I’m starting a new project that will be part of this blog for the foreseeable future, to narrate and interpret my favorite chapter of a book that has fascinated me for the past year or so. There are a number of different threads of interest that this project ties together.
Read moreI haven't been feeling creative much lately
I intended only to take a short break from blogging, sculpting, and playing the Feelings Collector, but it turns out I really needed the distance, so I took more of it. I found myself in a place where I was losing enthusiasm for most of my pursuits, which happens from time to time. I’m glad I noticed what was happening and acted on it.
But, it took a bit more effort to get back in the saddle than I had thought it would. Part of my lack of interest in spending my evenings fully engaged in one thing or another was that I began to exert myself more during the workday and it left me more drained than I had anticipated. Either way, I spent quite a few evenings careening from one thing to another, not able to focus for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Naturally, after a week of such evenings, I began to panic. Eventually, I remembered that browsing Julia Cameron’s books helped me out in similar situations earlier in the year and set myself down to read.
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 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.
Read moreExploring creativity through sculpture
In doing an exercise from “The Artist’s Way” late last year, I identified a latent interest that I had never pursued: sculpture. I suppose it originated in my often-felt feeling on archaeological digs that excavation was a bit like sculpting, but with earth.
Read more