thanks for all these

"horrible to take life advice from a youtube", you just dismantled my entire art philosophy

I dunno Steven, I can understand why folks may find it…misleading to say “meditation is supposed to be enjoyable” when 99% of anyone beginning, it’s going to be a confounding and irritating experience…. because it’s like…directly bringing us face to face with our conflicts with the present moment and our groundfloor discomfort with being “here”. So if someone begins a practice thinking “this is gonna be peaceful, relaxing or even fun” and finds (in most likelihood) that this is not their experience, it can further tighten their grip on self and so on that meditation is supposed to bring them somewhere other than “here” or that it’s SuUPPOSED to be ANYTHING….anyhoo…that’s my two cents and I love you 😅

This is EXACTLY the kind of videos I want from more artists!!❤❤❤ Don't doubt yourself! 😉

And that's why every new artist is fascinated by light hitting the table through a glass at a bar and all your friends think you are a bit weird

Your channel is something special

steven :)

keep at it, cody!

I did a career shift of healthcare for 12 years to art. I also had similar feedback. A corporate mind set makes you feel like you are only supposed to feel like a cog. When I worked in the ER during the pandemic I saw my friends, coworkers and strangers die. I brought an order to ER that burned me out for 3 years. I'm only now starting to feel better. My aspirations changed and I needed to heal. In pursuing art I became homeless and flopped on the art scene. Despite my enthusiasm and dedication I failed and it became a situation where I needed to give myself the permission to fail. AI rolled out the same time I started my pursuit. I found obstacles every step of the way. Being prosocial and joining local art groups helped. Connecting with better artists than me has helped. Recently joining cara has helped me enjoy art for the sake of art. I had to get a part time job making kitchens and it's nothing I particularly enjoy but it's part time and I make the numbers work. I think if you don't find something closer aligned with your aspirations you may not only regret not trying but feel covertly narcissistic about your skills. "If only someone discovered me, they might free me from the shackles of my situation". Not impossible, just extremely difficult in this economical and saturated environment. I am also someone who has high hopes. I have hopes for others and myself. It sometimes has made me bitter. Hope without pay off makes someone bitter. So it's good to as Steven says embrace uncertainty. Cultivating that helps you dislodge from some unproductive mindsets

I love the early release schedule on your videos. They are such nice morning companions as I start the day with all its routines. Okay, so I’ve made some interesting observations during my art making here recently. For a while I tried to come to the sketching and drawing field with ideas or themes I wanted to explore. There was always some resistance in doing that. But this past year I’ve moved towards just ‘aimless making’. Letting the hand and my impulses guide me somewhere. It has lead to better results with less resistance, but the interesting thing for me is what follows. As I start settling into the piece and get about half way, I’ve started to examine the things going on, and the craziest shit happens. It almost feels like deciphering a dream. I’ll research the aspects in the art and find some synchronicities to my life or to other elements in the piece…and that funny feeling that something bigger is going on just creeps in and can’t be ignored. Like we are conduits for what needs to come through. So it was cool to hear you touch on this briefly in the video! Thanks for your hard work on the channel. It helps shine a light when the creative world, really the world at large, is in upheaval.

Early morning with Mr. Zapata, (5:30 a.m. here) going to listen while running, good meditative practice.Thank you Steven.

Steven watercolour video makes me happy

I was trying to explain this feeling to a work colleague, how it feels like there is no "world" unless I am looking at it. It's like it only exists if I focus on it. They didn't understand what I was trying to say and kind of thought I was a bit mad but also incredibly self centred.

Love to hear this, very interesting to me at least, and I think it fits perfectly with your channel.

as an artistic driven individual. I do accept the moving tide. Id always felt that there was going to be a future of AI. to be honest its coming weather we like it or no. our ability to move and extend our selves through the coming tide is going to be the difference between us & them. humanity has its place but there is fault in its being. we will never be replaced. HAPPY HUNTING. KIM DAVIDSON.

You should make a podcast I would tune in.

Sorry to hear that about your dog. Goodluck

Ami is the so cool bro making song art it's like the best toy ever

Great talk. After learning topology and lighting and anatomy it gave me x-ray vision. After LSD, psilocybin and DMT it made me see my vision was a lie

Keep on the same channel! 😁 Your philosophy(or lack of) has always been really valuable 👍👍

2:35:17

32:08 "Why you would afford the privileges of this endeavor to unfeeling machines instead of human beings?" Because visual art is a product that people need, and reducing its price and increasing availability would greatly benefit humankind in general. Clothes, pottery and furniture were hand-made and considered art in the past. Industrialization made them affordable and widely available, which is definitely a good thing even despite it unfortunately put custom tailors and craftsmen completely out of business.

