Creativity As A Way Of Life:

An artist’s journal.

Below, the Creativity Journal posts for 2024.

Visit here for December 2023 posts.

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. Certainly, he had a gift that set him apart from others. He was the most complete musician imaginable, one who wrote for all instruments in all combinations, and no one has written greater music for the human voice. Still, few people, even those hugely gifted, are capable of the application and focus that Mozart displayed throughout his short life. As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times. . .” 
- Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

www.herondance.org/mozart-beethoven

Visit here for December 2023 Creativity As A Way Of Life posts.

I produce most and write best when I have no schedule at all, when I’m able to wander where whim carries me—both physically, through a city or a countryside, and mentally, in read­ing, talking, scribbling, thinking, whatever. Poems don’t come to me often when solicited. More usually it’s when I turn my back on them, and become absorbed in some­thing that is not a poem—a thing, a creature, a moment, a face, a fantasy, a memory—that an understanding happens between me and that other, an understanding that brings with it its own words. Then I don’t feel I’m making up the poem; rather my pen has to race to keep up with words that seem to be given. I complain about time.
- Galway Kinnell, Walking Down The Stairs

www.herondance.org/galway-kinnell

Visit here for December 2023 Creativity As A Way Of Life posts.

The creative life is a search for freedom — freedom for the wild bird inside that wants to sing. An artist, a writer, a musician, seeks to give that song a life of its own. To set it free. To let it make its own way in the world.

We seek to free ourselves of self-imposed limitations.

Reflections on creative freedom by Robinson Jeffers, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and jazz musician Gary Peacock.

www.herondance.org/creative-freedom

Visit here for December 2023 Creativity As A Way Of Life posts.

The secret of the creative life is often to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We are paid to take risks, to look silly. Some people like racing car drivers are paid to take risks in a more concrete way. We are paid to take risks in an emotional way.
            The film critic is like a medical examiner. He gets the cadaver on the table, he opens it up, and tries to figure out why it died. The filmmaker is like the pregnant mother who is simply trying nurture this thing. You have to keep the medical examiner out of the delivery room because he will get in there and he will kill that baby.
- Paul Schrader interviewed by Terry Gross on the NPR radio program Fresh Air

. . .

Other ideas explored in this post:

  • Creative work is experimental work. It often fails and needs to fail.

  • Art is bound to fail often because it is exploring mysterious subjects that defy understanding.

  • Why an artist has to think quantity over quality.

  • The most unique — and thus important — work is off-putting at first.

  • Don’t judge your creative work right after you complete it.

To read more:

www.herondance.org/quantity-over-quality

Visit here for December 2023 Creativity As A Way Of Life posts.

It is what is left over when everything explainable has been explained that makes a story worth writing and reading. The writer's gaze has to extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm of mystery which is the concern of prophets. . . If a writer believes that the life of a man is and will remain essentially mysterious, what he sees on the surface, or what he understands, will be of interest to him only as it leads him into the experience of mystery itself.
- Flannery O'Connor, Literary Witch, Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1962)

With additional reflections on the essential mystery by Francis Bacon and Einstein.

www.herondance.org/essentially-mysterious

Visit here for December 2023 Creativity As A Way Of Life posts.