Pico Iyer: The Joy of Quiet

I really enjoyed reading Pico Iyer's article, The Joy of Quiet, in the New York Times. Ways that I personally find quiet and clarity in my life are early morning solitary 4 mile runs several times a week, making the time to take a 15 minute brisk walk at mid-morning while at work, and very often at least one day of a weekend making a conscious effort to not check email, blogs, and my standard web sites. What are the ways that you find and capture the “Joy of Quiet”?

Take a line for a walk

via communication arts
“Cengage Learning promotes exercise for the creative muscles with Take a line for a walk. Authored by Robin Landa and designed by Seattle’s Modern Dog Design Co., the journal is comprised of mostly blank pages coupled with varied prompts that cue people to respond to whatever creative action—sketch, design, conceive, write—is called for. The author collaborated with designers, artists, architects, and experts in a variety of disciplines to vary the exercises in order to address numerous ways of thinking and creating and to entice all types of students, visual arts (and non-art majors) to think creatively.”
Details can be found here.

Wait. What Was the Question? A Series of Questions for Christopher Simmons

via neenahpaperblog
“The time I take to answer this question I'll never get back . . . Everything we do — create, love, mourn, worry, work, play, and so on — draws from a pool of nanoseconds into which no tributary flows. We can give away our time however we choose — just remember that you're not going to get any of it back.”
— Christopher Simmons


For the next 12 weeks Stefan G. Bucher  chooses questions
from his new book, 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself-Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment and asks some seriously smart and capable men and women for their answers.

Read the interview here, find 344 Questions here.

The Creative Brain On Exercise

via fast company
“For artists, entrepreneurs, and any other driven creators, exercise is a powerful tool in the quest to help transform the persistent uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that accompanies the quest to create from a source of suffering into something less toxic, then potentially even into fuel…”
Read the rest here.

Transcending Fear in the Creative Process

via brain pickings
“ ‘Creativity is like chasing chickens,’ Christoph Niemann once said. But sometimes it can feel like being chased by chickens — giant, angry, menacing chickens. Whether you’re a writer, designer, artist or maker of anything in any medium, you know the creative process can be plagued by fear, often so paralyzing it makes it hard to actually create…”
Insights on fear and creativity from five favorite books on the creative process and the artist’s way can be found here.

Everything is a Remix: The Elements of Creativity

via brainpickings
“…Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix project is one of the most important efforts to illuminate the mechanisms, paradoxes and central principles of creative culture in modern history — an ambitious four-part documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation, reflecting my own deep held belief that creativity is combinatorial….”
Learn more about the Everything is a Remix project here.

Synesthesia’s role in creativity: Pt. 3

via imprint
“…the premise of synesthesia offers a jumping-off point mainly for those creatives who don’t have it…”
Read the rest here.

Quote of the Day

The creative adult is the child who survived.

— U. LeGuin

Newspaper Blackout Poems

via felt and wire

“Austin Kleon has been creating newspaper blackout poems since 2005, shortly after finishing his undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University in Ohio. He was facing writer’s block, when he got the idea to make a blank canvas out of a newspaper. In an interview with PBS News Hour, Kleon says ‘I looked over at the recycle bin next to my desk and thought, “I don’t have any words, and right over there are millions of them.’”

Asked what he does now when he faces writer’s block, he says, “When I’m blocked, I don’t try to force it. I go do something else. I go for walks. Do dishes. Play the guitar. Watch a movie. Read a book. Doodle. Browse Twitter. As long as you show up every day, you can lose a day and still get work done.”

Though the words in the newspaper may not be his originally, the poems are always a reflection of Kleon. He doesn’t just summarize the initial article in a poem. Rather, he focuses on one or two words that really call out to him, and then he creates new meanings from a few already-existing words or letters.”


See more of his work here.

How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me

1 + 1 = 3

via HOW

“I love it when creative people explain how their creativity works. Artist and writer Austin Kleon gave a presentation called How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me yesterday at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, and was kind enough to share the slides.”

See the presentation here.

A+B=C [Atoms+Bits=the neue Craft]

via Adobe Museum of Digital Media

“John Maeda, one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, examines some of the history that connects the worlds of analog creativity and digital creativity. Set in the museum’s freshly constructed auditorium, the lecture is brought to life with interactive projections, animated infographics, video clips, and mini documentaries of various hands-based Rhode Island School of Design workshops, such as glassblowing and letterpress.”

Watch his talk, here.

Creative Roles: The Slow Cooker

Via design feast

A series focused on the lively cast of characters whose roles make the play of Creativity were recently posted. Meet:

The Slow Cooker: “There is always a rush to make things—a desire for the instant gratification that creating can bring. This will likely always be the case, as our world dialogue spins around ‘attention spans shrinking’ and the ‘cost of entry lessening.’ But what if the fast and furious way of making was coupled with a slow and gradual path?”

Read the rest of The Slow Cooker here, and others in the series here.