The Noise of Art

[My apologies for re/crossposting my own post, but it fits here]

Let's get messy! Too often people are overly polite and timid—they don't want to make waves. They don't want to stand out and be different. But percussion is all about making (sound) waves, and standing out above the din.

Make a big noise!


Don't worry about what your friends and neighbors will say, go ahead and make it! And if you paint, get out those bright colors, splash them on your canvas. Dancers, jump and wiggle. Writers, use big words, go into detail. Don't leave anything out.

There. Does that feel better?

Now that you have that down, you can edit things, tidy it up a bit. But you can't edit small. You need something BIG in order to trim it down.

When I'm in my studio working, I'm making all sorts of noise. It's chaos and things are messy. But out of that chaos come nuggets of golden ideas that are worth developing. Yeah, I throw away a lot of stuff, but that's the only way to get something worth keeping. It's the same for my writing. I might churn out pages and pages of words just to find that one sentence that is golden. 

I know that's it's a bit of a contradiction, because I am a very neat & tidy person who likes order, but believe it or not, there is order in chaos (just read some physics books to find out about that…) So for me, I see chaos in a controlled sort of way because I am directing it, as opposed to just reacting to it.

The nice thing is, once I have something worthwhile, it's easy to build upon it to create something larger. But I need that 1st thing to create a foundation.

All great artists get messy—you just tend to see the finished product, not the mess that was made to create it.

~ MB

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