of programming are applied in that a set of instructions are fed into the computer and thus a programme is created, prompting the computer to iterate through various different combinations of musical notes to effectively create music in this way.

Now look, how many musical notes are there on any instrument? There’s a lot, right? How many bars are there in any song from any genre of music? Lots, right?

So this computer would then proceed to produce one note at a time, matching it with either the same or any number of different notes for the next one, up until it has iterated through all the combinations for each and every note to form only one bar and there are many bars in the typical song.

So basically what is going on here is that the computer is doing nothing more than creating a lot of noise – a lot of what will no doubt be unpleasant sounds which sound nothing like any song anybody would even refer to a song. Furthermore, someone with a keen ear for music like a music producer or a talent scout would have to listen to what will ultimately be millions upon billions of “songs,” which would defeat the purpose of having a computer replace the artist in the form of a music producer. Someone would still have to scour all this noise in order to ultimately get to a production which sounds like something akin to good music, so if robots are indeed coming for artist’s jobs, they’re still going to be creating some more jobs for us.

True creativity cannot be taught or programmed, not even by the best hackers and programmers of this world, so artists, your jobs are safe…for now! You may perhaps just have to adapt to an ever-changing world in order to keep your specific job as an artist.

Realism is a copy of what already exists

As a graphic designer, I often marvel at just what some artists can achieve with their paintbrushes and even with their pencils or coal sticks. I’m talking about realism here – that art which makes you drop your jaw and go “wow” once you’ve picked it back up off the floor. There’s even an emerging trend called “ultra realism,” which will shock you when you realise that what you thought was the photograph you’re looking at is in actual fact a painting, or better yet, is a pencil drawing!

Things get really hectic with ultra realism, but going back to how Mother Nature ultimately proves to be the greatest artist yet, realism is indeed nothing but an attempt at copying what already exists. If something looks so good on a piece of canvas, then how must it look in real life, seen with the naked eye?

Abstract art is made up of the elements of Mother Nature

Even if you were to point at a sculpture which was intentionally made to look like nothing anyone has ever seen before, abstract art is still made up of the elements of Mother Nature. The unpolished copper metal the sculptor chose to fashion his work of art with comes from where-? Not only that, why did the sculptor specifically choose to use that unrefined metal, based on its consistency? The answer is Mother Nature came first and made it that way, with the sculptor serving as nothing more than a conduit of Mother Nature’s artistry.

All art ultimately chases the “natural form”

Whether you’re working on an animation for some TV commercial or if you’re designing graphics for a video game, etc, ultimately what you come up with is your creation, however that creation will likely be appreciated and approved of if it follows the natural form – if it obeys the laws of nature – the laws of Mother Nature. In other words, the subjects which form part of your work of art will only make sense if they follow laws such as those of gravity, density, spatial perception, etc, so yet again, Mother Nature prevails!

All art spawns from what already exists

None of this should make any artist feel chagrined though – I mean, after all, you’re the one who is making the money out of what Mother Nature whispers in your ear by way of an idea for an artwork and you’re the one who gets all the recognition. Embrace the process instead of trying to fight it and you’ll be opened up to a whole new world of inspiration enjoyed by few artists in this world and by even fewer art lovers who claim to harbour an appreciation for the arts.

As funny as the comeback is, what this story and the general reaction to it demonstrates is the plight of an artist, particularly those artists who were active a few decades to a couple of centuries ago. Because art is sometimes taught as something of a pastime at institutions such as in schools, society’s attitude towards art becomes just that. Society sees it as nothing more than a pastime or a hobby and generally it’s almost like society feels that when it supports an artist by buying a piece of art they completed, they’re doing them some sort of favour.

“Get a real job” is something the typical artist would be likely to hear from their parents, whom in all fairness are probably only just worried about their child. For all we know our famous artist who is being taken to town about clearly not demonstrating his astuteness by painting at night instead of during the day, could very well have had a daytime job since artists really struggled to make a living out of their art back in those days, if any of them made any money at all.

Things have changed a lot in this day and age however with art getting the recognition it deserves and artists having a blank canvass with which they can pretty much fill with any income generating path they choose. There are many avenues through which to pay the bills with your art and not only that; if you endeavour to find a way to make your art pay you over and over and over again, you can really build up some wealth through your art.

