On this inaugural episode, we’re chatting about Intention—that sometimes difficult to pin down focus that can guide and inform all our artistic decisions.
We’ll be talking about the specifics of intention and how you can use it to design art you love to create. By the time we’re done, you’ll be able to identify the types of intention that you tend to use, learn about types of intention you may not have considered, and how to become more aware of your intention and how to use it to create more cohesive and successful pieces.
Being the very first episode of The Sage Arts podcast, I am really eager to hear what you think. You can contact me with feedback, good or otherwise, or tell me what subjects you’d like me to cover in future episodes. Since I am going to be encouraging listeners to contribute to the podcast content, you can also send me stories related to your artistic experiences or your own ideas on art and creativity to share in a future podcast.
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Until next time!
Credits:
Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Music by Playsound
Transcription (AI transcribed, unedited due to lack of budget. Please excuse the copious errors.)
Welcome all you beautiful, creative souls. I’m Sage Bray Veron and this is the Sage Arts Podcast. Please relax, sit back. It’s just going to be me and you today. If you’re at home, grab a beverage and get cozy. If you’re driving or otherwise operating heavy or or speedy machinery, keep focusing and just let the conversation wash over you.
So this is my inaugural podcast. I had planned to start in January, but I thought it’d be even cooler to start with a handful of podcasts already in the queue for everyone. I drive over there come the beginning of the year, so we’ll keep it casual today. Then we’ll hit the ground running in January with interviews and challenges and just a treasure trove of inspiration and motivation and whatever else you and I come up with.
Because if you’ve listened to the trailer or read any of the promotional stuff, you may have come to understand that I really want this to be your podcast, not just me throwing my ideas about the things I think you need to hear about. So I am going to very much welcome your input and I will give you information on how to do that come the end of each and every episode.
I do have to say it is a little weird for me over here, just a disembodied voice sending my thoughts out to all you visual people. So let me paint a picture of where I’m at.
Just imagine you’ve come into my home and you’re sitting here with me and we’re having a chat, right? I am in a small walking closet size space. It’s a little room off of my studio office. I have been working out of where Tense Muse Publications has been created for the last six years. And I am in Southern California, which normally would be clear and dry and warm and whatnot, but it is actually probably in the 40s right now and raining outside. I’m hoping the sound of the rain doesn’t affect this recording because I’ve never done any of my tests with rain going on. So fingers crossed.
Just outside of this room is a beautiful backyard that opens up into an open space, a park, actually, and then an open space hill behind that. There’s a creek at the bottom of our yard. Our yard is kind of a hill. It goes down to a creek. And so right now, I’m really, really hoping this rain is going to develop a creek because we’ve been in a horrible drought and our creek dried up way earlier than it normally does. We haven’t seen it since April, I think. But anyways, that and then we also have a koi pond outside, which I do feel guilty about in this drought ridden area. But we have some close to 30 koi fish. It feeds the raccoons and the possums and the dragonflies spawn there, and the bees come and get their water there. And it’s just this really wonderful kind of small ecosystem that we have going directly outside of my studio. It’s a huge inspiration for me. I spend a lot of time out there, especially when I’m stuck letting kind of nature just wash over me and whatnot.
So hopefully you have some kind of beautiful space that you can go to like that too. I feel very, very fortunate for that. But that’s where I’m at, so well, that’s what’s outside of where I’m at. I’m actually in this closet with equipment and wires and things around me. But there is this nice little cherry wood table sitting next to me with a chair just for you. So you have a seat. Grab something cozy.
I have a very exotic beverage today. It is hot water with lemon and honey. Because I’ve been sick for the last two weeks, I’ve had a head cold. So I’m getting down to the wire to actually record this because I just haven’t been up for it and my throat has not been up for it. So hopefully my voice stays even keel and that you can understand everything I say.
And so today I want to talk about some kind of pretty big concepts, which are at the same time some pretty basic concepts.
First of all, when you start a new project or a new series or you make some major change in what you do, doesn’t it feel like when you present it to the world, you need to show them the most amazing thing, the most mind blowing idea? I suspect that social media and the kind of fish bowl world we live in these days puts a lot of pressure on us to capture people’s attention, not just so we can build a viable business, but also to validate the time and energy and money we spend doing the things that we love. We don’t want our enthusiasm crushed, especially not right out the gate. So we understandably attach a lot of importance to beginnings.
