#58: Negative manifesto
An alternate way to start a new year
In the book Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, David Levine, artist and illustrator (best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books), talks about the worst assignment he ever gave.
He passed out a bunch of art magazines to his students and told them to find an artist they liked that they’d never heard of and report back the next week to the class.
The assignment was a total failure: none of the students liked anything they saw.
So Levine told them to come back next week and report an artist they hated.
Bingo!
Each student came back with an artist whose work they critiqued enthusiastically, followed by an adrenaline-filled discussion that inevitably led to a positive conversation about each student’s own practice.
What I found interesting about this turn of events was how much easier it is, as a first step, to define your own position negatively, and how the beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like.
Sometimes it’s much easier to get started when you define what you aren’t going to do.
Likewise, it’s much easier to determine what you want to do when you identify what you don’t want to do. In Steal Like An Artist Journal, Austin Kleon has a page for a negative manifesto.
Instead of making a list of things to achieve, I thought I would start with things I will NOT do this year. This is how it went:
I will not neglect my health to write more.
I will not stick to routines on the days I don’t feel like hence giving creativity a chance to lead me wherever.
I will not get frustrated when I don’t tick everything off my to-do list.
I will not work on all seven days of the week.
I will not expect to make much money from my art.
I will not force myself to write or draw when my eyes and hands are hurting, and all I want to do is go to sleep.
I will not do anything which is not fun anymore.
All I need to do is to subtract these from my list and what will be left is what I want to do.
The Planner and Bullet Journal I have created has plenty of space to write a negative and then a positive manifesto. It has everything you will need to have a productive and stress-free year. Check it out here.
Happy planning 2022.
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