Courageously Creative

Be more creative in your own way

Creating

Creating

Does Your Life Come with a SOUNDTRACK?

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Riverside Park

Do you pair music with exercising, driving, or creating? Seeking a new song to play on my iPod while running along Riverside Park, I tried New York State of Mind by Billy Joel. It’s a near match with references to the Hudson River and Riverside and will make a perfect pairing someday when my pace slows down. What perfect pairs have you come up with?

Sometimes music and venues are logical mates:  Gamelon +Bali or Buffet + the Islands, but other combinations like Patsy Cline + New Delhi,   or Jack Johnson + Borneo  are like peanut butter and bananas – meaningless to most people but stuck together for me.  You must have some unusual pairs joined by strange events too. Continuing to listen to Joel’s Greatest Hits, I heard Piano Man as I passed the train piers and Big Shot near the boat basin before turning around as Scenes from an Italian Restaurant played.  These songs carried me back to childhood summers listening to A.M. radio.  Does your life come with a soundtrack? Do you add new songs or do you continue to listen to your favorite 45s?

Songs bring back memories and jog our imagination and many people use music to set a mood and provide inspiration when they create. Music itself can be a compliment to a piece. Dance and film are linked to music but what about cooking or painting? When you play music while creating, did you ever consider linking the particular songs to what you make? Try playing the song during a meal you serve or while displaying a painting to set a mood and help others fully appreciate your intent?  Everything is better with the right music.

At the end of my run, my iPod suddenly became silent and dark. Using all the king’s horseman, I was unable to bring it back to life –  maybe Mr. Joel was right and the good really do die young.

Oceans of Creativity: Are there Limits?

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Cloudy days end with spectacular sunsets

Giving the impression that our oceans are limitless, we see waves roll endlessly into shore. World Ocean Day today reminds us that our limited resource affects our climate and food supply. Have you noticed that your creativity at times seems limitless but other times feels bounded.

 

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me,” described Sir Isaac Newton.

Newtons First Law says: “Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.” Does this apply to creative energy too?

By exercising your creative talents; do you generate more capacity to create? It seems that people who create often have diverse interests and create in many different fields.

Do you find that on days spent sitting on a plane or in front of a computer, energy gets stored up and afterwards, you have the urge to do some exercise. Likewise on active days, an evening jog is the last thing you need. Similarly, on days full of routine tasks, do you feel more creative at night? And after a full day of solving interpersonal problems, and being innovative, do you have any creative sparks left to light the evening?

After a long time paddling through the waves, you get stronger but also at some point get tired. What do you think, does being creative bring more creativity? And are there limits? How can we sustain our oceans? And how do you sustain your creativity?


No Children Were Harmed in The Making of This Mother’s Day Card

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Made by hand or by foot?

We all did it in preschool, some of us in camp, but when was the last time that you made a greeting card by hand?

My mom always encouraged my creativity and whatever I made, she always said something overwhelmingly positive and always uses the word “BEAUTIFUL!” As a child, her praise was so loud that while many other kids became discouraged away from art by criticism, I was insulated.

Everyone has only one mom but you can send more than one card. Every year I made Mother’s day cards for my mom, wife, mother-in-law and grandmother. My favorite was a collaboration (pictured) with my son when he was only one month old. Pouring a set of washable finger paints on a tinfoil palette, I used his miniature foot as a stamp. He was not pleased but not harmed either.

Making Mother’s day cards is the one time of year that I paint flowers. One year, when I was living in Tribeca, I found some tulips growing in Hudson River Park. As I was painting them a class of toddlers came by and their teacher said that the children planted the flowers from seeds. The kids were happy to see me painting their subjects, and being all experienced watercolor artists and card makers themselves, we had a sophisticated discussion about techniques.

Mother’s day is this Sunday and there is still time to make a card. You don’t need anything fancy. Get a sheet of paper, fold it into four and draw, paint or paste something that you think your recipient will appreciate. Then, just write something nice on the inside. In today’s world of e-cards, don’t be surprised if your real paper card ends up hanging in a frame. Beware that once you start making cards, you raise the bar for next year.

What memorable cards have you received or what were your favorite cards you made?

Perfectly Off Balance

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balanced

Small sailboat provides balance

When something is off balance, you notice right away: too much coriander in the curry, the picture hanging over the fireplace is crooked, or the volume in the left speaker is too low. You adjust and like fixing a wobbly table, you mentally stack sugar packets under a leg to set things right.

We learned to balance our seesaws, bicycles and check books but sometimes balance doesn’t have to mean equal. Look at the photograph and use your finger to cover the sailboat in the upper left corner. Without that tiny speck of white, the much more massive plants and flowers look off balance.

