(Its not about the camera)
(Unleashing your creativity)
(Healthy living via a creative process)
(10 commandments of creativity)
Tomorrow night I will be giving my first talk on creativity. Public speaking on creativity has been a longtime goal of mine and it will be nice to check it off the bucket list. Hopefully if I do my job well it will be the first of many.
This talk has taken on different themes throughout this past year. To give you the short back story of how this “talk” came to be, last year after teaching a photo 101 workshop the conversation veered to my beliefs about the importance of creativity in daily life. This conversation was held after the workshop ended with a small group of people. After the conversation ended I was asked if I could give this same talk next year at the “Health Fair”.
One year later, I will be giving this talk. There will be four running themes: (see above).
Originally the talk was going to be on “faith and creativity”, but at the last minute I was asked to change the title to simply “Creative Photography”. The title change did bother me a little, but truthfully not much. Faith will be a guiding theme blended throughout the talk. And no, it will not be evangelical at all.
Lastly, I will end the talk with a Q&A session. I am guessing I will get a lot of techie questions, that's ok: I will tell you what the best camera to buy. (But you probably won’t like my answer.)
Where: Upper St. Clair Community Building
Free: Open to all
Time: 7pm
Showing posts with label 10 Commandments of Creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 10 Commandments of Creativity. Show all posts
7.13.2011
6.28.2011
Commandments of Creativity (Part 6 of 10)
(See Commandment #1 #2 #3 #4 #5)
These commandments are getting harder and harder to write about as I go along.
I have taken many walks trying to place into words my message. It starts with the idea that few people get to be working artists. Why? Because few people do the work that is necessary to achieve their goal. The easiest example I can think of is building a portfolio. It is not often that a person builds a portfolio, does the work necessary to build that portfolio without the assurance that they will get something in return for their efforts. Money, fame, more work, pat on the butt, whatever it is that motives you to keep on creating. But the problem with creativity is not that it is an act of receiving something, it is an act of giving something. Results should not influence the amount of work that you will do or not do.
This rant brings me to:
Commandment #6.
Do as little harm as possible and be aware of the harm that you do.
What does that have to with creativity? Let me tell you.
It teaches you how to see the world through a different lens to do the work, the creative stuff, that is needed. Too often we walk through life unaware in a dreamless re-hash of what is going on around us.
To notice is to see suffering. To notice is to see grace.
If you live in America or any first-world country it is hard to purchase anything without doing harm to someone. We can not walk through life without causing harm to someone or something. Taking the time to notice the harm that we unintentionally place on each other, either by the products we purchase or the words that we might say, give us a source of creativity.
Creativity is fueled by our feelings, needs and wants. Art is pain, creativity breads suffering. Both of those two lines are spot on. The practice of seeing the world is a practice that can cultivate new ideas, new projects and a new way to bring purpose to your work.
Arts only purpose is to serve. What is your art serving? Is it healing or entertaining or thought-provoking to the viewer?
Do as little harm as possible and be aware of the harm that you do.
Create, connect and grow in body, mind and spirit.
These commandments are getting harder and harder to write about as I go along.
I have taken many walks trying to place into words my message. It starts with the idea that few people get to be working artists. Why? Because few people do the work that is necessary to achieve their goal. The easiest example I can think of is building a portfolio. It is not often that a person builds a portfolio, does the work necessary to build that portfolio without the assurance that they will get something in return for their efforts. Money, fame, more work, pat on the butt, whatever it is that motives you to keep on creating. But the problem with creativity is not that it is an act of receiving something, it is an act of giving something. Results should not influence the amount of work that you will do or not do.
This rant brings me to:
Commandment #6.
Do as little harm as possible and be aware of the harm that you do.
What does that have to with creativity? Let me tell you.
It teaches you how to see the world through a different lens to do the work, the creative stuff, that is needed. Too often we walk through life unaware in a dreamless re-hash of what is going on around us.
To notice is to see suffering. To notice is to see grace.
If you live in America or any first-world country it is hard to purchase anything without doing harm to someone. We can not walk through life without causing harm to someone or something. Taking the time to notice the harm that we unintentionally place on each other, either by the products we purchase or the words that we might say, give us a source of creativity.
Creativity is fueled by our feelings, needs and wants. Art is pain, creativity breads suffering. Both of those two lines are spot on. The practice of seeing the world is a practice that can cultivate new ideas, new projects and a new way to bring purpose to your work.
Arts only purpose is to serve. What is your art serving? Is it healing or entertaining or thought-provoking to the viewer?
