Black ink on paper

Somewhere... 
Cool breezes and calming sea waters lap at the pylons that support your hand-built home. No troubles reside here. All is peaceful for you and your neighbors. Fresh water and natural foods are abundant; you want for nothing and give back more than you take. You are accepted and are an integral part of all flora and fauna; all you are one and perfectly placed - you do not question. Whatever is, is. It is as it should be or already has been.

Your labor is easy and enjoyable. Life is always meaningful. The air you breath is meditation. You have no need to climb that mountain; you climb it if there's a desire to be on a journey not to get to the top. You sail, if you like towards the horizon on the sea only to float on its back and not to arrive somewhere where you're not.

83 Days In The Sun

The French playwright, Romain Rolland wrote, "It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun falls."  If Rolland was referring to hope than every artist should be creating a lot of sunshine during the bleak winters of Chicago. 

According to Current Results the average number of "sunny days" in Chicago, (the total days in a year when the sky is mostly clear including days when clouds cover up to 30% of the sky during daylight hours.) is just 83 days. That's approximately 72% of non-sunny days. Again, according to Current Results if, you include partly sunny days, those that have cloud covering from 40% to 70%  and other days that are mainly overcast, with at least 80% cloud cover, the total average days "with sun" are 189. I'm not buying Current Results' calculations for the total number of days with sun. Especially since they include days where the ski has 80% cloud cover. And even if you do that means there's an average of 176 days without sun per year which equates to 48% of the year. Either way you face it, it's bleak in Chicago a lot of the time and that affects a lot of people in a lot of non-creative ways.

The Mayo Clinic describes Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as, "sapping your energy and making you feel moody." Yep, that's right. Of course, the symptoms they list may look like they align with other conditions but call it whatever you like people here are cranky and complain about the lack of sun a lot. A phycologist friend of mine told me that her non-depressed friends considering becoming patients every year between the months of September and March. 

Last month (January) shined 13 "sunny days' in Chicago and almost drove me and my wife to purchase a $600 light therapy lamp. We opted for a Southwest Airlines' travel special to Santa Fe, NM where they claim to enjoy 283 sunny days per year. We weren't disappointed. The minute we stepped out into New Mexico sun our spirits lifted and so too did the desire to create.

We headed straight to Sante Fe which seemed to have more art museums and 'art' related businesses that I've seen anywhere in the world. The museums are so focused that even in if you're in a rush you can view and take in each of their collections in 60 minutes. With the air so clean, the light so bright, the art so abundant, and the people so warm, I could easily see myself living and creating there. And create I did. That's not to say that I stop painting during the bleak winter months in Chicago but the colors take on well, different colors under a dark gray sky. So opposite to Rolland's above quote I will strive to remember
John Ruskin's, "Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." 

A old and dear actor friend once said to me, "Art is our only hope." He was referring to how art holds a mirror to humanity reflecting the best and worst of all things human. The above quote which caught my eye from a table at the Artists' Cafe, is stenciled in marble and hangs above the entrance way to an old and grand theatre in Chicago. After spending the day at the Art Institute seeing the above was quite fitting.

Filling A Glass With Ice Can Be Very Difficult

Filling a glass with ice seems like a very easy task, right? Grab a handful of cubes and toss em in. That's all it takes, right? Depends. If you're like me and sometimes make things more difficult than they really are, then filling a glass with ice can become very complex. 

Suppose you've interested in knowing how many cubic inches each cube takes up in the glass in order to determine how many cubes you'll need to satiate the thirsts of twenty friends coming over for a dinner party? (You hate waste, even frozen water) And just suppose, that you're really curious to know the the structure of ice and the amount of hydrogen each cube holds? 

You're probably thinking to yourself, "What on earth would you want or need to know that for? Just fill the freakin' glass with ice and if you have any left over, put it in your freakin' freezer until your next party!" And I'd have to agree but it's an example of how something to simple can become so difficult.

In my last post, Up Against The Wall, I described the dread I was feeling about writing a synopsis for my novel. Dreadful, because it was something new and something really important, but it didn't need to be difficult; it just required effort. I took the necessary actions, completed the synopsis and shipped it off to ten literary agents. Low and behold one responded the next day with interest to read the   entire manuscript! I never expected a response at all let alone a positive one. I understand the odds of gaining representation and just completing the synopsis and sending out submissions was satisfaction in themselves. 

The ice in the glass analogy came to me while running today  as many solutions do. "It's just work, it doesn't have to made difficult," I told myself. Now, I just have to remember that as I open my sketch book and stare at a blank piece of drawing paper.

A late addition and related to the above, my wife shared an All Things Considered segment with me, Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning. In it, UCLA Professor James Stigler whose research focuses on understanding processes of teaching and learning says, "I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart," Stigler says, "It's a sign of low ability — people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it, that's our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity." In Eastern cultures,  it's just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle."

Two ways of viewing struggle both of which can help me  accept that actions that may be experienced as a struggle help make me improve and become develop skills.

Up Against The Wall

Up against the wall and nowhere to go except around or through it. 