On a recent trip to the British Virgin Islands, I heard a surf instructor tell his student: “balance is not always gained by standing in the middle of the board.” Shortly later, someone handed me a Zen card with the words:

“The center is not always the point of balance”

And all of a sudden a lot of things made sense. Achieving balance does not require equal, opposite or symmetrical forces. Leverage can be used to balance the small with the large. Sometimes one cute habanero pepper can balance an entire pot of gumbo or a holiday weekend can balance a five day work week.

Equilibrium spans many disciplines but for art – shapes, colors and lines are arranged to produce a whole that is harmonious and pleasing. Talking about balance got Henri Matisse in big trouble when he said: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” The critics banished him for creating “decorations” instead of serious artwork. Who would want some of those decorations now?

Sometimes we just have to step away from the middle to find our true balance. What do you think?

Is One Night in Bangkok Enough? Using the Rule of 10 to Double Your Experience

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TravelogOne reason we travel is to gain inspiration. We take in the sights and smells, clear our minds, and begin to see things differently – But we are all short on time, so how long does it really take to absorb our surroundings?  And does anyone really need to spend more than one night in Bangkok? To determine the answer for yourself, I’ll give you my secret formula.

Travel is unpredictable. I’m probably the only person to have ever woken up one morning without knowing that by the end of the day, I would be going to sleep 6,000 miles away in New Zealand. Even though I left Auckland the next morning, I still remember my first impressions.  Have you found that when you visit a town for a night or two and keep your eyes open, you can get a real sense for a place that you never would have from any other way? What do you remember from some of your shortest visits?

In order to double your understanding beyond your initial impressions, try to stick around for ten days, meet some local people, and get immersed in some kind of activity. I’ve learned more about the Caribbean people from trying to get a flooded underwater camera repaired at the harbor than I ever did from other travelers on a dive boat.  What events have caused you to learn something unexpected from spending 10 days in a foreign location? The rule of ten follows and another doubling of knowledge comes after the first 100 days -think about the last time you moved to a new home, did it take about three months to get mostly settled?

If you are logarithms enthusiast, you may appreciate the name I gave to this phenomenon “the Log of Travel,” which states: To double the value of your initial experience, you need to increase the duration of your stay by 10.

As the moss begins to grow, there are fewer novelties and it takes longer to get much of a gain. The next doubling  takes about three years, and may involve  finding a job, making some friends, and subscribing to the local paper before we can reach another plateau. After that, I have not tested this on mice, but I suspect the next doubling  will probably take three decades. Maybe this is the amount of time it takes to truly master your craft too. To truly get inspired, talk to a centenarian, but that’s another story.

Everyone says to travel to gain new inspirations – but few think about the effect of the length of their stay. Please double check my math and comment about how travel has inspired you!

Stepped on a Pop-Tart?

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Searching for the lost shaker of salt

On a friend’s junk somewhere in the South China Sea, Margaritaville was playing and Jimmy Buffet was singing the line: “stepped on a pop-top.” Some of the younger guys on the boat were wondering, how could anyone step on a pop-tart? Did a frosted raspberry tart fly out of the toaster?

Those kids happened to be drinking TsingTaos and the very strange coincidence was that the cans must have come from an old bottling line since they actually had pop-tops. When was the last time you wedged your finger under the aluminum ring to pry off one of those tabs – and hopefully you didn’t toss it on the ground but “put litter in its place” or did you try to crochet with them?

Well, no sooner did I explain what pop-tops were, and how we had to watch for them when walking barefoot on the beach, when a young woman limped up to us in pain with one embedded in her heel. Pop–tops may not be around much anymore but some things don’t change.

A week later, Blondie performed at a fund raising gala, but before she could sing “Call Me,” she had to explained  to the young people: “what a phone booth was.” When was the last time you saw a phone booth? This started to become a theme – it was quaint to see Sting in Macau singing “if the Russians love their children too,” long after the cold war ended and now that we’re all practically family – conversely, Rod Steward and Harry Connick Jr., singing about love seem timeless and how could the Black Eyes Peas Elephunk ever be dated. Walt Disney said “Fantasy, if it’s really convincing can’t become dated for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.”

Furthering an idea from an earlier post: “Some songs hold up because they remind us of yesterday, but most of these songs hold up because they still remind us of today. When we create we make references to our surroundings. The moment we mention any form of technology or current event, our work gets a large purple date stamp – does anyone besides election or immigration officials in developing nations still use rubber stamps and ink pads?

When you create, is it your intention to make a historical record? Does adding contemporary references either make obsolete or immortalize what you make? Do you sense fleeting moments and want to capture them? And are we even conscious of the choices we make of what we include in our songs, paintings, stories or what we decide to add to our photo albums?  Or what is your favorite song with lyrics that are out of date??