Do as little harm as possible and be aware of the harm that you do.
Create, connect and grow in body, mind and spirit.
6.20.2011
Commandments of Creativity (Part 5 of 10)
(See Commandment #1 #2 #3 #4)
Commandment 5. Living your purpose is living your calling.
For as long as I can remember I have been having conversations about faith and creativity. The interest in these subjects seems to be just born into me, not sure why. Some people are crazy about sports. Me? I am crazy about a monk with a paintbrush.
This is the hardest commandment to write about. The topic is too large to only place some tips on a single page, but I’ll try.
Ask yourself "what is my calling?" That is a hard question to answer, lucky you get a lifetime to completely discover the answer. To live fully awake we need to have a starting place to open the doors.
This is where we get stuck. How do I start? Do I need an "epiphany moment"? Do I need change? Yes, yes you do. But it's not as hard as you may think, but you will have to think.
At this point the best correlation is the connection of faith and creativity. This is what I have been building up to with the previous commandments. There are as many levels of development with your faith as there are levels of development with your creativity. The prior commandment are the building blocks to discovering your purpose and calling in life. Commandments 1 through 4 are the tools to get you to your answer.
I am not going to ask you to meditate or journal your way to these answers but they are the fastest track. After conversations about faith and creativity my second most asked about topic is meditating and journaling. It seems that people have a love/hate relationship with them. They wish it could be fluid and natural process, but it never is. The “perfection is found is the process” is too slow for most people to make a real connection. Connection is the key word, not commitment. Here is a tip that I found useful to me: I do not care how bad I am at it, no judgment at all, all I care is that I do it. Thirty seconds or 30 minutes on the mat, I do not care if I do more. A page, a word, a line in my journal, I do not care if I do more. All that I care about is that it is something.
As for your faith, I do not care what or whom you believe in. I do not care what you create. I do not care if you ever make a dime off your work. I do not care if you ever have the pure God moment. I only care that you do something, every day.
With faith you have two choices: either sit in the congregation and accept, or seek for experimental truth. In our creative pursuits we can either be an observer or a creator. The choice is yours.
If you choose the life of sitting in the congregation and observing from the sideline then that is all you get.
We have to de-condition ourselves into discovering our purpose to living our calling. Dreaming out loud and even dreaming quietly to ourselves has been crushed by culture, community and the boxes of time we live in. Life has been divided up into the many boxes of time: work time, family time, personal time, relationship time, running around time. There is no time left to “Do The Work”. To live your purpose and find your calling you have to put in the work.
Jesus and Buddha questioned the status quo of life. Think about that. The two greatest and most enlightened people questioned their place in this world, which lead them to their life calling. It does not have to be this grand of a leap. You do not have to go out into the wilderness for forty days. But you do need to put in the work.
Do not give up on being human.
Do not let the machine think for you.
Do not concern yourself with results, concern yourself with the process.
It’s ok to fail...fail often, fail forward, enjoy the failure.
Opening yourself up to a creative practice is a road map. Opening yourself up to the idea that faith is a creative process in its most divine form is a road map to your answers.
Go do the work. Think about commandments one through four. Your purpose and calling is given to you in those answers. Go discover it. Then share it, and shout it out load on the mountain top.
Living your purpose is living your calling. You will no longer seek, but experience.
Commandment 5. Living your purpose is living your calling.
For as long as I can remember I have been having conversations about faith and creativity. The interest in these subjects seems to be just born into me, not sure why. Some people are crazy about sports. Me? I am crazy about a monk with a paintbrush.
This is the hardest commandment to write about. The topic is too large to only place some tips on a single page, but I’ll try.
Ask yourself "what is my calling?" That is a hard question to answer, lucky you get a lifetime to completely discover the answer. To live fully awake we need to have a starting place to open the doors.
This is where we get stuck. How do I start? Do I need an "epiphany moment"? Do I need change? Yes, yes you do. But it's not as hard as you may think, but you will have to think.
At this point the best correlation is the connection of faith and creativity. This is what I have been building up to with the previous commandments. There are as many levels of development with your faith as there are levels of development with your creativity. The prior commandment are the building blocks to discovering your purpose and calling in life. Commandments 1 through 4 are the tools to get you to your answer.
