tim lisko C
P Y W R I T I N G
A WRITER’S BOOK of WRITING.
“ME FAIL ENGLISH? THAT’S UNPOSSIBLE.” R A L P H W I G G UM
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EDUCATION
AWARDS AND HONORS
Savannah College of Art and Design MFA Photography, 2006
HIGH ART BILLBOARD PROJECT Arts Council of Indianapolis, 2014-2015
Portfolio Center (Atlanta, GA) Certification in Copywriting, 1998 West Virginia University BSJ (Journalism), 1995
WORK EXPERIENCE
One Click, staff photographer Greenwood, IN 2014-2016
HARRISON CENTER FOR THE ARTS “Shinkansen” Solo Show, Indianapolis, 2011 METROMIX Local Celebrity Feature, 2011 CHRISTIAN CENTURY MAGAZINE Arts Feature, 2010 SAVANNAH COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN Permanent Collection, Hong Kong, 2009 INTO THE QUIET Thesis Exhibition, Savannah, 2006
Franklin College, Lecturer of Art and Journalism Franklin, IN 2010-2015
PEOPLE MAGAZINE Author’s Photo, 2006 (Adam Davies for The Frog King)
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful’s Lilly Day of Service Official Photographer, 2010
EAT MY SHOW Inclusion in juried exhibition, Savannah, 2006
Art Reach (Indianapolis Art Center) Photo Instructor At-Risk Youth Indianapolis, IN 2009-2010
SILVERWORKS Inclusion in photography annual, 2005
Savannah College of Art and Design Professor of Advertising Design, 2007–2009 Indiana High School Press Association Guest lecturer & judge, Franklin, IN, 2008–present Master Artist Photography Camps for kids at the Jepson Center for the Arts Instructor, Savannah, GA, 2008–2010 Moses Jackson Center Photography instructor, Savannah, GA, 2007
HOSPICE SAVANNAH One-man show, United Way Building, Savannah, 2004 GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP Savannah College of Art and Design, 2004–2006 UNDERGRADUATE SCAD PHOTO SHOW Juried selection of 3 pieces, 2003 MAY POETTER SCHOLARSHIP Savannah College of Art and Design, 2001–2003 ONE SHOW Merit, 2001
Maine Photographic Workshops Teaching Assistant, Rockport, ME, 2005
PRINT Inclusion in juried publication (for Price-McNabb and WORK, Inc), 2001
Joyce Tenneson Studios Photography Assistant, New York, NY, 2004
ATHENA NATIONAL NEWSPAPER AWARDS Bronze, 2001
Price-McNabb Copywriter, Charlotte, NC, 2000–2001
SHOW SOUTH Gold (student), 1998
WORK, Inc. Copywriter, Richmond, VA, 1999–2000
CLIO Finalist (student), 1997
F R E E L A N C E Price-McNabb (NC), The Atlantic Group (CT), Match (GA), 1998–1999, The HEAVYWEIGHTS (IN), 2008–2010, CODO Design (IN), 2011
WORK Beer Tally Sheet ( R I C H M O N D, VA )
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For every time you Knock off the rust. Come out unscathed. Outlast a machine. And know how to fix it. You’ve earned some beer. For every time you Take it all on your shoulders. Use brute force. Go above and beyond. And save another life. You’ve earned some more.
What you have in your hands is pure American ingenuity. Elbowgrease staple-gunned to knowhow. It’s a tally sheet. A way to keep track of the ounces you earn. For the jobs you do. It works a little something like this: Pull up weeds. Mark it down. Build a fence. Mark it down. Shovel anything from Pile A to Pile B. For heaven’s sake, mark it down. If you put on protective gear to crawl under, over or into places a man shouldn’t fit, mark it down. This isn’t a substitute for work ethic. It’s not a bribe. It’s just a little something to make sure no job is thankless. So, go out and make your grandfather proud. Then mark it down. You’ve earned it.
