Tag Archives: Maria Popova

Just a tiny bit excited…..

My darling friend Tory sent me a link yesterday to a talk Maria Popova gave about the combinatorial nature of creativity.  It contains many gems but this really resonates:

…creativity is combinatorial, [in] that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.

Tory Hughes is someone who has contributed so much to the creative output of socollage 15P1 v1 many artists. It is no coincidence that she and another fabulous mixed media artist, Dayle Doroshow, were mentioned in several of the articles in the current edition (Diversity) of The Polymer Arts magazine.  Not just mine.

(Was that the Segue of the Century?)

That’s right. If you look at the collage of pages shown here, you will notice a magenta coloured one headed Exploring Oblique Strategies. THAT’S MINE!!!!  The article is about using Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies to enhance creativity and diversity.  I am so excited to be in this terrific magazine which brings joy, stimulation and delight with every edition, and exceptional joy and delight when I am in it!

Read about Wendy Jorre de St. Jorre, Heather Campbell, Wendy Wallin Mallinow, Ann and Karen Mitchell and other diverse artists.  Be inspired. Be very inspired!

Connection

The regular reader will know that I got greedy and had several Words of The Year and  (here comes another one for those watching!) one of them is connection.  This year I have been so aware of connection at many levels:

image006Connection with my place (like running in the Living Desert and doing lovely walks in Mutawintji NP); connection through my yoga and meditation; connection with friends and family; connection with people I meet who seem to often have just the thing I need to hear or learn….

There has also been connection in the form of teaching, buddying, mentoring and creating. At the moment, the work I am making is connecting ideas that seem quite disparate and I am absorbed with the link between seed pods and reliquaries.  Steve Jobs said Creativity is just connecting things. And Maria Popova in brainpickings writes about the role of connection and creativity here.  She quotes Paul Rand who says, The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection. Imagination begins with intuition, not intellect.

Some of the loveliest connections lately have come from students! Only this weekimage021 two students sent me some real treasures. In response to a conversation about colour, Carol sent these fabulous photos of birds (she didn’t know the source. Ideas anyone?) and after we talked about the importance of creativity in life Clem sent this fabulous quote from Helena Bonham Carter which he displays in his workplace for all to reflect on:

imagesI think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.

I think the pod photo was taken by Cynthia Mooney of this site but I am checking!  Soon I hope to connect properly with our new grand baby. Obviously I will need to wait until after the birth but I will be doing some preparatory connecting this week when I drive over to let it know that grandma is ready now!  At least you are all used to sporadic, irregular blogging.

Here’s a sneak peek at my polymer ponderings on pods and gaus – the Tibetan Buddhist amulet containers:IMG_0050

Life and Death

e1191109ebcdab31b6503debc3cbb179Guess what!? Austin Kleon reads obituaries too.  (Yes, I have mentioned him before!  I loved Steal Like an Artist and meant to write more about it) He describes obituaries as near death experiences for cowards.  I read obituaries. Not the ones of famous people but the ones about the heroism of ordinary people recounted with love by those they leave behind.  I usually cry.  As Kleon says in Show Your Work, they aren’t really about death; they’re about life.  In a wonderful newsletter this week, Maria Popova (Brainpickings) quotes illustrator and author Maira Kalman saying: the sum of every obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble.  I so agree with Kleon who says reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.  For me, verbally acknowledging each morning that all things end, all things change reminds me to not take for granted for one second, the preciousness of life.

Like many people on planes last week I was more nervous than usual. I refrained from sending an email to family from the airport telling them who the authorities should check if anything went wrong.  That would have made them more anxious! (But why would you board a plan for a 9 hour flight with no hand luggage? Travelling light obviously down to an art! And what was that bandage around the hand hiding? Surely not just a wound. Ah, the blessing of a vivid imagination.)

I sensed a collective relaxing of shoulders when we did all finally land. Sheepishlyannaquindlen_shortguide exchanged grins that indicated our slightly embarrassed relief.  I’ve been on planes where the passengers applauded when we landed. This time the relief was not audible, but just as obvious.

Lately the realities of life and death emphasise the value of living rather than existing (and go straight to Brainpickings for more on this. Gosh Brainpickings is good. Have I mentioned that?) I think I’ll buy A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen.  This resonated so powerfully for me:

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes.  It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen…the colour of our kids’ eyes…it is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.  I was reminded of that wonderful paragraph in Toni Jordan’s Additions where she says:

DSCN2559Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn’t when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at a sunset. [Mind you, that can be very lovely!] Life isn’t waiting at the altar or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in a deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. 10 or 12 grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you’re not watching, if you’re not careful, if you don’t capture them and make them COUNT, your could miss it. You could miss your whole life.”

As I was about to board the plane, and seconds before I had to turn off my phone, shots of my grand-child-in-utero, already besottedly adored, came through.  I allowed myself to feel incredibly happy acknowledging how profoundly vulnerable this made me.  I savoured those wonderful moments, cried, showed the man next to me and touched the dear face that appeared on the screen.  Quindlen says:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. [my emphasis! Can’t wait. We do great ears in our family] Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

 

   

Brain Pickings

pbifxlx94sbrainThe magnificent Maria Popova describes herself as an interestingness hunter-gatherer and, in words that I relate to oh so well to, a Sherpa of curiosities. Her website Brainpickings is one of the highlights of my reading week! It is one of the few I actually subscribe to and the newsletter that comes each Sunday provides a week worth of interesting reading and links.  She says,

The core ethos behind Brain Pickings is that creativity is a combinatorial force: It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to culture, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will be.

I loved reading about the seven lessons Maria has learnt in the seven years of reading, writing and living Brain Pickings.

She constantly turns up interesting writings, thoughts and observations on living the creative life and an absolute cracker is here.

She didn’t get me onto Brene but loves her too and that’s a good endorsement in my eyes. Read here where she introduces one of the books that has had a truly profound effect on every single day of my life and how I live it.

She finds fabulous writing about living a meaningful life, the kind of stuff that makes you want to stop reading and go out and live it. So…stop reading, go!