Well, here I am posting the first podcast episode of the Sage Arts, and I honestly was starting to stress out a bit much on it. But then I thought about the last really new public project I started, which was the Virtual Art box back in 2020. This monthly Immersive design lesson was set up like a short digital magazine, which I thought would help bring my magazine readers over to this online format. So I had a pretty big hurdle to start it off with, being that there wasn’t anything quite like it and people didn’t necessarily know what to expect.
At least with the podcast, there’s a lot of precedence. Even though I won’t be following much of the established standards, it’s just not how I do things. If you were with me at the beginning of the Palmer Arts magazine, you might know what I mean. It wasn’t a magazine filled with project tutorials like other craft magazines, and that confused a lot of people at first, but I persisted. I worked on getting out quality articles and appealing to a very specific group of people I wanted to write for the aspiring artists who wanted more from the work than just duplicating what was already being made. And that’s still who I want to speak to. But are there enough people out there who want that? Enough to keep an expensive project like this going?
I don’t know, but this is what I concluded. Right now, I actually don’t care how many people want this. I know that sounds terrible when I say it out loud, but when you’re creating what you love, regardless of what anyone else wants, you should start in the most honest and authentic place you can. So I’ve been able to recognize how much I want to be doing this right now, doing this podcast, and I’ve been lucky enough in the past to see that there are more than just a few people out there that have benefited from my particular passion to share my love of creating. So I’m hoping to do it again.
And honestly, if I just change one person’s life for the better, then it’s all worth it. And I think in the end, that’s what we’re all after doing what we love and finding fulfilling, hopefully touching work that connects to even just one other person in the process.
So I have the passion to do this, but still, where do I start. With the Virtual Art box, I started with what I deemed as the most important aspect of art for me. Although I have to say, this particular subject I chose made me really nervous, because it’s not something that people usually talk about. And it seems so obvious that I thought people would find it boring and then they might not continue subscribing to the project, et cetera. Luckily, the complete opposite happened.
Not only did this idea get people to think, but there were numerous artists who wrote me to tell me that this concept completely changed how they approached their art. It turned out to be the missing key for a lot of people, and to this day, that lesson is one of the most often referenced by readers. So I took a chance and went with my gut then and it worked out great.
My gut says that same concept I started the virtual art box out with is a great way to start this podcast too. Now, what kind of subject matter about art can be that life changing and yet rarely talked about? Well, it doesn’t sound very dramatic when I first mentioned it, but if you really take it to heart, this can literally change the way you work. And if it’s something you’ve heard before or you’re part of the virtual art box immersive, then this could be a great reminder.
The concept is about why you do what you do. I refer to this as intention, having an understanding of what is driving your work gives you a guide and provides structure to not just the individual pieces you create, but your process and your purpose for creating art without it. No matter how well you understand the various aspects of design or how skilled you are in working in your medium, it is difficult to create a successful piece if you don’t have an idea of where you’re going with it.
Your work really needs a base, a core, a grounding concept from which you build it. Otherwise, the work risks being chaotic. It’s true that channeling chaos is a viable approach to making art, but only if it’s the artist’s intention to create chaos. Then it has a purpose, and that purpose is what makes it art. Chaos without intent is not art. It’s just messy. Right?
Put it this way. How do you instill your passion, your ideas, your experiences, or even just your aesthetic values into your work without at least some intention of doing so? If you aren’t doing that, then you’re crafting or honing your skills. But the work is not yet art, and you’ll feel that it’s why production work, making the same thing over and over again, doesn’t feel anything like when you make that piece the first time. It can be art the first time you create a piece, but when you duplicate it, it’s just craft, which is fine.
The art is in the designing of it, in the exploration, the mistakes and the risks that you take to bring you and your ideas into the work, then anyone well skilled in your medium could probably reproduce the work you’ve made, right? So after you’ve designed it and you’ve done all this exploration, you come up with something that you love and you want to reproduce it. Other people can do that for you, right? But they’re not the artists. You’re the artist. You created the original idea. Someone coming in and reproducing it doesn’t make them an artist. Right?
Now, for some people, that’s enough. Some people just want to work with their hands and do a thing well, which I think is wonderful. We as humans are made to work with our hands. But if you want to make art, it takes more than skill. In fact, you don’t even need skill to make art.
There are plenty of people out there that lack honed or advanced skills who are making or have made amazing art. Now, that seems odd, but it’s because they create with intention. They have something to say or to share, and that’s what drives their work. Just look at the naive genre of art that includes such masters as Henry Rousseau, Grandma Moses, Frida Kahlo. They never had formal training and remained largely unskilled throughout their careers. But their passion was intense, and it carried their work from very early on into these amazing artistic journeys.
