Musing in Marble
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 27, 2009
Quick: name a visual artist whose work stirs you to write!
We had lofty goals to highlight several lesser known visual artists who stir our imagination. Then our work and our families stepped in; sweet but demanding. So, this week we will quickly profile one visual artist from each coast artist whose work inspires us. Europe, Asia, Canada, and Middle America will just have to wait…
California sculptor Bela Bacsci twists classic themes on their head. His creations make us think of questions. In general, we like the immediacy of sculpture. P. feels it is, as a form, active, urgent, tactile and sensual. We agree that it is too bad (though perhaps good for public health in the time of swine flu) that one can’t touch older sculptures-many sculptures simply beg to be touched.
We discovered Basci’s work through the websites of other artists on the Internet. It appears that Basci has connections to both New York and California. Basci is a long-time member of the California Art Club, whose 1997 sculpture in Italian marble entitled “Driver of the Wheel” could spark many stories. Themes like humans becoming one with time and worker becoming one with industry (either positively or negatively) jump to mind. It’s a thought provoking work.
His more sensual piece, “Vessel” (2006) also offers stories. For whom is the female form in his piece a vessel? Does she chose this role or is it thrust on her? Is this her only aspiration? We could go on. Sometimes, when we consider living artists, we wonder what it would be like to sit down with them over a chamomile tea and discuss their vision of their work. But J. wonders if that would ruin all the fun of guessing and creating one’s own interpretation. Are different interpretations one of the best parts of innovative visual art?
So, while we will not be driving to Santa Barbara to buy tea for Bela Bacsci anytime soon, we recommend that you take a peek at ”Driver of the Wheel.” If you look beyond all the beachscapes, the California Art Club website can also introduce you to some interesting CA artists. Perhaps their work will lead you to think of new stories.
Source of the day:
Creative Chefs
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 20, 2009
- In: Art | Cooking | Creativity
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What is the most creative meal that you have ever eaten? Who created that meal? Despite all the hoopla on the Food Network, chefs are often seen as skilled laborers as opposed to artists. We think that a creative meal is a work of art. P. lives in driving range of a restaurant Mecca. Her goal for this week is to chase down a truly creative meal for under fifty dollars…
Inspiration, Downloaded
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 19, 2009
- In: Art | Creativity | Music | St. Germain | Writing
- 2 Comments
Inspiration, Downloaded:
What music gets your neurons firing? Does Trance get your pen moving, or do you stick with classical? When we’re having a blah day, or facing down a case of writer’s block, music inspires us to create. Co-blogger P. spent a little time looking into music and it’s influence on the creative process.
How do we actually listen to music? I’ve got ears, but I’m no E.N.T specialist, so I thought I’d ask some medical folks. A long, rather technical discussion of the auditory cortex ensued. So, to sum up, I’m including a concise (if slightly cheesy) explanation I found in the Harvard Gazette. I once lived near Harvard, and not all the students were as smart as they thought they were (every Ivy league school has those legacies and legends in their own minds), but some of them really, really knew their facts. So… how do we listen to music?
“Your inner ear contains a spiral sheet that the sounds of music pluck like a guitar string. This plucking triggers the firing of brain cells that make up the hearing parts of your brain. At the highest station, the auditory cortex, just above your ears, these firing cells generate the conscious experience of music. Different patterns of firing excite other ensembles of cells, and these associate the sound of music with feelings, thoughts, and past experiences.”
-By William J. Cromie
All right, so my cells get excited. What will excite them to create? Unless you live on Pluto, I’m sure you’ve heard the claims that Mozart can decrease your stress, help you think abstractly, and maybe even make your crawling baby, who still sucks a binky, smarter. I’m a big Mozart fan. I also dig Beethoven. I’ve had experiences where a peaceful melody, maybe a little Vivaldi, calms me on a hectic day. There is some research that classical music may affect brain development and may even open new neural pathways for young children. Some researchers focus on Baroque music in particular, citing it’s possible ability to lower blood pressure and “increase focus. ” This reserach may back up the popular, common sense view that music mellows people out. (Note-some of the studies that supposedly prove these claims about classical music are one time experiments that, while popularized in the print media or on the Web, have not been completely replicated. So, while I can see how they could be true, I don’t endorse them.)
