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Elliott Earls

@elliottearls

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Artist-in-Residence Cranbrook Academy of Art. Head of 2D Dept.

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4 months ago

Are you a grad student or undergrad who feels like you’re getting nothing from your education? Here’s how to correct that.

The basic assumption behind school is that the application of knowledge is power. Power is agency. You go to school to gain more control over your life, your studio practice, your time, the work you do, and how you make money.

The problem is that the transactional nature of education is destroying part of its purpose. As tuition has risen, students understandably ask: I’m paying you. What do I get?

Too often, schools answer with bullshit and make-work.

The result is sleepwalkers, zombies, and grifters: students and professors who are disengaged, going through the motions, or gaming the system.

The solution is to take responsibility for your own education.

Scrutinize every assignment. Redefine it when necessary. Stop treating classes and grades as the point.

Ask one question: Is this activity transmitting sacred, secret, or technical knowledge?

If not, change the activity so it actually develops your knowledge, power, and agency.

School is still one of the best environments for doing that. But nobody can do it for you.

#ContemporaryArt #ArtistsOfInstagram #ArtEducation #ArtSchool #GraduateSchool #ArtStudents #DesignEducation #StudioPractice #ArtCritique #mfa by @elliottearls

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7 days ago

What feels like personal artistic failure may actually be a structural failure. A failure in your studio practice, not necessarily a failure in your art.

Unless, of course, you’re just lazy.

Sitting alone in your studio painting, designing, writing, or making music is not enough to sustain a practice over the long run. Being an artist also means building the structure around the work.

For committed artists, creative problems are often not personality problems. They’re structural problems masquerading as personality problems.

If you’re floundering, the problem may not be what you make. It may be what’s missing around what you make.

No deadline.
No feedback loop.
No destination.
No audience.
No economic model.
No public story.
No repeatable process.
No community.
No conversion mechanism.

A long-term studio practice is more than sitting alone in a room making things. Private making by itself isn’t yet a functioning practice. The work has to enter some kind of structure and eventually become something outside the private act of making.

The cold hard truth is that laziness is always one possible explanation. But if you’re genuinely committed to the work and you still feel like you’re failing, look at the structure of your practice before you decide the problem is you.

#ArtStudio #ArtSchool #ArtEducation #ArtistLife #ContemporaryArt StudioPractice ArtCritique Critique ArtistStatement Postmodernism ArtTheory FineArt VisualArtists ArtistsOfInstagram ArtStudents CreativePractice ArtAdvice MFAProgram ArtWorld EmergingArtists DesignEducation ArtSchoolCritique by @elliottearls

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11 days ago

Here’s how to reclaim experimentalism in the age of AI. A playbook for the young renegade.

This is rare footage from March 7, 1995, showing experimental design and type design in process. Type specimens on the wall. Notes posted on laser prints. This is how the work was made.

Compare that footage to where we are now. We’re drowning in art, and a lot of people believe the game is rigged. They see opportunities going to the children of rich or famous parents. Thats not how it works.

You start at zero. Then, when you’re an adult living on your own, you make choices. Not every artist starts out wealthy. What you decide to make, what you decide to pursue, and what you can imagine doing with your skills matter.

The question isn’t just, “Is it hot now?” It’s: What kind of person will I have been? What’s possible with my skill set?

After you make your choices, you pay a price for them. That’s a part of an artist’s life we rarely talk about. And if you’re lucky, you’re rewarded for some of those choices.

People talk about a career in the arts as though an attitude of experimentalism is handed to the artist. It isn’t. You choose it. We choose who we will be.

#GraphicDesign #DesignHistory #ExperimentalDesign #Typography #AIArt by @elliottearls

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13 days ago

Your professor should have to prove that they’re worth listening to.

A job title gives a professor authority. Their work gives students evidence. Student scrutiny tests that evidence. Credibility is what remains.

The advice shouldn’t be validated by the student’s work. The professor makes the claim, so the evidence should be in their own art, design, writing, or research.

Yesterday, Rose Deneau wrote a comprehensive criticism of my work. I installed the work in the critique room, gave the students my artist statement, and put the work itself up for scrutiny.

That seems important to me.

