Saturday, October 22, 2011

Tips for Accessing your Creative Spirit

Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking makes for a fine companion to Lawrence Staples’ The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness. If you are looking to tap into your own creative spirit, both of these fine publications will help.


Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking
by David Bayles and Ted Orland
ISBN 978-0961454739. Trade Paperback, 122 pages

What is your art really about?
Where is it going?
What stands in the way of getting there?

These are questions that matter, questions that recur at each stage of artistic development - and they are the source for this volume of wonderfully incisive commentary.

Art and Fear explores the way art is created, and the reasons it often does not get created, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.


The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness by Lawrence H. Staples.
ISBN 9780981034447 (ISBN 10: 0981034446) Index, Biblio, 100 pp., 2009.

Who we most deeply are is mirrored in our artistic work. Our need for mirroring simultaneously attracts us to and repels us from our creative callings and relationships. It is one of life's great dilemmas.

Artist's block and lover's block flow from the same pool. Often, we fear deeply the very thing needed to create original art, to experience intimate relationships and to live authentic lives: we are frightened by the impulse to be fully revealed to ourselves, and to others, as this most often entails exposing the unacceptable shadowy aspects of our humanity and risking rejection.

Mirrors in all their manifold guises permit us to safely see and experience ourselves in reflection and become better acquainted with the rejected, ostracized aspects of our personalities. Creative work is one of the few places where we can truly express and witness lost aspects of our authentic selves.

Within us a treasure beckons. This is what we spend our lives pursuing. What slows and distracts us is not the object we long for, but where we search. To find this precious gem, we must eventually return to our own creative spirits.

A few of the topics explored in THE CREATIVE SOUL include:
  • THE CREATIVE INSTINCT 
  • OUR UNIQUE IDENTITY 
  • SOME ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY 
  • SOME PREREQUISITES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS 
  • GIVING VOICE TO THE MANY LIVES WITHIN 
  • DREAMS AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION AS TRIGGERS TO CREATIVITY 
  • CREATIVITY AND INDEPENDENCE 
  • ART AND THE QUEST FOR WHOLENESS 
  • THERAPY AS ART 
  • FEAR OF SELF-REVELATION BLOCKS CREATIVITY 
  • INTIMACY AND CREATIVITY 
  • CREATIVITY, GUILT, AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT 
  • CREATIVITY AND LONELINESS
The Creative Soul, along with many other worthy publications can be purchased at the Fisher King Press online bookstore.

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