A few musings on the amazingly counter entropic gesture of pulling something into existence from what appears to be nothing… *** I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have […]
Creativity
- Creativity
- ...
Prescient Imaging
The creative process is mysterious, and I actually relish its unwillingness to be quantified and codified. Ongoing attempts to measure and metricize what it is and how it works are reminiscent of the classic image of the bubble under the tablecloth—that pocket of air that you can move around but cannot eradicate or hold in […]
- Creativity
- ...
Going to the Mat To Move Someone
It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
In Search of the Unified Field
Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Picasso I mentioned a book a few posts ago that I wanted to talk about in more depth. David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a very useful “map” through the historical survey of the visual arts. Galenson is an economist, not an art historian, but his passion for art runs […]
- Creativity
- ...
Not the Pipeline, Just the Mule
I find it humbling that my opinion-generating, perpetual judging machine of a mind gets called out over and over again. My assumptions become hardened into fact more rapidly than is healthy for someone who professes to have the “open mind” approach to life. I’m guilty as charged. But the one nice thing about being guilty […]
- Art Making
- ...
Riding the Wave
I have two poet friends, both of them extremely gifted. One, a Midwesterner, has a work ethic a lot like my own. She is focused, driven and very committed to her writing. Her poems are finely honed and crafted through successive revisions. Every word is considered carefully, and you feel that intentionality when you read […]
Meaning and Presence
I found an article in The Independent yesterday that I posted on my filter blog Slow Painting. It has dominated my thinking all day. In a singularly succinct manner, it captures a core set of issues that are at the center of my disaffection with a number of trends in contemporary art. These are some […]
- Creativity
- ...
Seven Metaphors
Wise man and friend D, author of the Joe Felso: Ruminations blog, had a posting this weekend that is so good it can’t be paraphrased. Rather than sending you there (although it would be time well spent since this is just one of many thought-provoking posts), I’ll make it easy and include the full text […]
The Schmooze Factor
One of my favorite bloggers is G, the genius behind Writer Reading. A few days ago she posted an extremely thought-provoking piece called Are Writers Ever Really Loners? that I have been mulling over ever since. She probes the often disruptive relationship between the “solitary” act of writing and the role of interacting with the […]
Black Sand Muse
Another day of rag and bone shopping, of gentle and cautious gestures, of softly silencing the voice of judgment, of speaking in a quiet voice when I want to be screaming. This is my courtship of the muse, I remind myself. The process is a dance of seduction, and success requires great patience and focus. […]