The issue of risk is absolutely central to being a creative person... I'm a very big believer in starting small and getting feedback from the world and course correcting there. (Source: Michael Ellsberg, The Necessity of Creative Risk Taking | Big Think) If risk-taking is fundamental to creativity as I've repeatedly insisted, then how do we assess what risks are worth taking, how do we to scale ...
Creativity
Tea Time: From Paisley to Procedural Drawing Tool
This morning (if 3-something AM is morning rather than purgatory) sleep abandoned me and I flitted a bit while the most incredible orange orb settled into the Jemez Mountains. Maybe I was moonstruck. Or just lucky to be insomniac, to be witness to the most magnificent moon dance I've spectated in a while. Somewhere, somehow between mugs of tea swirling steam paisleys into the darkness I stumbled ...
Creativity on Tap
The creativity spigot runs cold. It runs hot. And sometimes — the worst of times — it runs not. Better to run cold than not at all, but best when fluctuating between a hot gush and a tepid trickle. Floods of inspiration punctuated with marathons of perspiration. Starts. Finishes. Creativity Caveat Enough with the how of creativity and on to why... Why court the muse? Why seduce and sing and ...
Art is…
Perplexing image, right? I snapped it while wandering in flâneur-fantasyland (i.e. Kensington, London) the other day. It's the crowning detail of a public statue, and it's a bit disturbing, at least from this unusual perspective. And, lest clarification begs, the statue is not in any remote way connected to Edgar Degas. Until today. The words, however, are his. “Art is not what you see, but what ...
Bold Creative Risk
Unfettered by prudence, caution, inhibition. Undaunted by convention or expectation. I have a hunch that many adults — midlife, midcareer, mid marriage, mid mortgage, midway to retirement — grow conscious, subtly at first and then slightly less subtly, creative impulses still linger from way back, dormant instincts to forge something out of nothing. No, that's not exactly right. More alchemy. ...
Freestyle
When song turned to dance thirty years ago my rustic, unplugged, and MTV-free childhood rendered me self-conscious, tense, and generally joyless. This is a self effacing glimpse into a self effacing riff on whistling and dancing. The poem is still rough, but it's coming closer to a reflection on letting go and loosening up. A lyric look at wooing whimsy. The snapshot above is totally ...