If I had to name every single industry which forms part of the arts, we’d be sitting with what is an online version of an encyclopaedia of careers instead of a mere blog post about paying the bills with your art, so I’ll only briefly touch on some of the careers which fall under the arts bracket.

Yours truly is a graphics designer, which is a field of the arts offering many exciting opportunities, from working on TV commercials to designing the labels of everyday consumer goods. We also have what many believe to be the original form of what an artist is, such as painters, pencil sketch artists, etc, whose skills these days are required in the likes of animation and illustration.

Now I personally believe writers are artists too, in which case there are opportunities galore, so too photographers and storytellers.

The digital world we live in widens the career pool for artists infinitely because you can work on projects with people from all over the world and never have to leave your little makeshift studio, if that is indeed where your creative juices are allowed to flow.

Whether fuelled by a genuine desire to challenge their own growth trajectory or indeed if it was purely a monetary motivation, we have quite a few individuals and groups of people to thank for studying art a little deeper and uncovering the science behind it. Design is indeed a science and as a result of this it affords many more people enter into the arts – people who might otherwise consider themselves not to have a single artistic bone in their bodies, unknowingly stifling a desire to create which lives on in each and every one of us.

When art becomes a science

Art overlaps with science when an artist, whether casual or professional, introduces a procedural approach to the manner in which they create their art. Sometimes the procedural aspect is exercised only in the conceptualisation process and not necessarily in the physical process of creating the art itself, like for example a painter whose inspiration is drawn from feeling the beach sand between their toes and letting the cool ocean breeze hit their face, prior to hitting the studio and getting to work on their next piece of art.

In a little bit more of a direct way however, art and design become interchangeable with a science when you think about individuals such as chess grandmasters, computer programmers and even mathematicians and scientists!

Perhaps one of the greatest chess players of all time, Gary Kasparov will forever be remembered for having been beaten by an IBM computer while he was still at the helm of his career and still active. What many people seem to have selective amnesia about or what many people perhaps don’t even know at all is that Kasparov actually beat the same computer in a previous match, so the score is actually 1-1.

Now in my humblest opinion, I believe the computer, with all its computing power that’s infinitely more powerful than that of any human, failed to beat the grand master and world champion because of one simple element, creativity! A computer can very easily iterate through all the available and known moves within a matter of seconds so that it comes up with the best move, but as with every branch of the science field, some of the best work that gets done stems either from creativity or it stems from a moment of pure chance and luck.

Now if we take things back to design, the science of design simply draws upon scientific principles of searching for the best way of doing things, iterating through as many of those as is possible and then ultimately coming up with something that wows the mind as the eyes catch first sight of the final product.

The case in point which he made reference to was that of how he realised that the one thing which has remained constant in his life is his love for the beautiful game of football and in order to keep that fire burning he has fallen into a routine of watching as much of the football on T.V. as possible. When I’d been in touch with him recently, however, on more than just one occasion, I couldn’t help but notice that he’d respond late to my messages and when he finally responded he’d tell me he’d been out to the stadium to catch the football live.

Reason? The quality of the production has deteriorated, so he says whenever he can help it he goes out to catch the action live so that he doesn’t have to have the frustration of his team playing nonsense compounded by the poor broadcasting production which has become standard these days.

He says he wishes he could subsequently get into production and show them how it’s done, based on how they’ve previously been doing it before the sports broadcasting standards seem to have been updated in some way. One particular example he made reference to was that of how he can count about three seconds after kick-off when the director of the broadcasting team is going to cue the display of that big 0-0 score-line at the bottom of the screen, splashing the league sponsor’s logo and the names of the teams playing the match, without fail. The problem is that sometimes right where the post kick-off info splash is displayed, that is where the action is and the viewers therefore miss out on about five crucial seconds of action.

It’s only simple logic that sometimes this score-line splash should be delayed a bit if it means the viewers at home get a better viewing experience, but this is of course something which only a director who themselves is interested in the game would know.

