Next Time I'll Invite Brian Eno to my Art Retreat Weekend

19/11/2014

Ideas generation in Noteledge digital sketchbook

Don't Shoot the Muse
Digital sketch for my WIP based on
the Artist's Book Ideation Cards
© Cherry Jeffs 2014

If you're anything like me, occasionally you could do with some external motivation in your creative practice. Experimenting with Artist's Prompts will give you a new lease of artistic energy.

This year for my personal Home Art Retreat weekend, I followed a series of prompts from my newly acquired set of Artist's Book Ideation Cards. I can't recommend enough an occasional foray into working from someone else's prompts for the fresh stimulation it provokes.

If you would like to try working from prompts in this way, buying the Artist's Book Ideation Cards certainly aren't the only way: Dan James alerted me to Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.

Oblique Strategies art prompts card deck

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's
Oblique Strategies deck

Oblique Strategies clip from the film Slacker

Prompt cards by Fluxus artist George Brecht

Water Yam
Artist's multiple by George Brecht
First Edition, 1963

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Creative Prompts

The Oblique Stategies deck was the result of a joint project between musician Brian Eno and Berlin-born, British artist/composer Peter Schmidt (1931–1980) who had just finished a set of 64 drawings based on the I Ching.

First published in 1975, the deck of 115, 7 x 9 cm cards was printed with simple black text featuring an aphorism to help artists break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. Though the deck was in itself a conceptual art project, the cards were also a practical tool for generating ideas and breaking free of stale thought patterns.

Oblique Strategies in Popular Culture

The aphorisms of the Oblique Strategies deck have made their way into many areas of popular culture especially music: Coldplay are said to have used the cards when recording their 2008 Brian Eno-produced album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends and Eno himself used them whilst recording David Bowie's iconic 1977 album Heroes on the song Sense of Doubt.

The Oblique Strategies deck also appears in the film Slacker - in which a woman offers cards to passers-by.

(The first card drawn in the clip - "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." - came to be seen as a summary of the film's ethos though in fact it was not part of the official set of Oblique Strategies.)

While the original Oblique Strategies cards were limited edition, there is now a new non-limited edition available.

The Avant-garde: Fluxus

Eno's ideas for the Oblique Strategies cards were probably influenced by similar decks coming out of the avant-garde at the time of his visual arts education in the 1960s - which developed in tandem with his growth as a musician - in particular the Fluxus movement.

Water Yam - an 'multiple' by American artist George Brecht, originally published in Germany in 1963 is considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus. The box - designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit - contains a large number of small printed cards, containing open-ended instructions known as event-scores, or 'fluxscores' for a musical performance, 'temporary assemblage' or 'abstract action' and which leave space for chance as well as interpretation by performers and audience.

Online Art Prompts Generator

Online Art Prompts

Art Prompts - new site claiming to be the only prompts generator designed specifically for artists. Simple card-like UI with prompt categories of: character, creature, environment, object, situation and random. You can also upload your own prompts and share artwork you make based on prompts from the site.
Random Art Prompt Generator - humourous take on the same idea based on the Cool Bits Story Generator by the same author.
You can also freely access the Oblique Strategies prompts online at ObliqueStrategies.com and Stoney's Zone.