I’ve been busy and a bit drained this week and did not find time to write sooner than Friday afternoon, so this is going to be light on text. I’ve consistently managed to spend at least a little bit of time every day on sculpting for the past two months. I’m pleased with how my expression is developing. I love how many steps there are in the whole process. I love how sometimes an idea accretes slowly, whereas other times the entire piece comes together in a single moment of lightbulb-to-execution.
Read moreFeeling more creative
Now that I’ve got ten posts under my belt and have successfully made blogging into a weekly practice, I want to say a little bit about what I think I’m going to be doing with this for the rest of the year.
Read moreModeling The Creative Process, Part 2: The Rock Tumbler
As I wrote last week, James Webb Young once described the creative process as using the “production line of the mind” to generate ideas. This metaphor for the creative process is useful because it specifies a mental technique that can be learned. The technique is not esoteric, mysterious, or romantic, but rather consists of a few simple principles and methods that you can train yourself to use in your daily life. Young’s enduring insight is that the “production line of the mind” is the source of all ideas.
Read moreModeling the creative process, part 1: Source Material
As I wrote about at the beginning of the month, one of the books I first went for to begin playing the Feelings Collector in 2021 was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity. Among the books greatest strengths is its empirical depth, much as is the case with Flow. The lives of the creative people surveyed to produce the data on which the book’s argument is based are rich and insightful. There’s a lot of collected and collective wisdom in this book.
Read moreArtist's Dates
Toward the end of 2020, I decided to pick up a copy of “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. “The Artist’s Way” is a celebrated book for reason, it is a powerful guide to enhancing your creativity. In many ways, “The Artist’s Way” led directly to me choosing creative as my Feelings Collector feeling for 2021. In brief, “The Artist’s Way” is a twelve-week program designed to help its readers overcome their creative blocks and to learn to self-actualize through creating art. Cameron has an implicit theory of flow that aligns quite well with much of what I read and studied throughout 2020 and I will certainly be expanding on that in the future.
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