WORK Beer Distribution Sheet ( R I C H M O N D, VA )
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Work beer isn’t cute. It isn’t fruity. It isn’t tanning beds and trust funds. Weak minds and weaker handshakes. It’s about torque. And raw knuckles. And spending eight hours fixing six machines with one tool. It’s axle grease and Detroit steel. It’s knowing money does grow on trees. But only if you hack one down and rip out the stump. Work is a lager. Pale and not too heavy. Crafted like house beers back when men were men and women built bombs. Slightly bitter with a malty body that somehow tastes better when you sit back to count bruises and fingers and it only seems fair that the bottle has to sweat.
F E AT U R E D IN T H E O N E S H OW.
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AN ENTIRE SEASON OF NAG-FREE FOOTBALL. FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT MAIN ST. BEER CO. 1. CUT OUT DECOY AD 2. “ACCIDENTALLY” LEAVE IT WHERE SHE’LL FIND IT 3. SEE YOU ON GAME DAY
A 17-WEEK, MEN-ONLY SEMINAR
s
Sessions Include: • Intimacy: It’s A Two-Way Street • “Spoon Time” • Revealing Your Fears • What’s Right With Being Wrong • Looking Beneath The Words • Love Is The Little Things Classes meet every Saturday and Sunday.
THE ART
of LOVING, LEARNING and LISTENING Mike Ditka, Ph.D.
Monday Evening classes are also available.
Call For Reservations 831-9366
Beer. Football. Food. We’ve taken the three most important things in a man’s life and figured a way to painlessly separate them from the fourth. Every Saturday, Sunday and Monday throughout the season, join us for: satellite-broadcast football, 20¢ hot wings, 75¢ BBQ ribs, $1 tacos and our specialty - hot dogs steamed in Fan Lager. What we have here is special. It’s a great system, possibly worthy of a Bryant, a Lombardi or a Shula. You get your beer and your football, and when you go home, she gets a content, well-fed man who’s ready to cuddle for hours and maybe even watch Lifetime. 1911 W. MAIN ST. • RICHMOND, VA.
B LO G
One Click Ventures (Be nice.) ( G R E E N WO O D, I N )
http://www.readers.com/blog/only-make-one-resolution-this-year/
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PERSONAL
Artist Statement ( S AVA N NA H , G A )
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In 2001, in an elevator in the Bank of America Corporate Center, somewhere between the metal detector at the lobby’s entrance and my cubicle on the 72nd floor, I realized I was dying — not immediately, but inevitably, and that the pile of papers I’d been spending my life shuffling from one end of my desk to the other, would, in the end, mean nearly nothing. That moment has colored everything since. It has meant the end of doing what I was supposed to do; the end of being responsible first; the end of trying to synthesize the practical and the lucrative into a life plan my guidance counselor would recommend. Somewhere along the line, I picked up my camera. And I used it as a sort of dowsing rod which I hoped would point itself toward something that would turn out to be important to me. That something turned out to be a sense of balance, of simplicity, of stillness. When I make a photograph, I am literally cropping out the rest of existence — its tension, its chaos, its hunger, its pain. For one small moment, I wall myself into a world of my own creation; a world where things may not make immediate narrative or logical sense, but where everything is in balance. Thin, almost pencil-drawn lines offset wide, flat spaces. The smooth hardness of glass acts as counterweight to the fine hairs of a polyester wig. I don’t have any pretensions of long-term escape. I know when I put the camera down, when I step back from the print, there will be something like an avalanche of smells and voices, car alarms and newspaper headlines, legal obligations and biological concerns. I will be a part of things again over which I have no control. But for a moment, I have hidden long enough to take a breath.
