Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts

Friday, July 3, 2009

Transformation 34


I just finished this piece, which I have been struggling with for some time. I have no idea why; it seems pretty simple and straightforward. Sometimes I think I can become too analytical, nit-picking and agonizing over every little decision. It can be difficult to just let go and be in the moment of creating. When I worry too much about the result ("Don't mess up!", as one of my professors told me), I just can't seem to get out of my own way. I always tell my students that making mistakes is nothing to fear, as long as we learn something from it. Words of wisdom, indeed. Remember: it's the process, not the product; it's the process, not the product...

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Gardening

I apologize for neglecting my blog for so long, but I've been too busy with my regular springtime activity, i.e. gardening. I love my flower garden, and consider planting and playing in the dirt to be a wonderful act of creativity. A garden is truly a living work of art.

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.
- Scott Adams



I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
- Claude Monet

Take thy plastic spade,
It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants,
They are thy colours.
~William Mason, The English Garden, 1782



I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. ~John Erskine

Creativity is our true nature; blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a
process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming
of a flower at the end of a slender green stem.
- Julia Cameron



Don't underestimate the therapeutic value of gardening. It's the one area where
we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of art.
Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from nature,
has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of beauty
and a joy for ever.
- Geoff Hamilton, Paradise Gardens



"The secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all
the details of daily life, and in elevating them to art."
- William Morris

Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is
the immersion of the hands in the earth, that
ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing
the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
- Margaret Attwood



"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
~ Rachel Carson

"Nothing is more the child of art than a garden."
-- Sir Walter Scott