Andrew Overn

Andy Overn is a professor at Bethany Lutheran College who has over 20 years of experience in illustration and design. In his classes he aims to set his students up for success in their future careers as artists and designers, which is what inspired me to reach out to him for this article.

Charis Carmichael Braun

A resident of New York, Charis Carmichael Braun is a painter and arts administrator as well as an adjunct Art History professor at Bethany Lutheran College. Recently she was on the Hearts & Hands podcast describing her artistic journey.

What are your definitions of “art” and “artist”?

Andy Overn:

To be considered an “art object,” the object must have a physical form that may be observed and considered by all. Second, the object must show at least an attempt towards meaning. FORM + CONTENT. If either are absent, the work may remain decorative, but not “art” with a capital A.

Note that quality is a related but distinct concept. Work of high quality will show sophistication or even mastery over the formal elements and original, creative depth of content/concept.

An artist, then, is the individual who creates or contributes to the creation of an art object.

Charis Carmichael Braun:

I find that a current definition of “art” and “artist”—viewed through a lens focused on European Art History—is amorphous because of the material developments, philosophical evolutions, and shifting affirmations that have grown out of the First Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. While my personal background and choice of artistic training may suggest distinct parameters for some thing to qualify as “art” or a person to qualify as “an artist,” being a participant in a post-Romanticism artworld, I must be open to the possibility that any person making some thing may leverage their creations under their own definition of “art” and “artist.” This is a great topic for discussion – in fact, every movement in “art history” has asked this question, with changing criteria, time and time again!

In your opinion, how do you know when an artist has “made it”?

Andy Overn:

In the most basic sense, an artist “makes it” when they manage to create something that they themselves find satisfactory; that is, the external expression of the idea closely matches the ideal they had in mind before producing that object. It’s the satisfaction of creating something of actual quality that reinforces the desire to continue.

Charis Carmichael Braun:

The only one who can define whether one has “made it” or not will be the one calling oneself an artist. Certainly, there are hoops to jump through, ladders to climb, and mountains to hike, in every creative’s career. CERTAIN hoops, ladders, and mountains may bring peer or industry recognition, but each person’s journey with creativity is their own and they are responsible for seeking out the things by which they want to define themselves. 

Any resources that you can recommend for artists?

Andy Overn:

Book: What They Don’t Teach in Art School, by Will Terry

Website: https://www.andyadams.org/everything-i-know-about-freelancing/

Charis Carmichael Braun:

SUPPORT: Artmaking is hard, and often inconsistent. Find financial support, emotional support, physical support, health support, space/housing support, community support, and spiritual support. 

THERAPY: While making things may be a way of processing emotions and thoughts, it’s also good to reserve safe space (through therapy) that allows parts of the artmaking to just be artmaking and not self-therapy.  

HOPE: You can change the way your ambition is shaped, you can adjust where things fall on your timeline, you can revise goals, just keep the hope that inspired your artmaking in the first place.

What has your art journey been like? Share in the comments!

The memories that we have are copies of copies of the initial experience. Every time we load the memory in our brain, it loses a little bit of the vibrancy and detail it had in the days after. The same can be true for ideas, if you only take them out to admire them and don’t build on them. And when we lock thoughts in our brain vaults and don’t return to them, they either emerge as mere glimmers of a sensation years later, or are lost forever.

The solution, then, to keeping that initial spark glowing is to do something with it while the iron is hot: write it down, build the framework, tell someone about it. You may not be able to bring it to its fullest potential right away, but if you capture enough of it in a bottle you can pick it up later and follow your own instructions.

Until the library of Alexandria burns and you lose everything.

My particular brain-library is prone to be leaky. I have inattentive ADHD, which makes me less likely to pay attention to the right thing, and I have fewer slots in my short-term memory so not everything makes it to long-term conversion. As a result, I’ve learned to write everything down. In classes, I write down the professors’ every word, complete with relevant doodles of the images shown or alluded to. Studies have proven that taking long-form notes helps you to retain information better (2014, 2021), but for me, it’s mostly so that a) I’m actively listening and not daydreaming, and b) I have something physical to return to in order to bring that information back into my memory. My brain isn’t likely to remember proper nouns—it’s rare for me to contribute to a conversation without an awkward pause as I realize mid-sentence that I’m blanking on the most important word.

For someone like me to hold onto an idea long enough to actually make it happen is huge. But waiting this long to start artinministry.com hasn’t come without a cost. In high school and college, I kept pages and pages of notes on topics for the future AIM blog in my computer. The notes software was backed up to the cloud, but I let it stay unsynced for too many months and I lost nearly all of it when my computer died. Some ideas I wrote down on slips of paper which went with me through every move in my adult life (and I moved nearly every year for six years) but I couldn’t find them when I needed them. Even in the middle of making Art in Ministry a reality, I neglected to back up my iPad notes before my hyperfocus on learning handlettering ran the battery to the ground. Not only that, but the reason I was so fired up about art advocacy—the lack of creative fulfillment in our Lutheran schools—wasn’t as relevant to me personally anymore, because as a second career student at Bethany Lutheran College I had the opportunity to try my hand at all the artistic endeavors I had craved ten years earlier.

I’ve heard the strategy of some people is to let ideas be—don’t write them down, don’t do anything with them, just entertain them in the moment and let them go. If they keep coming back and you remember what they were, those are the ideas worth keeping, and that’s what you run with. I struggle with accepting that mentality, because what if I never remember my ideas a second time? Plus, if you only follow through with the ideas that are the most “worthy” of implementation, you pass over so many ideas that help you develop your creative muscle. At the end of my life, I don’t want to be the person who had ideas but never acted on them because they weren’t practical.

Creator Resource

One way to keep track of ideas is to always have onhand a “parking lot” for your thoughts so that you can jot them down before you forget them while not interrupting your current task. This could be a pad of paper, sketchbook, or an app on your phone. I’ve created a simple notebook that you can print out & fold zine-style using a single sheet of paper. It has a space to mark the date at the top, and a place to tally how many times you’ve gone back to look at your notes. If you’ve reviewed it enough times to fill up the tally box, it’s probably time to put that idea into action!
Download the Parking Lot Notebook for free on Teachers Pay Teachers

What is your system for keeping track of ideas? How do you choose which ideas to follow through on?