RADIO
Shreve, Crump and Lowe Jewelers ( B O S TON, M A )
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SPRING :30
EASIER JOB :60
VO: “There is a first day of Spring that sometimes doesn’t happen when the calendar says it should;
VO :“A heartfelt apology, from Shreve, Crump and Low: On behalf of the management of Boston’s oldest jewelers, we would like to extend our deepest apologies. It seems we have come to an unfair understanding -- one that gives, you, our customers, a more difficult job, while leaving us the far easier one. You are the ones who go on blind dates. You are the ones who plan romantic dinners out and take picnics in the park. You are the ones who search the world for someone whose laugh makes you laugh and whose smile makes you smile. You are the ones who take on the nearly impossible task of falling in love.
a day when you can’t explain it, but the world just smells like things are getting brighter; when birds are beginning to sing the songs that make the flowers bloom; when colors explode onto the landscape and the grays just seem to disappear. You’re not sure exactly how it happened, just that it did and that it’s perfect and you wish it would last forever. At Shreve, Crump and Lowe, we believe that seeing a piece of fine jewelry for the first time, should feel just like that moment -- like everything is perfect and right and all you have to do is open your eyes to be dazzled and wish that it would last forever. Shreve Crump and Low...(ending tag).”
All we have to do is take two hundred years of expertise and make sure that when you find the right person, we have the one perfect piece to tell them how you feel. Not that it’s simple, but when you’ve done it as long as we have, it gets to be something like “easy.” So, please, accept our apologies for taking the easier job. We’re Shreve, Crump and Low. We promise to offer exceptional quality and extraordinary service at competitive prices, but we’re sorry...we can’t fall in love for you.”
RADIO
Blue Marlin Low-country Restaurant ( C H AR L OT T E , N C )
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“SHRIMP” :60
“ TA S T E ” : 6 0
VO: The Lowcountry is a long, slow stretch of land thick with culture, thick with men who wake up every
VO: When we say that Blue Marlin cookin’ tastes like the Lowcountry, you may need a little help knowin’
morning and head out into the mist, looking for shrimp. Just like the fathers and grandfathers before them, who’d wake up every morning and head out into the mist, looking for shrimp.
exactly what we mean.
These men, these lifelong shrimpers spend sunup to sundown chasing shrimp, hauling shrimp, putting shrimp on ice. At night they drift back to shore in boats riding low, heavy with shrimp and drive themselves home in trucks they bought to haul shrimp, listening to reports on shrimp futures and the latest shrimping news to climb out of wet clothes that will always, always smell like shrimp. So it takes some powerful cooking, some kind of special, passed-along, Lowcountry magic to get these men to sit down to dinner and think:
The Lowcountry tastes like warm Sunday afternoons, spent following the shade -- from moss-covered oaks to wide front porches and back again -- carrying leather-bound books and sweet iced tea. It tastes like leaning back in a swing your father helped your grandfather build, riding out the afternoon to the sound of smooth piano jazz strained through a patched screen door. It tastes like sweet red peppers picked fresh into a wide cotton apron. And roasted pecans. And fish caught fresh from a one-man rowboat. It tastes like you took all that, simmered it for three generations, and heaped it on a fork.
“Man, that shrimp looks good.” At the Blue Marlin, every jumbo shrimp, every sweet crab cake, every forkful of fresh-caught swordfish carries with it the taste of the land that thought it up.
At the Blue Marlin, every crab cake, every fresh filet, every spoonful of wild mushroom salmon carries with it the taste of the land that thought it up. Blue Marlin. Fine lowcountry eats.
Blue Marlin. Fine lowcountry eats.”
PERSONAL
Teaching Philosophy ( I N D I ANA P O L I S, I N )
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First and foremost, I am a pragmatist. That is, I believe wholeheartedly in the studied consideration of a given problem, followed by the reasoned pursuit of its solution. When it comes to teaching art, the problem becomes the gap between what students know at the beginning of an education and what they would need to know to function (or even to become wildly successful) in their chosen fields. In practical terms, that pragmatism causes me to give a lot of thought to what it is that students actually need; that is to ask myself what best fills that gap between what they know and what they need to know. The assignments I give are designed so that successful completion demonstrates an understanding of the underlying concept. Along my own educational journey, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from some incredibly gifted teachers and artists. What I’ve learned from them distills down to a set of core beliefs which provide the foundation for the way I teach: 1. THE PURSUIT OF PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS.