There are many other examples he came with, such as how the director always cuts to the fourth official when they display the board which signals how many minutes are to be added on to the regulation time and they do this regardless of whether or not there is some hot action on the pitch which should perhaps rather be shown to the viewers.

The problem is indeed a problem because there was a time when none of these things were an issue, which speaks to the discussion of art sometimes being a thankless job in that when the viewer is getting a good viewing experience, the artists involved behind the scenes have absolutely no reason to be mentioned or even thought of in any way, let alone congratulated for a job well done.

It was the funniest thing ever because the cats we almost hesitant to either stick around or run away, opting for the latter after the gentleman finished his speech and turned around to face the cats as he was filling their bowls with food. It’s almost as if the cats kind of knew who is under the mask, yet for some reason their instincts kick in and send them scurrying away from someone who seems like he is trying to feed them.

Consequently and in the unlikeliest of ways I guess, this is the video that kick-started what is now a growing love for abstract art, something which I’d previously not been partial to because I just didn’t get it.

In the same way that this video is worthy of a few shares following its ignition of some wicked chuckles, abstract art is all about one’s appreciation of the process of creation. Some level of creativity brewed inside the mind of this cat owner when he perhaps went to one of those open-air fairs where they sell some props which leave you wondering just who on earth buys these things. He must have immediately thought of his cats’ possible reactions to the freaky-looking mask on display and concluded that the price for the mask was worth finding out.

That’s how abstract art is – it requires one to look a little deeper at the outcome, be it a painting or something like a sculpture, and in so doing try to imagine what the artist was thinking when they created this piece of art, where they were, how they were feeling and whether or not they were doing it with the intention of selling it.

Okay, so as much as I labour on in my life with this newfound appreciation for abstract art, I do still draw the line somewhere, but that’s just my personal view and not an attempt at dictating to anyone else how they should enjoy their consumption or appreciation of art. I’m talking about those “artworks” which look like a three year old was given free reign with some watercolour paints and, between putting the brush in their mouth just to see why mommy said they shouldn’t, they concocted something that looks more like an accident than anything else!

There are limits to these things and the pain I suffer when I come across such artworks is further compounded by the hefty price tag I often see slapped on their frames!

Nevertheless, abstract art is indeed ABSTRACT and it takes some abstract thinking to be able to understand what is going on within the frame you’re looking into.

As a fellow artist, every single art form I admire from close range or from a distance has me iterating through what is a common methodology which forms part of the creative process, so for instance you might find me watching a movie for the third time and then wonder just why on earth I’m so captivated by it in a manner which suggests that I’m watching that movie for the very first time in my life. What’s really going on is that I’m watching in admiration of the artistic process that went into its creation, such as perhaps trying to figure out how a certain shot was perfected or how the conveyance of a certain mood was so perfectly achieved.

I particularly like to do this with movies that have been converted from a book into the motion picture, which is also why I have the utmost of respect for great writers as well. Writers use these things that we call words to create art, with the best of these writers making the reader feel like they themselves could perhaps go home and start writing a bestseller.

As I mentioned in the opening of this post though, in my eyes no art form is as intriguing as that of illusionists and I say this because with illusionists I can sit and watch them perform a certain illusion a million times over, sometimes even freezing the video for a frame-by-frame analysis, and yet I still can’t quite figure out how they did it!

Illusionists seem to defy all the laws of physics, which is where the allure of their art lies I guess, but they also seem to defy the laws of art in every way!

My intrigue with what illusionists can achieve wouldn’t let me rest easy though. It was just something that would have otherwise bothered me for the rest of my life, so I had to reach out to an illusionist and ask him to share with me some insider information. Obviously, he wouldn’t give away all of his secrets, but he was happy to explain to me where their success at creating believable illusions stems from. He says it’s merely psychology at play – a sleight of hand which firstly seeks to set the brain to see things in a certain way and then delivers the killer blow by blowing the mind away with something that appears to defy the laws of nature and physics.

Mind reading as one of the many areas in which illusionists excel in making people believe it is indeed possible simply comes down to suggestive psychology. If I want you to choose a specific number for example, as an illusionist I’m first going to send subliminal messages to your mind, effectively giving it no option but to choose the number I want it to.