First Friday: July 2023
Inspiration & Updates from Artist Brian Madden
“You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time.”
Jeroen de Flander
This past June, I stood in the northern hemisphere a day before the longest day of the year, and in the southern on the shortest.
Standing between two realities, summer and winter, San Francisco and Sydney, made me reflect on the dualities of the path I’ve chosen. Art and business, curiosity and focus, clarity and uncertainty. All parts of a whole, and wildly different in the moment.
This month I’m diving into this sense of duality as we continue the year of three winters. I’ll share:
What I’m making: Superb Lyrebird & the Sonic Monuments
What I’m seeing: First visit to Glenstone for Ellsworth Kelly at 100
What I’m reading: Passion. Purpose. Profit. & Obviously Awesome!
What I’m hearing: Sydney Winter / San Francisco Summer
You’re receiving First Friday because you’ve supported my artwork, visited my studio exhibitions, or signed up to stay in touch, and I appreciate you for it.
Thanks for being a part of my community.
What I’m Making: Sonic Monuments and the Superb Lyrebird
I’ve been inspired by all the exotic (to me) bird songs and natural sounds we’re hearing throughout Australia. Jen and I recently went for a bush walk up to the epic Drawing Room Rocks, a cliff above Kangaroo Valley about 3 hours south of Sydney. Walking through the bush, we were marveling at all the beautiful bird songs, when we realized they were all coming from one bird!
Behold the male Superb Lyrebird. Kind of like a peacock, with a majestic set of tail feathers and expert mimicry skills, they’re able to recreate the calls of other birds, monkeys, and even machinery like trucks and construction equipment. And watching him sing brought me back to a series of drawings I created in Sydney.
I've been feeling a calling lately to build upon my Sonic Monument series. I’m creating colorful drawings and studies for sculptures, layering the soundwave forms, and playing with scale and rhythm. And I’m enjoying interpreting bird songs. In Study 050823 (Bird Songs) the different colors represent each bird song, and the undulating ceramic forms represent the observed sound waves.
I’ve created several works on paper throughout my first two months in Australia, and I’m excited to share some here. In the spirit of Richard Serra and the late greats, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, these drawings represent a vision for sculpture celebrating sound that I plan to build when I return to my studio in San Francisco. I hope you enjoy.
What I’m Seeing: First visit to Glenstone for Ellsworth Kelly at 100
When I’m traveling, I love to make pilgrimages to museums, galleries, and hallowed halls to experience great art. One museum that’s long been on my wish list is Glenstone, near my hometown of Vienna, Virginia, which I knew I had to visit on my next visit home. Glenstone first piqued my interest for its building block-like exhibition halls, scattered across a 230-acre campus of art and nature in Potomac, Maryland.
I was so inspired that a conversation with my friend Jason Hsu sparked an idea to place a Sonic Monument concept at the Glenstone. I created this digital study, showing how I might express my vision with this aspirational landscape as a canvas.
Before my visit to Glenstone last month, I was keen to see one exhibition in particular: the Ellsworth Kelly at 100 retrospective. The late game-defining abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly would have turned 100 this year and the Glenstone was showing a fantastic career-spanning collection.
I’ve had a chance to see Ellsworth Kelly’s work at SFMOMA and the Zurich Kunsthaus, and I’m continually drawn into his large-scale dimensional paintings and observational abstract art practice. He was an expert at distilling feelings and mundane sights into simple, bold statements. I aspire to practice my marble and other sculptural artwork with a similar spirit and channel the creative inspiration from this trip into my upcoming work.
WHAT I’M READING: Passion. Purpose. Profit. & Obviously Awesome!
As a small business owner with a foot in the fine art and corporate design worlds, I’m focused on building my skills as an operator and marketer. And I know there are many current and aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs in this community, so this month we’re doing a double feature on business coaching AND product positioning. I hope these books can help you along your journey.
For part one of this impromptu book club, I’d like to feature a creative business coaching workbook I recently picked up called Passion. Purpose. Profit. written by Fiona Killackey, a professional coach based near Melbourne.
Killackey has created a vulnerable, thought-provoking workbook to support the process of building and growing a small business. I may be an artist running a creative studio, but I’m navigating the same challenges as other business owners face. And just like in the athletic side of my life, I’ve found coaching to be a helpful way to navigate the unknown, set goals, and achieve more than I thought I was capable of.
A key part of my process of growth as an artist has been to incorporate coaching into my life. If you’d like to learn more about coaching and how it might benefit you, I’m happy to chat.
And now, for book two of this month’s impromptu business book club.
My wife Jen is a product marketing leader and brought a book to Australia called Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford. I stole it off the nightstand to learn about product positioning. Dunford explains that “positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”
While I see art as an infinite game, versus a zero sum competition, I do want to practice being the best at my own game. And I found it fascinating how a lot of the exercises around successfully marketing a product or a brand boiled down to pinpointing and celebrating what is truly unique and special about a product, brand, or person, and what they can offer a community in search of those unique qualities.
Dunford underscored this thought with a simple quote from Natalie Massanet, founder of Net-a-porter: “If you want success, be unique.” I’m learning that looking inward and drawing out my unique qualities is paramount in my career as an artist. And it reminds me of a question my executive coach poses to me when we’re discussing potential paths and challenges in life: “Are you willing to be the exception?”
WHAT I’M HEARING: Sydney Winter / San Francisco Summer
As the northern hemisphere heads toward the dog days of Summer, we’ve just passed the winter solstice here in Australia. The days are short (but now getting longer), and the air is crisp. Even though we’re in midwinter now, it feels like a perpetual autumn. And I love autumn. So I’m trying something different this month for the First Friday playlist and leaning into the sentiment of the season.
This is a mellow mix with some special finds and brand new tracks, care of my friend, the legendary Adam Garcia. He just launched a beautiful new album with his project, Maarches. Hope you enjoy.
The First Friday Playlist can only come from songs I’ve heard, received, discovered, (or rediscovered) out in the world. Songs overheard at coffee shops, bars, galleries, received from friends IRL and online. And I’d count this newsletter as public too. We do welcome requests.
I’m excited to be building this community with you. Please feel free to share and invite friends to join up.
And if you have any friends in Australia you think I should connect with while I’m here, I’m an open book!
Thank you,
Brian
brian@brianbmadden.com
Image of Mossy / Frosty by Jason Hsu Studio in the Presidio of San Francisco