Let’s cut to the chase here. It’s Monday night. My novella is going nowhere. My fingers freeze on the keyboard. The cursor taunts me. What can I download to grease the gears? Lately I find myself drawn to the chameleon St. Germain (Ludovic Navarre, a Frenchmusician). I am a little late in discovering him, but heck, cut me some slack, I was abroad for a few years. Whether you call his music House, jazz, “fusion” (the latest adjective for music, food, and art that resists definition), or “nu jazz,” it gets me going. To me, writing music has to be energetic, driving, but not too intense so as to be distracting. I have always loved Led Zeppelin but I can’t play them and write. A Led Zeppelin song is so innovative and intense that it forces me to stop and listen; it commands my absolute, full attention.
I took an informal poll of some adult friends who create “art,” asking them what music they play for inspiration. (Note-all were over 30 so there are probably cool, young artists on Youtube that we don’t know about yet. )Some of them write stories, some shoot, write ,or edit films, some cook, some design and build structures, some paint a canvas. Here are their suggestions for artists, albums and songs to inspire:
*Peter Gabriel (so true)-from his pop, to his world, to his film scores
*Jazz- in it’s many incarnations (from Charlie Parker to new artists of jazz fusion)
*Classic “R and B” (Marvin Gaye, etc.)
* Gaelic Music
*The “Blue Man Group” albums (whatever you would call them)
*Dvorak
*Classic Buddy Holly
*Pink
*Tori Amos
*Sonic Youth
*The Doors (I’m not a fan. But to each his/her own…)
*David Byrne (or Old Talking Heads)
*Jean-Luc Ponty
*Prokofiev “Romeo and Juliet Suite”
*Stravinsky
*Copland
and of course…
*Beethoven and..
*Mozart!
These are the artists who get the ideas flowing for creative adults whom I know. I am sure that others have their own favorites. Some web searches yielded some cool artists who are new discoveries for me (see Source of the Day). Music can be a catalyst for creation. To me, the adjective “fusion” is so overused now that it is losing it’s meaning, but the right music can help me fuse together a vague musing about an interesting character and a concrete story plot. That’s key. Stories need plots. So I’m grateful for the music that helps me focus.
Source of the day-
http://blog.infomuse.net/2008/03/29/music-for-writing
-P.
(P.S.-So, our new readers, what do you think? Who have we left off the list? 
)
Iraq War Veterans Forging Their Own Creative Outlets
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 16, 2009
Creativity can help make sense of chaos. We have witnesses this in our own lives. Faced with staggering challenges, some returning Iraq War Veterans are also discovering this fact. These veterans are finding their own creative outlets to help them process the sights, noises, smells, and tastes of combat. We recently came across an article describing some of these brave survivors. If anyone reading this knows about other veterans using creativity and art to help them cope, please comment, we’d love to hear about them and their work.
The crisis of combat stress has been in the news this week. Combat stress is a serious issue, and we in no way want to rob it of the spotlight. (Politics is not the main topic of this blog, but we both firmly believe that the current administration should robustly fund V.A. mental health services and augment V.A. serviceswith new, more innovative supports.) Our focus in this blog, however, remains on the strong soldiers who have made it home and are taking care of themselves, day by day, and coping with the challenges of recovering from war injuries and living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Andrew deGrandpre recently wrote an interesting profile of several returning Iraq War veterans who use the arts to help them cope with their injuries and their PTSD. One of us was particularly taken with the description of Marine Sgt. Chris Mandia, an aspiring screenwriter. He took a lot of his pain and wrote it out. The article asserts that Sgt. Mandia uses writing as a “means of making sense of the confusion that clouds combat.” One of us thought about that statement a lot. Though she had never fought in a war, this sentiment felt real to her. One of us noted how this sentence could be changed slightly to say that writing is a ”means of making sense of the confusion of violent crime” or a “means of making sense of the confusion of domestic violence” and it would still ring true. Yes, combat PTSD is unique and horrible. But, as the historic researcher Judith Herman argued in her excellent book Trauma and Recovery, certain aspects of trauma and it’s aftermath can be generalized to other violent situations. Can certain aspects of coping be generalized as well? There is an entire school of treatment, art therapy, that seems to assert that they can.
