I am a kind of inventor. That is largely my approach, especially when making a frog.

I make frog sculptures. That’s what I do. I didn’t come up with this idea myself. I got it from my dad, who also makes copper frogs. Or did. He is in his mid-eighties. I imagine he still makes a frog or two. We don’t talk much. I check up on him every now and again.

Why did I start talking about my dad? He’s also a kind of inventor. He came up with the human-sized copper frog. That is his main invention. He’s pretty damn proud of it, and he has a right to be. It is a really great invention. 

So I make these frog sculptures that my dad originated 40 years ago now. An old family recipe, kind of like Colonel Sanders. Charles, my dad, came up with that old family recipe. A retired diplomat living on Seabrook Island asked him to make a frog, suggested to him to do that, and do that he did. He never looked back, my dad. He just kept making frogs after that. This is old news. 

He is not the first guy to carve out a living making frogs, so I have been told and so I have observed. We – myself, my brother and my dad, that’s who makes these frogs – have our share of copy-cats. But then, others have legitimately found themselves making frogs for a living, copper frogs, bronze frogs, metal frogs…without copying what we do. Once when I was selling frogs in the market in Charleston, a passerby told me about another guy who started making copper frogs because everyone bought them when he made them. Well, that is what happened to us. But that does not, or should not, deter from my dad’s frog as being an awesome invention just on it’s own, not just because it is a frog, but more entirely because of how it is built, the craftsmanship and artistry that has gone into the design. It’s awesome, and has survived and thrived for me, my dad, and my brother for several decades now. 

So the thing is, if I am such a great inventor, why am I making something my dad came up with? Why am I not making my own thing? I’m an artist. I should be creative enough to come up with my own thing. Well, I didn’t. It’s a long story, some of which I will tell in future blog entries, and some of which I will leave to the imagination, and some of which I will never tell. We all have many reasons for doing what we do, and not all those reasons are privy to the prying minds of public audiences. Sorry. 

What can I say? The human-sized copper frog is a great invention. I can only add to it. Or, shall I say, the human-sized copper frog is the foundation for more invention within the realm of sculpture. I think my dad would approve of that statement, or be into it. I know him well enough to say that. I know the kind of stuff he gets into and some of how his mind works. I don’t want to know totally how his mind works, because he… Well, let’s just say he is a very private individual. Let’s leave it at that. I’m sure he doesn’t want me talking about him. I know this from prior experience. It’s a tough situation because I’m an artist. The whole thing is about expressing yourself and getting as much publicity as you can. And, well, dad didn’t like that. So let’s not go there.

He deserves more fame than he got for his human-sized copper frog invention. I tried to help him with that, and then quickly found out, knew, in fact, that was not going to work. At all. 

Here is a nice nugget for those who also make art and blog about it: The problem with Instagram and the like is that you are constantly giving away not just secrets, but energy. You know, like some writers will say, they don’t want to talk about what they are working on. They want to save that writerly energy for actually writing the damned thing. So, if all the time, you are constantly documenting the work as it progresses the moment you are doing it, well, that’s no good. That is giving everything away. So, what to do. Wait a while. Let the stew stew. Be working on something else, and then talk about the process. 

See, I, like many, got so excited in the beginning that I could share my process and that someone might be interested, that I would take pictures all the time of what I was doing. I did that for Instagram. Now I have my son commanding that ship because, frankly, it gets in the way when I have to take pictures all the damn time. I lose the energy of what I am doing. That is just one way I have, in the past, deflated my efforts. Not good. So I don’t want to do it that way. So I had to figure out a way to do this blogging thing without giving away too much and without divulging all my secrets. That’s why I say that I will at some point fabricate. On the other hand, I will also document the work. That is very important. 

I suppose if you follow my blog, you might learn a thing or two about creativity. In fact, I’m sure of it. So, one thing is, with your creative efforts, learn how to contain the energy. Don’t give away the energy. You have to learn how to do that. Keep secrets. Don’t give too much away. Set boundaries. Be careful and considerate around your energy. Don’t give way to addiction. Some obsession is ok, but addiction, no, unless it is a good addiction. Then the addiction is not as bad. I would rather be addicted to running than to heroin. 

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Invention. 

