Eclectic works and wild ideas from one restless creative mind.
For one month, every painting I made got its color scheme from whatever my shuffled playlist coughed up — album art, mood, the occasional stray lyric. What started as a gimmick turned into the most uncomfortable and useful art lesson I've had in years, even after the algorithm assigned me beige three days running.
I walked into a suburban pawn shop with two Andrew Jacksons and a ten, and walked out with a dead man's guitar, a bowling trophy for a league I've never joined, and a half-finished embroidery of a lighthouse. Six months later, I've made six things I never would have made on my own — and I think every artist should try inheriting a stranger's unfinished dream.
For one month, I handed my studio over to the least glamorous public infrastructure in America: my neighbors' WiFi network names. Four weeks, four networks, four pieces of work I never would've made otherwise. Here's the field report.
I surrendered my entire week's soundtrack to shuffled playlists built by people I'll never meet — strangers with strange taste and zero regard for my productivity. What I learned about curation, comfort, and why my 'personality' might just be a really well-organized queue.
I bought a $12 burner phone, set up a voicemail line, and told strangers to leave me one sentence: a creative prompt I'd have to execute no matter what. Forty-one messages later, I'm convinced the blank page was never my real problem.
For twelve months, every title I gave a piece of art came from a random word generator, and the results rattled me. Buyers didn't just tolerate nonsense names — they built entire stories around them. Here's what a year of algorithmic titling taught me about the fiction we call meaning.
I found a stranger's crumpled shopping list in a Kroger parking lot and decided it would curate my next art show. It sold out in one night. Here's why randomness beats taste, and how to run your own 'found prompt' experiment.
I posted one question to the internet — 'name my next project, I'll build whatever you pick' — and a guy named Greg answered. What followed was the most disorienting and productive month of my creative life. Here's what happens when you let go of the steering wheel on purpose.
I wrote a list of thirty things I could make, rolled dice every morning, and let fate decide my creative output for thirty days straight. Some of it was garbage. One of the rolls produced the best thing I've made all year, and I'm still not over it.
I spent a weekend rereading a decade of journals, old blog posts, and half-dead drafts, and honestly? It hurt. But the cringe turned out to be the whole point — every wince was a receipt proving I got better.
I gave myself one Saturday, twenty dollars, and a rule: buy only the five strangest objects I could find at local garage sales, then build them into a museum exhibit. What I learned about the afterlife of other people's stuff was stranger than anything I could've planned.
Somewhere between the cutting room floor and the final mix lives the part of your work nobody asked for — and I'm here to defend it. The indulgent, overlong, self-gratifying stuff is often the only part that actually sounds like you.
I spent a summer Saturday crawling through garage sales across town, asking strangers about the half-finished quilts and unopened saxophones they were selling for pocket change. What I found was a secret history of art that almost happened.
I let my followers name my next project through a week of social media polls, and they chose something unhinged. What I learned about control, chaos, and why the internet's worst idea was secretly my best one.
Kevin Kelly said 1,000 true fans could sustain an artist. For the gloriously unfocused among us, the real number might be smaller—and the history of weird, eclectic creators proves it. A case for logging off the content treadmill.
You don't need a $2,000 microphone or a vintage synth to make something worth hearing. The world is already a recording studio—you just have to show up with a phone and bad intentions.
Every creative person I know has a graveyard: the novel at 12,000 words, the podcast with one episode, the half-sanded chair. I'm here to argue that none of it is failure — it's fertilizer.
Somewhere in Kansas, a man spent decades wrapping twine around a ball because he wanted to and nobody could stop him. Roadside America is a masterclass in creative audacity, and we should all take notes.
Every brilliant thought I've ever had arrived at the worst possible time — usually while I was horizontal, in the dark, with no pen in reach. Here's why the 3 a.m. brain is a genius with terrible timing, and how to finally trap it.
Before the fame, before the followers, every creative worth remembering played to a room with nobody in it. A look at history's patient builders — and a defense of the beautiful, terrifying zero-audience era.