Yes please and thank you 🙏

thank you so much for this speech. i appreciate it greatly and hope you are going to continue posting these videos. i may not completely agree with your results, yet i like your methodoledy of contemplation, the questions you are asking. one think i am contemplating regarding this claim of "the experience is never of the body(thing) itself". it may hold true of anything, except of one thing, and that is of our experience itself. the thing-out-there as itself is unknown, but the tree (thing-out-there) is reflected for-itself only as it is for us, in as much as we are talkig about the tree as it is for us. and the same with the body, for the exerience we can be certain to say "i am this conciousness and a part of this conciousness is aware of a coldness" or plainly put, "i feel cold". of course there is never this "coldness" as-itself for us, only this experience only communicable as the word "cold", which is nothing but saying "there is this experience" and making is abstract and universal, and in as much as it is abstract and universal, it is a thing in-itslef and for-itself.

Its hard to hold in some of the things we think about as artists when around our friends and family.

My thoughts: 1. "I want to be many things. One of those things is being an artist. But, whenever I look at art, I always have this, deep, deep, visceral reaction to my art being in the same place. I don't like the prospect of others seeing my art. I don't. I make art for myself. But as of recent time, that visceral reaction faded, and was replaced with something so much more, miserable. I hate the prospect of my art being *found, found* by the abyss. The abyss, the abyss, the abyss we find ourselves staring into today. That, *thing,* that *manufactures* creativity. I won't help it. I won't supply it. I won't. I won't..." 2. "Whenever I see manufactured art, I feel like I'm staring into a dead man's eyes. An abyss. An abyss that stares back, terrifyingly. If you stare into an abyss like that, and you don't have an answer when it stares back, you, or at least I, will break. I can't look into a dead man's eyes. I can't look into the abyss. I don't have an answer." 3. "I'm, miserable. This isn't a world we should pass down. Not with the way things are going. The future won't know creativity, not with the way things are going. It will be manufactured, with the way things are going. The future is an abyss. But when it stares back, I don't look away. I have an answer. And it's my misery. I want to be an artist. I want to be an artist..." 4. "I appreciate you paying mind to my thoughts. It, helps, if only a bit. Please, artists, do your best to not be disheartened. It's grim, but we can keep going. I was shown a quote today, 'No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell'. We are the tree, and we are going to reach heaven. Don't stop the work. It's a good work. Until next time, I've been your host, an artist."

Wow. This was about a lot more than drawing. You reminded me of some very important things that I tend to learn, internalize, then pass and forget. I like to believe I end up a little hardier each time the cycle concludes, but I'm always excited to learn again. Thanks Steven. You're a good person (wink)

There was always a spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical aura that came along with art especially needing to learn about anatomy and physics and how the human perceives life. Makes sense since we’re trying to recreate life and things we interpret in life. Ever since your first few videos I was ecstatic that someone could grab these idea and explain them instead of me just having them floating around in the back of my head. This perspective of art feels like a renaissance in art thinking while we just had a "medieval times of art{social media} " non stop consumptions and needing to pump out art as fast as we can and only thinking about what we can get out of art. Instead of the meaning of creating art. Thanks you for being an art shaman. The modern master with disciples wanting to learn the hidden secrets. Please make more of these videos. There are few people I trust to mend my brain with this perspective of life and philosophy of art.

This technology reflects the mentality a lot of artists have that eventually, we will "get rid" of AI. Because its "bad for artists". But thats a really narrow and naive view of the situation. LLMs and image detection/generation is useful for a plethora of things. Their existence does NOT NEED to mean that your livelihood is at risk. Legislation needs to change. The things that make me uncomfortable, is the intentional and targeted poisoning of models that will inevitably be used in areas where they NEED to work. Maybe its in a classroom setting for educational purposes (as defined by the EU) or maybe its simply for accessing information (like with models such as perplexity). Intentionally attacking a system that has the potential to dangerously misinform and possibly even harm people sheerly out of dread and paranoia is... Not something I see as ethical. And right now we are giving people tools that could prove potentially dangerous if used strategically.

30 minutes in and you comment that the tree would not have the concept of space without the ability to move. Had this thought in the car the other day after I'd watched the first video and thought about it a bit. Thought about how crazy it is that just because i can move my limbs and have the sensation of touch, my mind thinks in three dimensions. Crazy to see you talking about the same thing haha. Good thoughts to be having, thank you for sharing steven!

whoa what the hell was that, did you just cast a "fill 3 pages of a sketchbook" spell on me?

I want all of these videos. They're delicious.

Thanks so much for sharing this! Similar thoughts have crossed my mind (though I did this thinking stuff a lot more like 10 years ago when I had much more time for myself) and it's refreshing to have a similar but different version put to words. I've certainly done wayyy worse job at trying to sometimes explain something similar (I pretty much don't try to these days, people just go on to joke that I've gone insane). I think an interesting part is that when you realize everything you experience is from the frame of your mind, it opens up the question how much can we intentionally alter or develop it. The way people draw and especially how they draw visualizations of themselves is a door to look at how they see the world also.