Please note that we ourselves are not art therapists. We just see ourselves, as well as our friends and clients, using words and images to puzzle out past painful experiences. We wish Sgt. Mandia and all other Iraq (and Afghanistan) war veterans well. We wish that we could afford to buy every returning veteran a new, leather bound blank journal (not a girly diary) so that they could jot down whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Words can be powerful tools. We hope that they are there when the veterans need them.
Source of the day-http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/offduty/travel/military_vetsart_071109w/
What is creativity?
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 13, 2009
- In: Art | Creativity | Writing
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What is creativity? Is creativity merely the action of creating-whether it be a sculpture, a short story, or Slavic-Thai fusion chili? Or is creativity something larger, more basic; is it an instinct?
Some well-known minds weigh in on the subject. I will, of course, add my own two cents…
Let’s begin by nodding at greatness. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.” One could stretch the kernel of her meaning and define creativity as a process of recognizing the truth in a seemingly strange idea. Is that all that creativity means? Is that definition too narrow? Or is that too abstract for you? Let’s look at some more concrete definitions…
“Creativity is marked by the ability or power to create-to bring into existence, to invest with a new form, to produce through imaginative skill, to make or bring into existence something new. ”
-Webster’s Dictionary
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“ The emergence of a novel, relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual.”
-Carl Rodgers, respected psychologist, founder of the self-psychology school
“ The occurrence of a composition which is both new and valuable.”
-Henry Miller
“Any thinking process in which original patterns are formed and expressed.”
-HH Fox, scientist
”It is…fluency , flexibility, originality, and sometimes elaboration.”
-E. Paul Torrance (educator, academic, “creativity investigator,” whatever that means in academia)
”Creative thinking involves imagining familiar things in a new light, digging below the surface to find previously undetected patterns, and finding connections among unrelated phenomena.” -Roger von Oech So, what is creativity? To me, creativity means abandoning my thoughts of what is outside my window in the wet, green grass, pushing past my thoughts of what “should be” outside my window on the freshly-mowed green grass, and embracing my musings of what could be outside my window in the thorny, red grass.
For a pithy look at this subject, read D. Keyser’s “Define Creativity-I Dare You”at…
Source of the Day-
PS-Happily, it looks like a co-writer, J. from Maine, will be joining me on this blog project to better address how creativity and resilience intersect. This should mean more ideas and, eventually, more frequent posts. We are both looking forward to seeing where these ideas lead us…
Creative in 140 Characters?
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 8, 2009
- In: Creativity | Writing
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Is it the really the era of micro-fiction, or is it just a fad? Can you improve a thought by shrinking it down?
I am always looking for new challenges to my creative process; considering new ideas to get the creative juices flowing. Plus, I do love words. New words beguile me. At this moment, I don’t know where my car keys are, but I can repeat exactly a witty, pretty phase I heard on “All Things Considered” three days ago. So I have been wondering what I think of the new trend of writers using Twitter as an outlet for their vision, their precision, and their derision…On the one hand, any outlet, and, particularly, any paying market (even a tiny one), that gives new writers more of a shot at an audience is a wonderful bonus. They’re publishing the “Tweets” of regular folks with a literary flair or clever turn of phrase? Why, that’s positively democratic! There even seem to be a few folks doing it well, like the Hemingway-inspired crew at “Six Word Stories…”
On the other hand, just because something is brief doesn’t make it of good quality. It’s damn difficult to boil a nuanced idea (and, in my opinion, most good stories come from nuanced ideas) down to 140 characters!! The 140 character count maximum even includes punctuation. I took a gander at some of the new markets on Twitter and I really felt that they ran the gamut, from trendy and amateurish (i.e. some English major’s pet project) to clever and intriguing. Whether or not they will have a lasting effect on writing and writer’s markets like Flash Fiction (or short, short stories, often of 500-1,000 words) remains to be seen. To me, Flash Fiction seems to have evolved from a trend and become, basically, it’s own genre. Literary magazines, festivals, and writing contests with cash prizes (YAY! We writers loooove cash prizes! ) all celebrate the intensity of well crafted Flash Fiction.