Recently, I completed my first novel, Birds Like Us, The Pi Phillecroix Story.  I thought that writing 70,000 plus words over ten years was the hard part and then I learned that I a synopsis would be required by some literary agents for submission. Agh...Really? Must I? Come on! Yes, I do if, I want my work to be seriously considered. 

Different agents require different lengths of the synopsis but in general the less the better. I can't imagine how many submissions that agents receive but I'm sure it's a lot and that they truly are looking for their next hot writer that they and only they will represent.

Writing a synopsis, as the experts say, doesn't have to be difficult but it does take time to construct. I've been putting it off for several weeks now and capitulated today when that wall just would not budge. It's actually coming along nicely after I made the commitment to start. Funny, all it took was a commitment to myself to just start and as Jackie Gleason said, "And away we go!"  

The Class That Made it Right

        

Day One Self-Portrait

   

Day Five Self-Portrait

One class can change your perception of everything. That's what happen to me after attending the five day intensive class, Draw From the Right Side of the Brain. The class born from Betty Edwards' book of the same name proclaims that anyone can learn to draw just like anyone can learn to read or write. Like many people, I thought that you were either born with artistic talent or you were not; that artists like van Gogh and Rembrandt were naturals; that it was so much easier for them than people like me who liked drawing but found it too hard to do it right. 

For five consecutive days, eight of us 'non-natural' artists learned to draw by quieting our left brain hemispheres and seeing with our right brains. I won't write about Edwards' theory because I'm not qualified to do so. What I can tell you is, all of us who attended the class claimed up front that we were all very bad drawers or couldn't draw at all but wanted to learn. By the third day we proved what thousands of other attendees had previously learned, that drawing 'good' can be learned.

Pictured above are my two pencil drawn self-portraits; one from the first day of class and the second from the last day. Remarkable! I was and am still amazed at the marked improvement that all of us made in such a short time frame. Was it hard? Yes. Did it take a lot of discipline to stay in my seat and not run screaming from the little art studio that held the class? Hell, yes! (Of course, I now know that from a Neuroscience point of view, that was the left hemisphere talking.) But I stayed and as is always the case, the benefits greatly outweighed the struggle. I am seeing in a different way: my perceptions are enhanced and changed. I can see the entire space; the negative and positive. I can directly apply the lessons learned in the class to all problems applying right brain creative solutions. As Edwards writes, "The larger underlying purpose was always to bring right hemisphere functions into focus and to teach readers how to see in new ways, with hopes that they would discover how to transfer perceptual skills to thinking and problem solving." So now, instead of focusing on the problem I can look around it. I can literally turn the problem upside down just as we did when we drew Picasso's famous drawing of Stravinsky upside down.

The class, taught by Edwards' son, Brian Bomeisler was not cheap but taking into consideration that the class compressed approximately three semesters of art school into five days, I'd say that it was a bargain. If you can't or don't want to attend the intensive class, get one of Edwards' books and start seeing things in an entirely new way. Even if you don't want to draw, you'll learn how to quite that noisy, always talking left brain hemisphere and access more of your right brain where the "natural" creative in all of us lives.

Get Unconscious

I came across John Cleese presenting a talk on "how to be creative". He admitted up front that he had know idea how creativity works and can't explain it. He did, however, go on to explain the magic that comes from our unconscious minds, for within it rest solutions to creative problems and that there are two modes that we can choose when faced with a creative challenge.


If you're anything like me or most people, a blank piece of paper, canvas, or mound of lumpy clay can cause sheer panic. Cleese addressed this when he talked about the importance of accepting that uncomfortable feeling of not having any idea of how to proceed but start we must on that book, painting, sculpture or business plan in spite of the anxiety. He relates that moment when we feel completely lost and stuck to being in a "closed mode" versus the moment we pick up that brush or pen and commit to the "open mode". When we operate from the open mode we allow our imagination to percolate even if we aren't fully aware of what's actually happening. According to Psychology Today, the unconscious mind is the "source for intuition and dreams." This can be very exciting to some and a source of anxiety for others.


Cleese's "modes" are quite interesting, especially since I had the incredible fortune recently to meet Carol Dweck, a Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck wrote the mind changing book Mindset. I found it so intriguing that I finished reading it in two days. 


The premise of Professor Dweck's book is that we have a choice of two mindsets: fixed or growth. A fixed mindset believes that people are born with a fixed amount of intelligence, skills and talent. A growth mindset believes that anything can be learned and mastered with hard work and time invested. (Read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success) Growth mindsets love challenges and don't give up when things get uncomfortable. Even geniuses like Einstein and Picasso had to learn and put a lot of what they learned into practice. If they hadn't we never would have heard of them. Einstein famously said, "I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious."


Both Dweck and Clesse speak to the importance of taking  frequent breaks along with playing and having fun, especially, when faced with the big "C" word, Creativity. With open or growth mindsets the answers will seemingly come when least expected. Wherever they come from, I can say that after reading Professor Dweck's book and watching the Cleese video, I have had a very productive week in spite of the initial uncomfortableness.