Eclectic works and wild ideas from one restless creative mind.
For one entire creative quarter, every meaningful decision in my studio — medium, palette, titles, even what I charged — came out of a 25-cent vending machine in a rural Missouri diner. Somewhere around week nine, I started cheating. Here's what that taught me about control, instinct, and the myth of the decisive artist.
I bought a bargain-bin oil painting of a sailboat and spent a month treating it like my executive coach. Every creative decision had to clear the boat's 'energy' first. Here's what happened when a stranger's yard-sale reject ran my career better than any productivity guru ever has.
Every title I'd ever given a painting was either a pun so bad it needed a lawyer or a pretentious string of words that meant nothing. So I handed the job to the most soulless institution in America, and the results were disturbingly good.
I printed out an Amtrak timetable for the Empire Builder, pinned it above my desk, and let a train schedule dictate a month of studio work. Every piece had to be 'about' the next stop on the line — and the results were stranger and better than anything I'd made in years.
For thirty days, every painting, song, and essay I made started life as a spam email — the phishing attempts, the miracle cures, the widowed princes. Turns out the least trusted corner of the internet is also the most honest muse I've ever had.
For one full week, every email, decision, and doodle came from 'Hurvi Sadamm' — not the person who pays the water bill. The experiment was supposed to be a joke. It turned into the most honest performance review of my life.
I spent eight months photographing cardboard and poster board masterpieces on suburban roadsides, then hung them in a gallery under track lighting. Turns out the most honest graphic design in America is written by someone who needs their recliner gone by Sunday.
For one month, I handed every aesthetic decision to internet polls — paint swatches, socks, even the mug I drink gas station coffee from. The verdict was burnt orange, and the weird part is how free I feel inside a color I never chose.
One hand-painted yard sale sign in a stranger's front yard rewired how I thought about permanence. For an entire season, I banned the archive, the portfolio, the 'keeper' file — and discovered that disposable art might be the most honest art there is.
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.
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.