Right now, Twitter is the hourly craze. But, the gloss of Twitter could fade in 2010. Instant gratification excites. But information overload annoys! I recently perused Twitter, and I made the mistake of “following” Anderson Cooper from CNN (sign, too bad). I was then barraged with information on every possible news lead CNN staff could acquire. Ten points for being thorough. And I never, ever want to see that well-groomed face of his again, thanks!
One Twitter paying market that randomly caught my eye was Tweet The Meat. I don’t often write Horror, but the idea of creating something grisly in 140 characters seemed easier than the task of creating something deep in that minuscule character count….Of course, though, my inner perfectionist found it no easier. I do like that Tweet The Meat suggests “themes” per week to unify their tweets though. In that way, the site becomes more like a thematically unified literary magazine (just unified by bizarre, bloody themes). I read the site for a few days, and then took a stab at the week’ s theme which the editors described as something along the lines of “dripping.” I didn’t end up too happy with my first, clumsy attempt at a macabre mico-story, but I had to meet their deadline to participate, so I sent it in anyway…
“Cerebrospinal fluid is so wet. I am eighty percent water. Even after the surgery that scalpel wielding infiltrator gave my human. That’s why I hit the linoleum with a thwap!”
Silly personifications aside, I find micro-fiction a challenge. Maybe a trend, but still a challenge. And to a writer, a challenge is always a good thing…
Source of the day-http://twitter.com/sixwordstories
Common Themes
Posted by: writeresilience on: May 5, 2009
- In: Creativity
- 1 Comment
What themes bring your scattered ideas and hopes together? What drives you? This past weekend, as the rain trickled down and my spastic Border Collie puppy gnawed the edges of the carpet, I scoured my brain (and my old, coffee stained and dog-eared dictionary) for adjectives. My writing projects and my day jobs seem to have jumped to and fro every five years. I may have had some trouble deciding what to be when I grow up. I still want to help people navigate our exciting, capricious world and have time and energy for my creative pursuits. I still refuse to choose one of these goals over the other. I stroked the puppy’s belly and wondered if my passions are just too disparate. The more I thought about it, though, the more I decided that my two seemingly different goals are linked.
My creative outlets have not just been a pastime, they have been a lifeline. People can be too busy, too self-centered, or just too weak to stand by you. But stories never let you down. And the process of creation, from vague ideas glimpsed while walking the dog in the early morning mist, to words nudged and nursed into phrases, to completed stories e-submitted to publications with a satisfying click, still animates me.
I feel that, in my case, my creativity has played a big role in my ability to cope with the obstacles I have encountered in the karmic lottery. I am not alone. Think of all the visual artists who depicted their pain and their fears. American psychological researchers have been studying the links between imagination and resilience since the 1960s. So my mission, in this space, is to focus twice a week on my creative process and how it keeps me going through life’s challenges, large and small. I also hope to pass on ideas from other writers and professional researchers who explore creativity and resilience. Please join my work in progess, twice a week. Twice a week, at least for the next five years.
Source of the day-Are you in a creative funk? You say you haven’t written/painted/composed/played the jazz flute since you were a kid but want to get back into the creative process? Some fun, creative ideas that make me smile can be found at:
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- writeresilience: Great Ideas!
- ceylanthewriter: You forgot about Disturbed, Niyaz, Tarkan, and Cirque de Soleil! Ceylan
- Dina: apropos of nothing: I recently read Elizabeth Gaskell's "North and South". Not the easiest read during this economic climate, but it's left my bra
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