I am not going to ask you to meditate or journal your way to these answers but they are the fastest track. After conversations about faith and creativity my second most asked about topic is meditating and journaling. It seems that people have a love/hate relationship with them. They wish it could be fluid and natural process, but it never is. The “perfection is found is the process” is too slow for most people to make a real connection. Connection is the key word, not commitment. Here is a tip that I found useful to me: I do not care how bad I am at it, no judgment at all, all I care is that I do it. Thirty seconds or 30 minutes on the mat, I do not care if I do more. A page, a word, a line in my journal, I do not care if I do more. All that I care about is that it is something.
As for your faith, I do not care what or whom you believe in. I do not care what you create. I do not care if you ever make a dime off your work. I do not care if you ever have the pure God moment. I only care that you do something, every day.
With faith you have two choices: either sit in the congregation and accept, or seek for experimental truth. In our creative pursuits we can either be an observer or a creator. The choice is yours.
If you choose the life of sitting in the congregation and observing from the sideline then that is all you get.
We have to de-condition ourselves into discovering our purpose to living our calling. Dreaming out loud and even dreaming quietly to ourselves has been crushed by culture, community and the boxes of time we live in. Life has been divided up into the many boxes of time: work time, family time, personal time, relationship time, running around time. There is no time left to “Do The Work”. To live your purpose and find your calling you have to put in the work.
Jesus and Buddha questioned the status quo of life. Think about that. The two greatest and most enlightened people questioned their place in this world, which lead them to their life calling. It does not have to be this grand of a leap. You do not have to go out into the wilderness for forty days. But you do need to put in the work.
Do not give up on being human.
Do not let the machine think for you.
Do not concern yourself with results, concern yourself with the process.
It’s ok to fail...fail often, fail forward, enjoy the failure.
Opening yourself up to a creative practice is a road map. Opening yourself up to the idea that faith is a creative process in its most divine form is a road map to your answers.
Go do the work. Think about commandments one through four. Your purpose and calling is given to you in those answers. Go discover it. Then share it, and shout it out load on the mountain top.
Living your purpose is living your calling. You will no longer seek, but experience.
4.20.2011
Commandments of Creativity (Part 1 of 10)
Commandment 1. Do Not Give Up On Being (Part 1 of 10)
See complete 10 commandments list (Here)
She taught me one final lesson before she passed: Do not give up on being human.
The second injection went in, her heart stopped. My companion for the past 18yrs passed. I fell to my knees, cried, prayed and gave thanks for the life we spent together. Till we meet again, in the forest of heaven, hiking along the path, you will be missed.
My dog has come to the end of her nature. She lead a great life, a dog-life. She enjoyed everything about being a dog. Walking, running, playing, eating, sleeping, snuggling, protecting. She loved it all, a purist at being pure to her dog-ness.
Final lesson: live your nature. How many of us can say we do this? Do we live our nature, our “human-ness”? What is human-ness anyway? What does it mean to be human?
My answer is found in the the teachings of Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy: living a balanced life of body, mind and spirt in self, culture and nature. Simply put, a life of purpose, effort and happiness. That has been my pondering question as of late. Do I live this way and do we as a culture live like this?
This new way of thinking and questioning arose from teaching people about photography, which lead to conversations about creativity. Teaching creativity to others is hard (if not impossible) but giving advice on the creative process is far easier. Follow your heart, listen to your mind, trial and error, failure is a good thing, enjoy the task, perfection is found in the process not the outcome, and finally, enjoy your results.
This is where I feel we as a society have fallen short. We no longer ache to be human. We want (if not need) results with no concern or interest in the how, what and where of the process. Is that being human?
Much of being human is already being done for us. No need to think, Google does that for us. Why be curious? Have a question? Type it in the box and we accept the answer. Why exercise? The need to exercise has been handed over to big pharma. Why work the body when a pill can do it all for you? What need is left for the body? When is the last time that you felt soil, walked on the earth barefoot in the grass? If we can sit and stare at a screen it seems our bodies are doing all that’s left in it’s job...the bare minimum of living. Is our spirit dead? Not faith or belief, but the spirit that guides us internally throughout our life. We are people of congregation, we listen, sit and repeat, but we have no practice.
Ok, I know this is moving in a morose direction, I have not given up on humanity. What I am questioning is: what is left for us humans to do?
My answer is to create...anything. That is our purpose: to create. Why? God gave us empty space and everything is provided for us to fill it up. I love the story of creation vs evolution. My favorite part is that we, humanity, were placed here last. After all the fruit was placed on the trees and the vegetables have grown out the ground, after the clean water ran down hill from the mountain tops, Earth-Gaia-God gave us life. Creativity is the greatest gift to humanity. I suggest that we can only do three things in the images of God: love, forgive and create.