So, yes, skill can be helpful and can certainly be impressive, but it is not the base upon which great art is built. I’d like to propose that having great skill will never be quite as amazing and fulfilling for the Creator as creating with personal, individually divine intention. In other words, I think intention is the basis for creating with an authentic, unique voice and wellbeing, the magic that draws people to your work and makes them feel connected to the work and to you as an artist.
So let’s talk about the specifics of intention and how you can use it to create art you’d love to create. Now, there are quite a number of reasons for making art, right? But proceeding without being conscious of those reasons is kind of like heading out of the house with only a vague idea that you want to go on vacation, but you have no plan. It’s true, you could get in the car and wander about and end up at some wonderful place and have a fantastic experience, but your chances of that are greatly diminished without some idea of where you want to go and what you want to do.
I bet we’ve all done this exact thing with an art project before, right? We start working on something with a vague idea, mostly comprised of wanting to make something really cool and it doesn’t go very far very fast. Sometimes we do accidentally hit on a design that works, but too often with this kind of approach, we just muck around until we have to admit to ourselves that what we have isn’t quite going to live up to our hopes and we make do with something lackluster or we just scrap it and hopefully start again.
So when you start working on a piece, not only is it immensely helpful to have a vision of what you want the piece to be, which is similar to knowing your preferred vacation destination, but also knowing the reason for creating it, which you can think of as your metaphorical roadmap to your vacation. Having both the destination and roadmap in hand gives you the overall intention.
Now, what this intention does for your work is to act as a guide for the choices you make as you create the particular overriding intention. Having that in mind will result in a cohesive and purposeful and most likely well designed piece. Now, I know some of you are already thinking that you don’t want to think so deliberately about what you’re creating or that you just like to explore.
First of all, all artistic creation is exploration. So I’m absolutely not discouraging your sense of curiosity. Play, discovery if you want that to be at the center of your choices. The untethered exploration, creating for the joy of it, the stream of consciousness, creating, these are all still processes with a particular intention. It’s like taking a road trip in which you purposely have no destination and no expectations. But your intention is to adventure and to be surprised. And knowing this, you can be prepared for the variety of things you might run into.
Also not quite incidentally, once you start out on a destinationless trip or start creating a stream of consciousness, peace themes and patterns start to emerge and eventually you find a focus. A destinationless trip may start out to be about stopping at every weird and quirky sight along the way. For instance. The thing is, after a while you will be on the lookout for some of the more exciting things you start to run into. Like the giant ball of yarn, these giant crazy things you see out in the middle of America. You may just end up thinking that’s what I want to go after. You will end up with some kind of focus. It’s the same thing with your work. You’ll get fascinated by the way some of the colors work together, or you discover a new texture you haven’t created before and that will guide your work. From that you can find an intention rooted in your desire to share what it is about the colors or the textures you’re drawn to. Then you’ll find that your subsequent choices will work best if they highlight those aspects or if you develop a story from what you discover in your creative play.
So if intention will become obvious as you work, even if you don’t start out with a particular intention, why is it important to pay attention at all? This is a good question, but let me pose a scenario and I think you’ll be able to answer some of that for yourself.
Let’s say you decide to create a piece that embodies the experience of a recent vacation. I just came back from Maui where I got sick. Yay, too much snorkeling I think. But let’s say I want to share my experience in Maui. For me, I would love to share my impression of how relaxing and peaceful I felt there. Not only that, I was really surprised by the contrast of the things I was seeing. There was the ocean on one side and these rainforests on the other or be in an area that was desert like an almost like Southern California. And then over the hill we’d get into some crazy green area that looked like I was in Ireland and I was just amazed by all this contrast. Well, if I want to share that, where do I start?
Considering I’m talking about things that for me were kind of emotive? I might start with colors because colors are particularly emotive. So what colors would I pick? One might automatically think that since I was in Maui, in tropical paradise, I would pick blue because of the blue ocean, the blue skies. But since I was most intrigued by the contrast, I might think about the green of the forest, the black of the rocks that form the tide pools and a lot of these hillsides, the white of the sand that separated the tide pools and the forest. Being aware that my intention is to relay my own experience and not just the feel of a tropical island. I might choose a color palette with the greens, the blacks and whites, because those are the colors that most remind me of my experience.
