One of my favorite bloggers posted the rules he gives to his writing students. These excellent guidelines for writers (and readers) are applicable as well to those of us who work in the visual arts. I have extracted from his posting below, but you can read the entire piece on his blog, Joe Felso: Ruminations. […]
Creativity
Rhizomatics
I spent last week at the Ad:Tech interactive advertising and technology conference in San Francisco talking to people about where they see the Web heading and what life online is going to look like in a few more years. The range of future views I heard was, as expected, diverse. While I do not have […]
In the Tangents
I have often used the phrase, “somewhere between what is hidden and what is seen” as a way to describe what pulls me in and inspires. So I was enchanted when a young Irish student visiting a show of my work in West County Cork turned to me and said, “I think I know what […]
Explorations in Landscape and Art
As I continue to explore how Aboriginal art expresses a deep and complex relationship to the land, I am also interested in how the art/land relationship shows up in our Western cultural tradition. Ross Bleckner, typically described as an American abstract painter, takes a lot of his imagery from his experience with nature. From an […]
Subliminal Knowledge
The Twins, Castor and Pollux Dorothea Rockburne I think the reason I paint, or that I do whatever I do, is to deal with (I don’t think of it as unconscious) subliminal knowledge. And I do think that one has knowledge about things that haven’t occured yet, and I try to work for those kinds […]
Crossing the Line from Personal to Public
The following comment was made by Elatia Harris in response to the posting Bathed in Milk and Honey: Could it be that the “bathed in milk and honey moment” or better still the “eye-painting moment” for a work of art in the West is the moment it is exhibited before a public? We long so […]
Metonymy
I traveled to the center of Australia with the hope that I could step deeper into understanding why I have such a powerful attraction to aboriginal art. For 15 years I have been studying these works, often only in reproduction, and my attachment has only deepened with time. While in Alice Springs, I must have […]
Grumpy, but with a Purpose
Jing Zhou, an associate professor of management at Rice University, has researched how grumpy people are more creative problem solvers. “It’s a departure from the general management philosophy that a positive mood leads to creative problem-solving,” said Zhou. A mood of contentment doesn’t fit with creativity. So bad moods can spark creativity, says the experts. […]
Zen Bits
In the case of a Zen artist, there is then no artistic reflection. The work of art springs “out of emptiness” and is transferred in a flash, by a few brush strokes, to paper. It is not a “representation of” anything, but rather it is the subject itself, existing as light, as art, in a […]
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Keeping Your Head Down
Do not depend on the hope of results…you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to that you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results […]