In art and design education, authority shouldn’t come from the position alone. The reason students listen to a professor should flow directly from the professor’s work.
#MFA #ArtSchool #ArtEducation #GraduateSchool #ContemporaryArt StudioPractice ArtCritique Critique ArtistStatement Postmodernism ArtTheory FineArt VisualArtists ArtistsOfInstagram ArtStudents CreativePractice ArtAdvice MFAProgram ArtWorld EmergingArtists DesignEducation ArtSchoolCritique by @elliottearls

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16 days ago

It’s good to hate art. Let’s take a look at the logic chain. A personal note, I hate art. I don’t hate art. And here’s why you should too, particularly if you’re an artist. All institutions are flawed because they’re made by humans, like all institutions. The culture around the work of art is filled with hypocrisy, money, power, avarice, and greed. You develop a hatred for its rules by fighting its rules and conventions, you give it power over you. So rather than fight, you ask, what’s within my control? Then you recommit to making work that aligns with your values. The experience of art, the process of making art, and the art object can be a spiritually moving endeavor, particularly when you have a flagrant disregard for art culture. #artworld #contemporaryart #artistsoninstagram #creativeprocess #artlife by @elliottearls

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19 days ago

Your mind looks for problems to solve. If it has no productive problem, it may begin creating unproductive ones.
Creative work gives that part of the mind somewhere useful to go. Writing a song, designing a chair, or making a painting fills your attention with problems that lead somewhere.
This does not protect you from sickness, loss, war, or any of the other problems life hands you. You cannot choose everything that happens to you. But you can choose some of what occupies your mind.
You are going to have problems. When you can, choose problems worth solving.
#CreativeProcess #CreativePractice #ArtPractice #CreativeMindset #ArtistsOnInstagram by @elliottearls

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21 days ago

On July 29, I published a reel called “How Contemporary Graphic Design Lost Its Voice.” It argued that technology and a shrinking world have weakened regional design cultures and produced a new international style. The work increasingly looks the same in Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, and Cincinnati.

To demonstrate the problem, I asked ChatGPT to select an image from anothergraphic.org and create a derivative work that changed the language, details, and composition while maintaining its style. It took about two minutes.

The response was blistering. Several Swiss designers accused me of stealing another designer’s work. Others objected to the use of AI, the execution of the video, and what they saw as gatekeeping or punching down.

But the ease of imitation was precisely the point. Designers have always copied one another, just as Target can produce its version of the Hermès Birkin. What has changed is the speed. Copying a visual language that once required considerable skill and effort is now nearly instantaneous.

This isn’t good. But the genie is out of the bottle. Don’t shoot the messenger.

#GraphicDesign #Design #artificialintelligence #AIArt #swissdesign by @elliottearls

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24 days ago

Great art can make other artists jealous. Emerson gives us a way to understand why: we recognize our own rejected thoughts in someone else’s work.

We dismiss an idea because we doubt it’s worth pursuing. Someone else develops a similar idea, and suddenly we see value in the possibility we rejected. We regret not following through. That regret can turn into jealousy.

So much great art, design, writing, and music seems simple and obvious once it exists. It feels like it’s been there forever, right in front of us. Someone else saw it through.

#Art #Design #Artist #ContemporaryArt #GraphicDesign by @elliottearls

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a month ago

The ballpoint pen is capable of grotesque beauty. Apart from the No. 2 pencil, it’s probably the drawing tool most familiar to most of us. We see it everywhere. In ledgers, in math class notes, on scraps of paper at the gas station.

I think we make things needlessly complicated. There’s great beauty in simple tools.

#Drawing #art #PenDrawing #Sketchbook #ContemporaryArt by @elliottearls

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a month ago

Typography has an antiseptic problem.

Digital tools make precision easy, but they also encourage us to treat every material consequence as a defect. Typography gets trapped inside a perfection mechanism. Even strange letterforms can be perfectly clean. Their outlines tell us nothing about weight, friction, contact, or age.

Objects in the material world are different. They gather dirt, decay, fall apart, rust, and rot. Build a letter in wood, aluminum, brass, clay, or ink, and those conditions become unavoidable. Parts need support. Joints interrupt the contour. Surfaces record contact. Time changes what you made.

As we disappear further into a hypermediated reality, the imperfections of the material world become increasingly visible—and increasingly important.

#typography #graphicdesign #design #art #type typedesign lettering visualdesign contemporaryart designprocess by @elliottearls

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a month ago

Your unfinished sketches, failed experiments and discarded images aren’t just studio garbage. They’re a record of visual thinking.

A drawing is not simply a picture of an idea you already understand. The act of making it can produce ideas that couldn’t have been reached through language alone.

When you begin with a fixed thesis, every decision has to prove the same point. The work becomes instructional and heavy-handed. But fragments behave differently. Making one element larger changes its relationship to everything around it. Removing an image or replacing it can shift the entire ideological system of the composition.

This is epistemic expansion. New relationships, distinctions and possibilities emerge through the process of making. Your thinking becomes embedded in the object in front of you.

Art doesn’t simply make thought visible. It makes otherwise impossible thought possible. #art #artist #artprocess #artiststudio

Private one-on-one Zoom calls are back this Sunday. Check the link in my bio. by @elliottearls

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a month ago