Quick Note:
City Arts and Lectures, a program here in the City had an interview with Maya Lin yesterday. The show is replayed Tuesday nights at 8pm on KQED FM in San Francisco. KQED has a media stream so you can listen on your computer to the interview even if you don’t get KQED.
The reason I am telling you this is because I think you should listen to it. I sat there riveted the whole time thinking that I wanted to be Maya Lin’s new best friend.
I didn’t know how well spoken and thoughtful Maya Lin was. She is also a thinking artist. She thinks about her art and what it means and how she is going to make it. She does research. Listening to her made me think that I had found a kindred spirit.
I also listened to a CraftSanity podcast with Brenda Dayne. Brenda is a podcaster who created Cast On!, a knitting podcast. The podcast is number 22 and I would recommend listening to this episode of CraftSanity. The show was from 2006 (still making my way through the archive of over a 100 podcasts), so I am glad to see see that Ms. Dayne is still podcasting. During the show she said that she wasn’t sure how long she would continue. Ms. Dayne has a great voice! Very smooth and a voice to which it is easy to listen. I don’t even knit much and am thinking of listening to a few of the Cast On! podcasts just to listen to Dayne’s voice.
A couple of things I liked about this podcast follow.
First, Jennifer always asks what advice her guest has for listeners wanting to start creative businesses. Ms. Dayne’s advice was spot on! She said to look at creating a number of different, but smaller income streams, such as writing, making things, teaching, producing posters and cards of your work. Her idea was to suggest that a creative business person not expect to make their entire salary from one thing. If you make stuff and expect to make all of your money from that work, you will burn out and be out of business.
Second, she talked about the landscape around you informing your work. Ithought this was wonderful to think about. Ms. Dayne lives somewhere in Wales (apologies to my Welsh readers: I know nothing about Wales) and moved there approximately 9 years ago from Portland, Oregon. At the the time of the podcast, she had lived there for 6 years, so I am extrapolating out and assuming she still lives there. Ms. Dayne said that she had knitted wonderful classic sweaters in Portland that were perfectly suitable for Wales and she wasn’t wearing them. She didn’t have a good reason why. After thinking about it, she said that her new work was very different in color from her old work and the old work wasn’t suitable. She said it much more eloquently than I just did! Ms. Dayne also said that she had no doubt that she would wear the sweaters again when/if she moved back to Portland. She followed that with saying that she thought the landscape was informing her work.
This comment made me think of the way you see different colors of fabric in different areas and thought it might be part of the same idea.
CraftSanity episode #22 is well worth a listen!
