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Health & Fitness

Titles, Art, and The Creative Productivity Project

Learn about visual artist and writer Keiko O'Leary's ideas about artwork, how titles help viewers connect to art, and explore her blog, The Creative Productivity Project.

For today’s blog post, I met with Keiko O’Leary to talk about her blog The Creative Productivity Project. Keiko is a visual artist and a writer, and her blog reflects both of these elements.

What made you decide to start the Creative Productivity Project?

January of last year I made a website. I was blogging on Tumblr, posting art only. My first blog post has an image—one of the first of my daily compositions. These are pencil drawings that you make every day. The drawings were influenced by a Mastering Composition book I had just bought.

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What made you decide to create a blog of your art?

I thought it would be cool to have a blog and website. I don’t worry about what people think of my artwork, so I used whatever pages I could scan. They were postcard size.

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Did you set up your blog and website yourself, or did you have help?

My husband helped me with the website—he does it for a living. I did the design and had the ideas. I learned some html years ago, but he helps me when I don’t know how to do something. With Tumblr, you can just post a whole bunch of short—well, anything, and then people get an idea of your life and thoughts. But, I don’t use it that way.

You use Tumblr, but you have some long posts on your blog.

I’m thinking of doing more that way. Ideas and images are cool to post, and you can use photo categories in Tumblr, but there’s no title. You can view archives, and see the image or photo, but that isn’t always related to the topic.

Let’s talk about your blog post about using titles for artwork.

I had already started titling everything. It’s easier to talk about pieces by title than by number—still life number 3—that doesn’t remind you of a specific piece.

The title of this painting is The Lion and the Lamb Drink Sake #1: After the First Class. Why did you decide to paint sake and animals?

I was taking a 10-week composition class and we had to paint the same still life 20 times. I was thinking, “What could I paint?” I was cleaning the garage and found a sake set that my husband gave me back before we got married. I thought it would be pretty for a still life.

How did the animals come into it?

The teacher said we should put some asymmetrical objects into the still life. That was good advice. We have these Fischer Price farm animals that my mom saved from when I was a kid that my daughter plays with. I like the cow, but I couldn’t find it. I found the sheep, and then I found the lion. We must have circus animals, too, because the lion wouldn’t be on the farm. Then I had the lion and the lamb, and instead of laying down (the lion lays down with the lamb) they were drinking sake.

The idea of this exercise is to just use stuff you have around the house. Some people agonize over what to paint, but the whole point is to get away from the subject so you start looking at light and color. I had fun with it.

Did your daughter want the animals back?

Oh, I did a drawing and then disassembled the pieces. The still life is supposed to be from the same angle each time, so it’s better to refer to the drawing. Plus, I don’t have enough room to leave the still life set up.

Thanks for meeting with me to talk about your blog. I’m looking forward to your next post.

Thank you, too! It was really interesting for me to talk about these projects.

Readers, when you look at artwork, do you like reading the title? Does it make you think differently about what the art means? Leave a comment and let me know.

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