Summer Pierre and "Bring Your Artist to Work"

The cover of Summer Pierre's new book.

A while ago, over on my blog, I posted about Summer Pierre and her very awesome videos. Now I get to report that her book is out and ready to be purchased by us! Yay! So I thought I'd cruise around a bit on her flickr account while I listened to an interview Jamie Riddler did with Summer. Very inspiring. Summer's flickr account is full of great images and ideas and I'll include some here so you get a taste, and the interview was also full of great ideas which I'll share in a minute, but first I'd like to share some of her answers to my own art and creativity questions. So here you are:

From Summer Pierre's Flickr account

1. Some artists say they do their art because they must. Do you ever feel compelled in this way? If you do, where does this drive come from? Are you comfortable with it? 

I literally have no memory of not being able to draw or not having a compulsion to draw, so I would say that the creative impulse is as familiar to me as my own family members. Of course, as time has gone by and my creativity has expanded and changed with age, my relationship to it has changed, but one thing stays constant: I use it as a way to understand and make sense of the world and of experience. Sometimes this is an absolute joy, sometimes it’s a pain the ass. There is nothing like the spark of it, of hitting on some deeper sense of play and inspiration that helps me fit the puzzles together. Consequently, if I don’t use it when it calls to me, or even when it doesn’t, all the old spiders in my brain start to come out of their hiding places and I can get stuck not just creatively, but in life in general. This is a balancing act that can sometimes be more time consuming that I want to allow.

From Summer Pierre's Flickr account

2. Some artists say that their work nurtures them in ways that material things can't. Do you create to feed your self in this way?

I can’t stress how much art FEEDS my life in so many ways. I am not a materialistic person. I grew up without a lot and continue to not “have a lot” in the ways of materialism, but I don’t miss it. My priority has always been to have meaning vs. stuff. I am happiest, most well fed in life when I have time to do what pleases me—which is includes a heaping amount of art.

From Summer Pierre's Flickr account

3. As an artist what are you most passionate about?
Making sense of experience and exploring new ideas.


From Summer Pierre's Flickr account

4. Are you living an artful, deeply satisfying life? 
If not can you imagine such a thing? What would it be like?

I am living as close to my “dream life” as I ever have. For now I have figured out the priorities and arranged my life to fit those priorities. It’s ever evolving, but yes, amazingly I live an artful and (most days) a deeply satisfying life.

Pretty cool, eh? So here's what I learned from her pictures on flickr and from the interview on Jamie's website. 1. As artists we need to be able to do our creative work. We NEED to in order to live, breathe, and enjoy our lives. So why not take your inner artist to work. Consider the possibilities for letting the inner artist out at work, what would that look like? Would you get to be more yourself? Wouldn't you like to be "the artist in the office"? 2. If you live in Brooklyn there's this totally cool, radical concept of a place to work with other artist types, the Brooklyn Creative League. Check it out! It looks SO awesome. Wouldn't it be great if every city, town and village had one of these places? WOW! 3. We can make our own Cafe Mocha's and they taste GREAT! (I've had about 3 today already, can you tell, LOL) 4. Play as much as possible... everywhere and all the time.

Thanks Summer!