So my intention there was to relay my personal experience having to do with the contrast of the things that I saw. So do you see how my intention guided my color decisions? Those and every other design decision, including the shapes, textures, sizes, lines, even the construction of a piece can be informed by my intention to relay what most impressed me about this particular vacation, and not just the stereotypical idea of what a vacation on a tropical island might be. That way I’m asking myself, what choice do I want to make in regard to this particular design element for this piece? And then I look for ways my intention can be supported and communicated in order to find the answer to those questions.
I hope that clarified something, but maybe I can clarify what intention is just a little bit more. Let’s define a handful of different types of intention as I go through this little list I put together. Ask yourself which one sounds like the way you approach your art or would like to approach your decisions and how you create your work. These categories represent both your approach and your objective.
So common and rewarding forms of intention used by artists all over the world include ways to visually represent objects, places, or beings from the real world, or from the artist’s imagination, or both. And this could be realistic, stylistic or abstract representations of what we see in the world or in our minds.
Another is to recreate an experience like the vacation I was talking about, or an atmosphere or an emotion that you’ve gone through. Your attention could also make a social, political, spiritual, or other ideological statement.
You could also share your aesthetic appreciation of a form, texture, color, sense of movement, anything that gets you aesthetically excited. This could include revealing the beauty of the materials that you work with themselves. We often see this in things like wood, glass, stone, found objects, that kind of thing.
Also, you can work spontaneously in a kind of visual stream of consciousness, tapping into the unconscious creativity in order to mind the kind of weird and less quantitative aspects of our experiences and maybe our personality.
And lastly, consider the fact that many times your intention will be a number of these things, with probably one aspect leading the charge. But then as you progress, you may find another aspect kind of stepping up to the front. Just be careful that if you change your focus, it doesn’t take away from the cohesiveness of the work, or that you go back and rethink some of the previous decisions to see if they fulfill a change in intention and focus.
And then let me talk about three other kinds of areas of intention that can be valid but that I think you need to be careful about.
Your intention could also be to create pieces that fit a trend or that you hope will please the market. Or you could make something impressive to gain sales or recognition to enter a contest, for instance. You could also make something to please a particular person or organization, for instance, to get into a show or to make something for a friend, or because you’re commissioned.
Okay, so these last three, they will involve your particular awareness of the decisions made, so you’ll be channeling you. But there is a danger of your voice being drowned out by the expectations you think others will have for the work. So I’m not discounting these as types of intention. I think you just want to be aware that you consciously decide if you’re leading the decision making or if the expectations of others are doing it for you.
I can’t tell you whether one is right or not. That’s up to you. But what you want to do is you want to keep the focus and the intention consistent because then you end up with more cohesive work.
Now, there’s one last category of intention I haven’t quite hit upon. If your objective is to just experience the joy of creating with no aim to sell or show the work, then how do you determine the intention and how do you use it? Well, if just the experience is your overriding objective, a lot of what I’m saying might feel irrelevant. However, I don’t think it is. Even if you aren’t creating to share your view or your aesthetic with others, you’re still creating to communicate, if only with yourself.
It’s like keeping a diary. We don’t usually do that kind of thing with the intention to have other people read it. We do it because we want to record our experience in this life, maybe so we can re experience it later, or to gain a better understanding of ourselves or just get stuff out of our heads, right. Regardless, if you can identify a specific intention in what you’re doing, you will better succeed at providing those things for yourself and even more so if you’re creating to share for others.
Now, how do you identify your intention and is that important to do? I do think it’s important because the more awareness you have of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, the easier it’s going to be for you to hold on to that specific focus. Identification of your intention itself is a bit of a process and how you go about it depends solely on how you work.
Some people just like to form an idea in their head and that’s where they keep all their information about what they’re going to make. Others spend a significant amount of time sketching and making notes and writing things out. Others come up with stories or do a little creative writing. There’s even others who do collage or collect bits and pieces that become the basis of their intention.
Any of these methods can work as long as you have some kind of conscious idea of your intention. That said, if you have never tried putting your intention into words, I’d strongly encourage you try it.
Personally, I stay away from being too literal when making notes for my artwork. Most commonly, I turn to poetry to work through my ideas. But for me, words are another medium I use in an artistic manner so that it makes sense for me. And it’s pretty natural to turn to that as a choice for working through my artwork ideas. For you, it might be journaling or making a list of words that reflect what you’re after or talking it out with a friend.