Before my dog passed she taught me this by the way she lived her life. A dog’s life of purpose is to love, have effort to explore and enjoy the happiness of a belly rub.
1993 - 2011 Kiani.
Magnificent and loving friend
See complete 10 commandments list (Here)
She taught me one final lesson before she passed: Do not give up on being human.
The second injection went in, her heart stopped. My companion for the past 18yrs passed. I fell to my knees, cried, prayed and gave thanks for the life we spent together. Till we meet again, in the forest of heaven, hiking along the path, you will be missed.
My dog has come to the end of her nature. She lead a great life, a dog-life. She enjoyed everything about being a dog. Walking, running, playing, eating, sleeping, snuggling, protecting. She loved it all, a purist at being pure to her dog-ness.
Final lesson: live your nature. How many of us can say we do this? Do we live our nature, our “human-ness”? What is human-ness anyway? What does it mean to be human?
My answer is found in the the teachings of Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy: living a balanced life of body, mind and spirt in self, culture and nature. Simply put, a life of purpose, effort and happiness. That has been my pondering question as of late. Do I live this way and do we as a culture live like this?
This new way of thinking and questioning arose from teaching people about photography, which lead to conversations about creativity. Teaching creativity to others is hard (if not impossible) but giving advice on the creative process is far easier. Follow your heart, listen to your mind, trial and error, failure is a good thing, enjoy the task, perfection is found in the process not the outcome, and finally, enjoy your results.
This is where I feel we as a society have fallen short. We no longer ache to be human. We want (if not need) results with no concern or interest in the how, what and where of the process. Is that being human?
Much of being human is already being done for us. No need to think, Google does that for us. Why be curious? Have a question? Type it in the box and we accept the answer. Why exercise? The need to exercise has been handed over to big pharma. Why work the body when a pill can do it all for you? What need is left for the body? When is the last time that you felt soil, walked on the earth barefoot in the grass? If we can sit and stare at a screen it seems our bodies are doing all that’s left in it’s job...the bare minimum of living. Is our spirit dead? Not faith or belief, but the spirit that guides us internally throughout our life. We are people of congregation, we listen, sit and repeat, but we have no practice.
Ok, I know this is moving in a morose direction, I have not given up on humanity. What I am questioning is: what is left for us humans to do?
My answer is to create...anything. That is our purpose: to create. Why? God gave us empty space and everything is provided for us to fill it up. I love the story of creation vs evolution. My favorite part is that we, humanity, were placed here last. After all the fruit was placed on the trees and the vegetables have grown out the ground, after the clean water ran down hill from the mountain tops, Earth-Gaia-God gave us life. Creativity is the greatest gift to humanity. I suggest that we can only do three things in the images of God: love, forgive and create.
Before my dog passed she taught me this by the way she lived her life. A dog’s life of purpose is to love, have effort to explore and enjoy the happiness of a belly rub.
1993 - 2011 Kiani.Magnificent and loving friend
4.05.2011
10 Commandments of Creativity
Forgive me Moses....This is my top 10 list for unleashing creativity. These 10 commandments will be my speaking points for my talk on "Faith & Creativity” later this summer. Also during part two of my workshop, which focuses on composition, I will be discussing these points at the end of the class to sum up the whole of creating a photograph.
1. Do not give up on being human.
2. Do not let the machine think for you.
3. Do not concern yourself with results, concern yourself with the process.
4. It’s ok to fail...fail often, fail forward, enjoy the failure.
5. Living your purpose is living your calling.
6. Do as little harm as possible. Be aware of the harm that you do.
7. True-Metaphor; arts only purpose is to serve.
8. Create something new daily, anything...
9. Share it!
There is no #10...it's up to you. Go.
Over the next couple of weeks I will be writing blog posts on each commandment to fill in the details. Stay with me on the journey...it should be interesting.
1. Do not give up on being human.
2. Do not let the machine think for you.
3. Do not concern yourself with results, concern yourself with the process.
4. It’s ok to fail...fail often, fail forward, enjoy the failure.
5. Living your purpose is living your calling.
6. Do as little harm as possible. Be aware of the harm that you do.
7. True-Metaphor; arts only purpose is to serve.
8. Create something new daily, anything...
9. Share it!
There is no #10...it's up to you. Go.
Over the next couple of weeks I will be writing blog posts on each commandment to fill in the details. Stay with me on the journey...it should be interesting.
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