7 minutes of brilliant creative inspiration!

On a trip to New York over the weekend I was tipped off by a friend to the Dance on Camera Shorts Program at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I am a dance lover, but never knew about the emerging art of dance captured on film. That’s where the appeal of attending the program began.

There were 12 excellent films in the program, but one completely blew me away (and garnered the loudest applause from the packed audience). Boris Seewald’s short film, Momentum stole the show.

I was excited to find the film online and I am thrilled to be able to share it with you.

The film is 7 minutes of pure genius. It’s a great film creation, but the reason it excites me so much is the story it tells (and shows!) about how creativity can start from a moment as small and insignificant as picking up a tortilla chip. Really. Incredibly.

I hope I've peaked your interest, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

(I think you'll also enjoy seeing more of Boris Seewald’s work, which I was glad to experience.)

Great energy at the January workshop

What a treat is was to join with another amazing group of participants for my Igniting Your Creative Core workshop yesterday. We did more Intuitive Painting and writing than ever, including individual and group projects. And, in addition to sharing a beautiful and healthy lunch, we shared experiences, insights and ideas that are related to creativity and our lives — including many hopes and dreams. The group has already reached out to continue the conversation and to provide support for building more creativity into day-to-day life after the workshop. 

Here some photos from the day: the participants in the midst of working on a project, and one of the incredible pieces of art done in the morning.

I am looking forward to my next workshop on February 23rd, and I will soon schedule workshops for April and May. I’d be delighted to see you at one of them!

New creative adventures

I belong to a small group of creative friends that meets monthly (or as close to monthly as our busy lives allow). We’re now into our 6th year together, and the ways we spend our time has changed over time as we’ve changed.

Each member (there are 4 of us) does professional work related to creativity. One sold her ad agency and has been a full time (and very successful) artist for over a decade. One is an architect with a thriving practice. One recently gave up teaching in an MBA program at a prestigious university to be a full-time artist — something she was just starting to explore when we first formed the group. I transitioned from my design firm to my current creative coaching practice. Our journey together has been marvelous.

This year we have paired up differently to plan new creative adventures for each of our 3-hour meetings. For this week's meeting, we each sent in a piece of music we loved, and were told to come with an assortment of materials to share for making sculptures — something totally new for me. Here’s a photo of one of the three sculptures I made. It was created while listening to Tigerlily by Natalie Merchant.

I’m also including a photo of a collage I made at our session in December. I'd helped to make the plan for the collage project. Each person started by picking a topic from those in a hat (the topic for my collage was “pain”). To make the collages, we selected images from a stack I’d saved from my design firm days — wonderful samples provided by printers and paper merchants — and applied them to wooden panels. As at our sculpture session, everyone's collages were marvelous and quite different.

If you’d like to learn more about the experiences my group has had, or how you might start a similar group, get in touch. 

Wire and light — a magic combination

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While on a wonderful holiday trip to Paris, we spent the afternoon at the Pompidou Center and nearly wore out our feet visiting the museum's amazing, enormous contemporary collections. Alexander Calder has always been a favorite, and when I came upon this wire sculpture, Josephine Baker IV, vers 1928, I was simply delighted. Next to the piece, an old movie clip was playing of Baker in performance. The sculpture, together with its shadow, creates a sense of Baker's dance moves and distinctive personality that we saw in the old film. 

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Among the many other delights we came upon was a large work by Alighiero Boetti, an Italian artist, whose dramatic and varied work we first experienced in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 2012. The scale, color and detail in Tutti (Everything) are fantastic. The 1987 work is part of a series that was embroidered by Afghan refugees in Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of their own country. Boetti entrusted the execution of his design to the embroiderers, distributing 84 colors and a finite amount of thread for each.

And, seeing a marvelous portrait by Henri Matisse, Fillette au chat noir (1910), that was new to us, was a treat as well. Matisse was a master of color and this portrait totally charmed us.