Even with my students as young as 8, I believe in the pursuit of the level of work in art history books and museums. In critique, I try to give an honest assessment of the work as it would be judged by curators and professional jurors. If I want students to learn to show aesthetic balance like Josef Koudelka’s, it only makes sense to show them his work and then use it to define a workable rubric. If I want them to print like Frederick Sommer, again, it makes sense to show them his work and develop a rubric accordingly. I also believe in presenting critique as a means of moving things forward, toward those standards, rather than a means of punishing students for having fallen short. One of my graduate professors described critique as “the opportunity to address the problem of “what a piece lacks that keeps it from being brilliant.”” At best, that is what I’d like my critiques to be. >>
2. HONESTY.
I believe in telling students the truth as best I can. If I believe that some instruction I’m giving isn’t necessary in absolute terms, as in matters of contemporary taste, for instance, I’ll tell them it is only necessary given the current art market or it is necessary in order for me to know that they are capable of a given technique. As an example, I was taught that an artist must always be able to explain his or her work for it to be valid, which didn’t explain E.J. Bellocq’s unwitting post-mortem collaborations or Gary Winogrand’s quote “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” The truth of the matter is that the explanation of one’s work makes it more likely to sell, and that for graduate students, it is absolutely necessary to understand one’s own work before trying to teach. In another example, it isn’t empirically necessary to print black and white photographs with a full, 10 zone tonal range, but it may be necessary for students to print that range to demonstrate that they are capable of it. From what I’ve read about the current generation of college students (as well as what I’ve experienced in the classes I’ve taught), this kind of honesty tends to break down barriers of cynicism and outright disbelief that would otherwise get in the way of an education.
3. THE LACK OF NEVER.
This is an extension of my belief in honesty in the classroom, but I do not generally believe in “never” as a viable teaching tool. There are brilliant counter-examples in world-class collections to nearly every “rule” I could present to my students. If I told freshmen never to shoot pictures of their toilets, I wouldn’t be able to explain Edward Weston’s “Excusado.” If I told them never to center the subject, I wouldn’t be able to explain Harry Callahan’s “Eleanor, Chicago.” I do however, tell my students about what I call “90% rules.” I explain that here is an increased likelihood that a photo will resonate with the viewer (or a critic, or a curator) if it follows a set of given guidelines, but that the rule isn’t absolute.
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4. RESONANCE.
A professor and long-time Maine Media Workshop teacher told me once that the closest he could come to defining “art” was that it was a construction that resonated with its audience. He went on to say that there was an imaginary triangle between the artist, the work and the viewer, and if that triangle contained energy, the work was a success. What I try to do, generally speaking, is to apply those tenets in a way that makes the class dynamic. I want the kind of energy that spills out the door after class. I want the hallways to buzz with the ways my students have just been challenged or enlightened or experienced a breakthrough. I want other students to see my classes empty at the end of the period and feel the slightest bit of either jealousy or curiosity. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t feel that I’ve done my job. In broader terms, I want students to look back on time that they’ve literally spent in my classroom, time that they will never get back, and know, I mean know, that they’ve spent it well.
WEB
Gather A‘round BBQ ( I N D I ANA P O L I S, I N )
http://gatheraroundbbq.com/
It’s worried over, hard-won, only-the-familyknows-the-recipe, barbecue. It’s the right meat, with the right smoke, at the right temperature, in exactly the right sauce. This is call-your-friends barbecue. It’s “we won the big game” barbecue. It’s barbecue that’ll make you fill up the cooler and empty your calendar. Find a reason. Place an order. Grab a fork.
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Pattern Magazine Shinkansen ( I N D I ANA P O L I S, I N )
http://issuu.com/patternindy/docs/pattern_spring_2014_digital
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AT 1 8 0 M P H , I F Y O U A D J U S T S O T H AT E A C H S H O T L A S T S M O S T O F W H AT Y O U S E E PA I N T E D I N S T R E A K S A C R O S S M O S T O F W H AT Y O U S E E AT A I N M I L E S — I T ’ S M O U N TA I N S
T H E C A M E R A’ S E X P O S U R E A COUPLE OF SECONDS, U P C LOS E I S CO LO R , THE PICTURE PLANE . D I S TA N C E C A N B E M E A S U R E D A N D C I T I E S A N D L I F E F LY I N G B Y.
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304.444.6454