Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art has a new display of film director Tim Burton's art:

In photographs, Tim Burton looks the part of the goth filmmaker: rumpled and slightly menacing, his grizzled locks untamed, his expression surly behind a barricade of tinted blue glasses. In person, though, the 51-year-old auteur is surprisingly warm and fuzzy, more like an eager teenager stumbling over his sentences and punctuating his speech with jabbing, agitated gestures.

It may be Mr. Burton's connection with his inner adolescent that accounts for the string of hit movies that deftly blend creepiness and dark humor—"Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Corpse Bride," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," to name only a handful of the 14 that he's conceived and directed over the past 25 years. But it's his restless hands and imagination that have produced since childhood hundreds of doodles, sketches, cartoons, puppets, storyboards, photographs and fully realized drawings, many of them on display in the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of Mr. Burton's works.

Some things for creative types to take from this:

1.) Creative types create. Burton was driven by his own unique vision to create his work and that's what he did: he created. He didn't spend time in a coffee shop or bar talking about what he was going to do. He did it.

2.) Location helps. Burton's talent got him into the Disney Institute but his living close by helped. So he went to where art was being created. With the miracle of the Internet, actual location isn't quite as necessary has it has been in the past but virtual location helps. Seek out and find other creative types.

3.) Don't get discouraged. Burton didn't start out directing blockbuster movies. And when he did direct blockbuster movies, he directed some movies that weren't. (Hello, Planet of the Apes remake?) He kept moving right along. Success is nice but failure isn't the end.