Whenever you decide to continue posting these here or elsewhere, please do share them. I personally think this is part of art, even if it can be part of other things also.

i want to cry...It's a year from this video, and now Adobe and Meta are just doing the most daylight theft of all...

Thank you

woah, I was so caught up in the ideas that feeling meant that I could experience my foot. It is such a strong illusion even allowing you to feel squeezing in muscles and feeling the exact location of tension. Its a strong approximation, but ultimately everything is an approximation. We don't have access to all light waves, we are quite colourblind and if an alien saw our art it would be pretty confused. I think you brought that up in one of your previous videos. What the hell would having foot consciousness be? we would experience some sort of electrical signal, perhaps we would contextualize this as a strong desire to tense muscles at certain points, but we would not know for what reason we would do this. We would also feel pressure or pain, completely randomly without the understanding that we are a moving object through space. But this is not how feet think because feet don't have minds, much like how trees don't have a mind like ours, and how trees feel without any context much like my foot would. But even my foots senses are only decoded at the brain which is to say the CEO is the one feeling the foots senses. So maybe I still disagree because to be a foot is to be an inanimate object without the CEO seat. Is that semantic? I think there is a distinct difference because it is the CEO who experiences the sensations not the foot. If I could attach my brain to the experience of a tree and have the CEO decode the trees experiences then maybe its the same but we cannot do that. The foot is me, blood cells are not me though because we have no senses which monitor blood cells. I see my body like a planet with senses. There are beings coexisting on me, in fact I am made of organisms which have organisms in them(cells and the mitochondria) as well as gut bacteria, and even surface bacteria. These are all animals grazing hunting living on me, beings which rely on me and in some cases who I routinely kill for the sake of cleanliness 😈. The reason I bring this up is that these organisms are separate from other parts of me which can be controlled by the CEO. You could say that well I actually can't control anything and I'd agree but I think what my conscious mind thinks it can control is me. But saying that makes me think this whole thing is stupid because really we're the same as wind, rippling water or rocks tumbling down a cliff. We are only elements reacting to our environments which have been gifted the ability to observe, and for some reason given the illusion of free will. So logically if we cannot control anything but rather the world controls us through chaos, maybe we are just the world, and maybe the blood cell is just us. That is true if you're a determinist at least. So yeah I am my foot because everything is me including trees and guns and ham sandwiches and microplastics in my balls and my family and you and everything.

Haven’t seen you before but these comments are exciting

I think you would have some great conversations at the youtube channel HealthyGamer GG its led by a Harvard Psychiatrist who integrates Hindu philosophy into psychology. He has really helped me and many others shed their sweaty gamer tendencies with his videos (also just generally helped a lot of people work through trauma ect) and they have helped me work towards my artistic goals. He often has influencers on his podcasts where they talk about life or whatever they feel like and I think since you both explore quite common ground I think it would make for some great conversation. Please consider reaching out, I think you could learn a lot from him since he studied philosophy all across asia, under various monks and has a solid understanding of at least hindu philosophy.

I think people are gonna have fun if you ever bring up how time is also a construction of our brain. That is something I don't really understand myself but its such a fascinating idea which I'd love to play with more and its something that your audience may really enjoy as well. As for the idea that we can only see the near past and that we will always be separated from reality through the filter of perception, I remember learning this when I was a child watching science videos on youtube and I had such a strange feeling, but I think I had my fun with that thought enough to the point that I cannot experience the wow moment again (although I will try). Watching this felt kind of like walking already tread ground but after reading some comments I think my experience is the exception so thank you for bringing this strange feeling I felt back then to more people!

This is the line that divides fine artists and 'industry' artists. Of course it is by nature of work and necessity of purpose, this is so. fine artists love art so much they make art. Industry artists are, much good than fine artists I may say... but they have lost the soul of a true artist in exchange for skill.

Thank you

Design school most certainly made me crazy haha

Keep it as one channel....can't really imagine this stuff being excluded when speaking about being a creator. Great talk ❤

I started drawing at 44, like a madman, 10 hours a day locked alone from the world. 9 years later I woke up and realised the thing that made me is me:) And now I am on a ride like I never imagined:)

If my art was good yeah. 😂😢😂😢

« Lets go buy something we saw on an add or something » You killed me xD

I am not deleting my work from sites I shared to because it's time stamped and dated for me. Years from now it's digital proof I existed before AI took over. As an artist I am frustrated that companies think we don't get to voice how our work, our voice, is handled.

I think this absolutely feels like art and I would love to see more stuff like this on this channel