Iterations

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...

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 w...

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...

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 unfa...

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...

“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. Fir...

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 sh...

"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 monol...

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 mome...

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, shou...

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 an...

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 Presle...

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 anoth...

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...

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’...

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...

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 hav...

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 mont...

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/ CONNECT WITH ME Website: https://jeffer...

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 CONNECT WITH ME Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jef...

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...

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...

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...

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 r...

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 exte...