Clintavo on Substack

What happened to art?

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, a

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I define poetry as finding evocative, unconventional ways to say meaningful things.

For example, instead of saying "the day was hot," you could write “even the bugs were looking for air conditioning.”

In that example, we're describing the effect caused by our subject (the hot day)—as opposed to directly describing the heat itself. In other words, po... See more