The point of verbalizing is to make it more concrete in your mind to spend some time working out what it is you actually want to share or convey. Plus, we feel a bit more committed to a task or our intention when we’ve written it down or told someone else about it.
Now my mind wanders big time. So I am also a fan of having reminders at my work table. If I sketched out my ideas, I leave the sketch in the notes out where I can refer to them as I work. I also have wipe off boards that I use so you can get a wipe off board near your space. I know people who use sticky notes or note cards. I even recall somebody created slideshows of images and they put them on an iPad or a computer and they just prop that up in their work area and they let those things rotate through and keep glancing up and getting inspired by the kind of serendipitous image that’s there when they look up. You could also just leave a corner of your space if you gather items. So your rocks, your shells or your flowers or whatever it is you find and just leave them nearby to pick up and touch and reference.
So how do you feel about this idea of giving your work focus through the use of intention? For some people, this is an instinctive thing they’ve been doing all the time, and becoming conscious of it will be quite affirming. But if you’re one of us who periodically or all too often works through a design only to be disappointed by a chaotic or uninspired final project, you may become delightfully surprised at how having a stated intention can really bring a piece together.
Employing this concept in your creative process can do amazing things, not just for your work, but for your personal enjoyment of your creative time. There is just something so comforting about knowing where you’re going and something terribly exciting about the anticipation of what you’ll have when you get there. I think intention can give you both.
Now, if you stick with me on this podcast, you’ll be hearing about intention quite a bit, as most of the subjects we’ll talk about explore our intentions on some level. Like why do we create, why do we sell our work? Who do we want to create for? Why are we drawn to particular mediums? How much of a priority is our creative work in our life?
If we understand our purpose in making the choices that we make and moving the directions we do with our work and our personal lives, we can create a purposeful life. And a purposeful life has the greatest potential for contentment and joy and impact on other people.
So this coming week, I’d love to have you really consider how intentional your work is right now. Naturally, what we are doing and how we want to proceed comes to the forefront with a new year.
As you think about what you want to accomplish in 2023, think about the intention behind those choices. Maybe do some journaling or chat it out with a friend. If you’re trying to grow your business, why are you trying to grow your business? Is it because you need to pay bills? Or is it because you think you’re supposed to? You think it’s the next step, things like that. You just really dig down and try to figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing.
And maybe as part of these choices that you make, you’ll make a commitment to follow this podcast, which I would love. I also think that the time that you listen to this podcast can be committed, creative time. You can take me to your studio, you can take me out into the wilds to sketch or on a hike where you’re thinking through what you’re doing. This is time for your creative self.
So if you want to do that, one of the best things to do is to follow me in whatever podcast player you’re listening to. And you can do that by simply hitting the follow button. Sometimes it’s a circle with a plus sign like an Apple podcast, or it’s a button that says Follow or subscribe or something like that. And if it says subscribe, don’t worry about it’s not a paid subscription or anything that is going to be an option come the future, but we’re just going to get through getting this thing off the ground for right now. So it’s completely free and if you hit those follow buttons, then you’ll get notices in the player when there’s a new podcast.
If you’re listening to this in December, you may notice I’m being a bit quiet out there on social media and whatnot. I just want to work out all the bugs. So if you’re listening now, you’re part of a small elite crowd and I love to hear from you.
If you have ideas about what you want me to talk about, if you want to tell me about your thoughts on the subject matter today, Your thoughts on intention or you have a story related to your artistic experience that you think might be good for future podcasts, please let me know. You can do so by writing me at TheSagearts(at)gmail.com.
Or you can record a message using the red button on the website, which is www.theSagearts.com
You can also leave direct messages with me on Instagram or Facebook by searching for TheSageArtsPodcast, azll one word on either platform and then follow me there. If it’s on Facebook, the name for the page may actually still say Tenth Muse Arts. Just trying to get them to change it. But if you’ve worked with Facebook, you know it can take a while to get anything done.
If you appreciate what I’m doing and you would like to help support this project financially so I can do this continuously for you, I do have a Buy me a coffee page if you are so inclined. It’s buymeacoffee.com/thesagearts.
All the links I’ve mentioned are in the notes below the show in your player, but if you need anything else, please do reach me by email, which is again, TheSageart(at)gmail.com.
In the meantime, I hope you all are enjoying your holidays. Please stay well, stay safe, stay creative, and we’ll see you next time on The Sage Art Podcast.
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