Creativity and the Blues

Eric Maisel is interviewed about his book The Van Gogh Blues. He says this:
For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or [...]

Managing Creatives

Bullet points as ideas about how to manage creative people:

Jokes are serious business
Play is work.
Unwarranted criticism is DEATH.
Silence is DEADLY because unwarranted criticism is implied.
Philosophy is important, but is to be held loosely.
Rhythm rules.
Bending is necessary.
Insist on quality.

These will probably change.

Certain Kind of Joy

A certain kind of joy, here.
Smeared ink staining myfingers as the scratchingof the nib makes a lonelykind of music.

Writing-pen to paper forthe first draft-maybethe only draft-ofsomething leftof someunread,untranslated,barely thought out,barely digested,nascent memory.

A certain kind of joy, here.
The feel of music andwasting time, eyes adjusting tothe eerie light. Fighting off thepre-dawn delirium.The half-light of the morning [...]

Always Writing Down

J. mentioned that she looked over while we were singing in church and saw me writing on an index card. She laughed. I was embarrassed.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s just so you.”

Living on the Sun

My son Joseph had a dream:
He dreamed that NASA sent up a probe  to explore the surface of the sun. The probe accidently crashed into the sun and, seven minutes later, the earth went dark. The sun had gone out. Everyone was fumbling around in the dark. The earth was growing progressively colder.
During the panic, [...]

Working With Constraints

Chuck Jones, the animator, used rules when thinking about his cartoon The Roadrunner. Here are the rules as listed in Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination:

The road runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “beep-beep!”
No outside force can harm the coyote–only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.
The coyote could stop [...]

Motivation vs. Encouragement

I found this in the From the Sales and Marketing Management Performance Newsletter:
Recruiting and managing creative talent is tough in today’s competitive marketplace. A survey by marketing, advertising, Web and creative staffing firm The Creative Group finds managers of creative staffs believe their biggest challenge is knowing how to motivate different personality types.“Managers who hire [...]

Memory & Dreams (2)

In my limited experience, dreaming has more to do with the present or with the future than with the past.
I can’t remember a recent dream of my own, so I’ll make use of a dream my wife Gale told me about recently. She dreamed that somebody new moved in next door and they had a [...]

Memory & Dreams (1)

I suppose I should mention that I’ve posted an entry on Grace Notes about one thing that happened while on a trip to Chicago this past weekend. You can read it here.
The following entry was written a while ago, but I haven’t had the opportunity to post it:
Dee asked my thoughts about dreams and their connection [...]

Things Thunk Recently

I’ve been writing regularly, just not here.
It seems my writing has become more therapy session than art (well as close to art as I ever get). I’ve kept the “therapy” entries between the pages of my notebook. I’m certain there are many interesting nuggets in those pages, but I don’t know yet what nuggets are [...]

Turning

It has been ten days since we returned from our vacation in the Upper Peninsula. I normally try to assimilate myself back into daily life as quickly as possible. This year, though, I’ve tried to linger a bit longer on the lessons I’ve learned or re-learned. I’ve attempted to sort out as much as possible [...]

Floating

The quiet pool beneath this lilly pad flower is rich with tannin. It’s rusty color comes from the cedar trees surrounding the waters in the Seney Wildlife Refuge. The water is dark, murky, seemingly lifeless or, if not lifeless, containing some form of life humans should avoid.
But–on top of the water–in the light of a [...]

Reading and Writing Gap?

Sorry I’ve not been posting regularly. I’m going to try to get back into the swing of things by starting slowly.
Here’s an interesting article excerpt:
Studies have long shown that boys in the United States and around the world do not read or write as well as girls.
But a new study finds that the problem cuts [...]

Creativity: A Response

In the second chapter of Michael Card’s Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity, Card asks this question:
"Have you ever contemplated one of those long theological lists of God’s attributes and concluded that he is above all beautiful? We rarely ponder his beauty, much less seek to ‘gaze upon it.’ Rarely does our theology include [...]

Creativity: Creating Silence

I'll return to the What's in the Name series a bit later. My post, yesterday, got me thinking about creativity.
Michael Card's book, Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity, has been on my shelf for quite some time. I bought it right after it came out three years ago. I read it then and have been meaning [...]

The Stairs

Ever do this?
I've had this picture by Peter Schmidt on my desktop for some time now. During lulls, I stare at it and try to imagine what's up the stairs. The picture seems to suggest quite a bit with the light, the carpeting on the stairs, the point of view of the artist. He definitely [...]