So, when I make a frog, I am always trying new things. New techniques, new materials, new forms – ways to build a better mousetrap. Or maybe not even better. Maybe just different. 

It’s research. I do research, in the form of art, in the form of a frog. And sell it. I sell my research. 

On the surface, it may look like I am making the same thing over and over and over, just a little differently each time. But the same. Really, what I am doing is trying things out. It is a kind of improvising. Every time I do this. 

It is not quite like singing the same song over and over again. That can have its own improvisation and freshness, if you do it right. But it is different. Each time I work on a frog, I am to some degree trying to get away with doing research, not just doing the same thing every time. 

The most bored I get is when I am unable to do that, for one reason or another. 

The repetitive design or idea is the context. The context is the vessel for which the artist does research – for which the artist invents. 

If you get bored with what you are doing, such as a day-to-day job that seems repetitive and boring, recognize it as a context. Within that context, create. Change it up. Improvise. 

How to do this?

Something my father taught me and has long stayed with me: Isolate the parameters of what you are doing. Only change a few things. See what happens from that. 

If you try to change too many things at once, you will cease to learn from what you are doing. That is not always true. Sure. But it is true enough. You have got to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run. Kind of like learning how to stop. That’s the first thing you do when you learn how to ski. You get on the bunny slope and learn how to cross your skis and crunch down or sit down so that you can stop. If you don’t learn how to do that FIRST, you are liable to get into an accident. A friend of mine, when he was a kid, that is just what happened to him when he started skiing. He did not first learn how to stop, so he ended up skiing into a wall. Which is funny, a little bit, especially because he turned out ok. But it is surely bad technique. You’re not going to get anywhere behaving that way. First things first. 

So you tell yourself, I am going to ski. The first thing I am going to practice is stopping. I am only going to do that, for, I dunno, 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour… What am I doing? I am skiing. Wait a minute. I’m not skiing. I’m not skiing yet. I have to learn this stopping thing, which does not seem as fun to me as skiing. I want to ski. 

But, you see, you are skiing, when you are learning how to stop. You are isolating the variables and learning just one aspect of skiing. But you are skiing. You are learning to ski. When you become good at skiing, you can still be learning how to ski – and, if we stretch the metaphor a bit, you might also be learning how to stop, on another level. Once you learn how to ski, and then you start skiing, you can also learn how to slow down. That is also skiing. 

I daresay, the daredevils on the raceway have to learn how to slow down. What happens if they don’t slow down properly? Hey, let’s Google that. 

Yeah, so, in race car driving, it is crucial to know when to slow down and when to speed up. You can go into a curve slow, then speed up. You do not want to come into the curve too fast, then have to slow down. If you do come into the curve fast, you have to know how to slow down. 

All this shows that the creative process requires a lot of patience. Patience is easier to accomplish when you recognize the way to set parameters. It is easier to accomplish when you understand that slowing down is just as important, if not more, than speeding up. 

In fact, you can’t go fast unless you learn how to go slow. Guitar and piano players learn this with scales. One has to get proper articulation before one gets speed. Otherwise, one makes mistakes and sounds sloppy, just a muddy mess. 

Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi talks about something very akin to this in his watershed book, Flow, now 30 years old. For someone to achieve a state of flow, many things must happen. One of those things is that one must set the bar just high enough to make it interesting. If the bar is too high, that’s just frustrating. You will never achieve that. If the bar is too low, that’s no fun, either. You have to learn how to set it just high enough that it will give you a challenge, but not be impossible to jump over. And this learning how to set the bar is a way of learning how to isolate the variables – not having too many things going on at one time. 

So, this process, or technique, is scientific and athletic. Scientists do it. Athletes do it. And artists must learn how to do it, or they will not make art. The art will lack vibrancy, originality, creativity, invention… 

So…isolate your variables. Within the context of that, try something new – and learn from it. And you do this every time. 

So even though every time, I am making a frog sculpture, I am learning, growing, changing…evolving. This assures originality in every piece. I get to do research and I get to make art because every piece is original. I think you can see that in most of my work. 

Because my art is original, that ensures saleability. Why? Because that is what art should be. It should be creative, inventive and original. Over the short haul, that may not be the best financial plan. But, in the long haul, for sure it is, if you want to be an artist.