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This blog created and managed by Beau Smith, the Persuasive Digital Media Pro.

I am a writer, musician, sculptor, painter, all-around creative guy...I've got to blog. In this blog I am going to share all the different forms of work I create in. I consider myself a multi-media artist. That's not currently how I make a living. I make a living sculpting and selling human-sized copper frogs. For more on that, go visit my beautifulfrog.com site, which I have had up for many years. You'll hear plenty enough about frog sculpture on this blog, more than you'd like, maybe, but to get a quick idea of what I do, check out that site. Besides, I'd love to have you on my beautifulfrog.com mailing list. I offer a freebie ebook I made all by myself, about my frogs. So go there and check it out. If nothing else, you'll see a true artist site, what a site should be. I don't claim that this is how your site should look or that all artist sites should look like my site. No way. And I'm sure that as much as I do things right on my site, I'm probably doing some stuff wrong as well. Oh well. I keep at it.

I love the web and digital media. Love it. I grew up without all this stuff. I'm 46. On the tail end of the boomers. I'm a boomer tail kid. Though I'm not a kid anymore. My wife tells me I need to grow up. But, let's face it, I'm not a kid.


It takes guts to write the sort of blog I am writing now. Guts. This is the traditional blog. Can you believe it, there's such a thing? Yes, well, before everyone started making so much money with these things, there was the guy (or gal - politically incorrect?) who just wanted to say..."Hello, world!" Which is, if you don't already know, though many of you do, what a Wordprerss blogger page, among others, says when you first open it up to set down your first entry. The traditional blog is the one that gives you journalese.

This does not have to be such a bad thing. Look at the Beatles. According to Lennon (and I agree), McCartney liked to write about others and Lennon wrote about himself. So you have "A Day in the Life" by Lennon and McCartney (I.E., Lennon) and "Lovely Rita: Meter maid", by McCartney. Now that might be unfair. I picked a great song by Lennen and a lesser song by McCartney. Well, that's just what I could come up with on the spur of the moment. If you look at McCartney’s songs, you find he writes about characters other than himself. If you look at all Lennon’s songs, you see Lennon writing mainly about himself. This is a matter of a different style, a different way of coming at art and the art process. That's all. The way I term it, and I will talk about this in my Science of Originality series, McCartney is an Illuminator, whereas Lennon is a Director. I've already explained myself enough here. I won't go into these two terms, Illuminator and Director. They are two different styles of making art. I include a third style in my basic model of how artists go about making art: the Master.

I've said so much here that apparently I'll have to go into this for a moment. So I will. The Illuminator emphasizes subject matter. He illuminates his subject, and that's where the substance of his art comes from. The Director has a personal vision of the subject. The art becomes more about him. The Master, in contrast to the other two, focuses on his medium. That's what gives his art substance.
Three different styles. I am a Director. Thus, the traditional blog is perfect for me. There are dangers. After all, I'm writing about myself. As my wife has commented to me more than once, all the blogs she ever read were incredibly boring.

Well then what accounts for the huge success of blogs? Someone, many someone’s, must be reading them. Yeah, and you are reading this blog right now. This is of course a neat trick because I seem to be reading your mind when I am simply stating the obvious. If I wanted to be more honest, I'd give you my blog stats, which are not great right now because this is early in the game. Check up with me on this.

Hugely boring. Okay, that is the danger. But revealing. That could be a strength. Not so if I embarrass myself, of course. As Lewis Grizzard used to say, "I wouldn't of told that."

Embarrassment of this sort is not just embarrassing for the writer or artist of whomever is the originator of said blog: It's embarrassing for the audience as well. Maybe not as much because there's some pretty racy and revealing stuff on the net. If we can all know the intimate details of a president's sexual escapades... Be that as it may, I don't want to embarrass you or me.

This is a narrow ledge. Ont he one side is embarrassment. On the other side is a damn boring blog, if it is about me and I don't reveal anything. So what is the answer?

I'll try, as best as I can, to give you art. I may not be John Lennon. Yes, on inspection, I am not John Lennon. But I am an artist. Further...

I believe in the net. I love it. I dream of being, among other things, and among being an artist and writer, an Internet Marketer, of sorts, anyway.

Thus, a traditional blog needs to be part of my repertoire, for a number of reasons – among them, the Science of Originality. The Science of Originality is based on an ever-growing model of reality (and non-reality; this thing is vast.) that originated in me one day when I was out running. It came to me that painting brings vision, writing brings essence, and music brings flow, and that vision, essence, and flow – VEF, as I sometimes call it – is the primary and originating substance of creativity and indeed of all reality, which is life. It later occurred to me that non-reality is death, and that reality and non-reality are polar opposites in this game we play called life. And so on.

I am an artist. I am also, in a way, a scientist, though I doubt anyone but me would call me that. Soft scientist, to be sure, but a scientist nonetheless. (Well, my wife is a psychologist. That’s one scientist in the family. My dad actually was a scientist. He’s also a sculptor, but he got a degree in thermodynamics.) I am a scientist of art-in-facts. Okay, that’s just a play on words. I am a scientist in that I observe the creative process. I read about the creative process, study it, look at it in the lives of others, artists, creatives, businesspeople, anyone who interests me. Mainly, though, I get the information from watching my own process. This is the most direct input of information. Subjective, yes. I try to be objective, though, hence, scientist as well as artist.

As I say, I have set up a podcast that has a lot of the Science of Originality material on it.

Science of Originality… I might also have called it Science of Reality… I bet that one’s taken, at least in the URL world. Maybe not… I’ll give it a try a little later on.

I have called this science the Science of Originality because it’s mainly about creativity – life, in other words – and where creativity comes from, hence the Source, hence originality.