Iterations

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...

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 fogge...

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...

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. CONNECT WITH ME Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jefferysaddoris Instagram: @jefferysaddoris MUSIC Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddori...

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 wo...

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 fo...

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...

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 th...

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 on...

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...

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 Nash is 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...

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,...

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 fee...

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 sketchbook...

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 th...

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...

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 imm...

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 h...

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...

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 affec...

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 simul...

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 f...

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 groun...

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 w...

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...