creative process: the art of feedback

Deuce thinking about artist portfolios

Although an artist often works in isolation, there may be some benefit to stepping out of the sometimes lonely world of creative work to share what’s cooking.  On a couple of levels, this time-out for sharing in-process stuff can be a shot in the arm.  There is some additional motivation, some energy, some impetus lent to the project when we are trying to get a little something ready to show.  Granted we are trying to put some unfinished work out there, we nevertheless want to polish up, solidify as best we can our work at its current stage of development.  The comments we receive restore our sense of community, remind us that we are not alone, that there is an interested world out there.  As importantly, we may receive important feedback with respect to technical or esthetic considerations in our project, which can keep us on track, or put us on a better track.

These time-outs for sharing, in the thick of our own creative process, are also opportunities to offer feedback on the creative work of others.  “Do unto others . . .”  as they say.  We might consider, as we offer up some comments of our own, just how we can best frame our thoughts for the benefit of the other guy.  Especially when we are critical, some care needs to be taken to create a very positive context for that critique, if we have a sincere hope that our concern will touch in a productive way.

Lolita was excited this morning to see that Deuce had posted another article at the Audio Sparks for Art website’s music for art blog.  Here is the link. http://audiosparksforart.com/music-for-monster-art/ She thought it might be worth sharing here an example of Deuce’s thoughtful, yet critical style.

spark on!

midisparks

 

Creative Cycle: Pressure to Produce

Lolita, our mature yet still ravishing Composer of Art for Music, is definitely the competitive type.  Suggest to her that she may not be keeping up productively, or creatively, with her colleagues, and you light a fire best admired from a safe distance.  She has learned to tap into this powerful source of motivation.  But benefiting from the sagacity of Deuce the Spaniel Muse, she has also learned to temper that competititve drive and spirit so it does not devour her.

Part of what Lolita values in her daily process is the connection to creative thought, and thereby with the Creator, and the translation of that thought, step by baby step, into physical, concrete expression.  Like the best meat stews that Deuce creates, the magic comes from the hour of simmering.  Their is no rushing a good stew, and in important ways there is no rushing good art.

Nevertheless, allowing ourselves the simple satisfaction of having engaged, once more, in that day’s wrestling match, and having in fact moved our project forward a bit – giving ourselves that daily pat, on the back proves to be more difficult than expected.

Why is that?

Well – to be sure – if you are starving and relying on the sale of your next painting, and that next painting is still in process – well – admittedly – acknowledging a good day’s work versus a ready for sale project is something of a challenge.  Sometimes there is an element of momentum – we have generated excitement about our work, our website, our blog – and maintaining that excitement probably involves at least in part producing timely a steady stream of new work.  As a composer, Lolita is part of an online community of composers.  She sees in that community not just talent – but truly prolific talent.  Not only are these guys posting awesome stuff, but they are posting a lot of stuff.  She wants, she needs, to be one of the players.  So the ego kicks in – she should be able to produce like that also.  The ego is a real driver, putting on the pressure from the inside while a certain amount of community pressure is felt from outside – all of which is a drumbeat pounding: “Produce more, and better, and NOW!”

Each of us, of course, needs to monitor how these internal and external pressures bear upon our creative work – for the better or not.  Some of us thrive on competition and realize our best work in a competitive environment. Some of us do our best work when it grows out of the balance we work to achieve in our lives.  Most of us are some combination of the above and other drivers.

Find your motivations and your drivers.  Understand how your creative clock ticks.  Be sensitive to the conditions which foster your best work.  Recognize that occasionally producing your best work may take back seat to external demands for faster project turnarounds.  Tuning in this way to the externals and internals may prove a powerful recipe for effective engagement in your daily creative process.

spark on

midisparks

 

creative process: ready for the answer

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”  Our Chinese proverb suggests that problem solving is not only about wrestling with the complexities of the issue at hand, but also wrestling internally to identify the personal adjustments and preparations necessary to effectively engage in the process.  And as we grow in creative life, in our consciousness of attachment in a unique way as artists with the Creator, we become more sensitive, more aware, that each day brings a readiness to look at a particular issue – to walk the stepwise or random path necessary to reach some problem’s answer.

What does that process look like?  More often than not, of course, it starts with an articulation of the problem.  What exactly are we struggling with?  What exactly are we trying to achieve?

Once we have articulated the problem, we ask ourselves, “What is the very first thing needed to get at a solution?”  This goes back to the readiness point in the first paragraph.  Readiness is a combination of  motivation and ability to honestly and carefully evaluate what the very first step might be to solving the problem.  That very first step may not be complicated, but it may be time consuming.  In other words, it is as likely as not that a significant challenge we are facing will not resolve simply because we put a clear mind to it for a few days.  What that clear mind applied for a few days might achieve is the correct identification of a first step.  But that first step might take months or years to complete.

An example.   www.audiosparksforart.com associates audio clips with visual art.  For the 3-4 years that our Composer of Music for Art has been chipping away at this site, she has used the site host’s media player for each picture, which really looks pretty awful.  It was clear that she needed to incorporate some original HTML5 to make the audio presentation slick.  Somehow, that notion of learning HTML was pretty daunting.  Although she had some Basic programming as a little girl, she just did not want to get involved in learning a programming language at this point.  That is why she chose a website building platform to develop her site, namely webs.com.

Ultimately, a rather pressing concern arose that opened a door for her to solve the audio presentation problem.  That concern related to making the art posted on her website “copy proof”.  Without an ability to offer artists this reassurance, she could not hope to build content for the site.  She was definitely motivated to dig into this problem.  What she discovered is that webs.com does provide a fairly flexible platform for entering original HTML5.  And it turns out that there is plenty of code out there in cyberspace if you research enough.  All she needed to do was find the code and master the ability to plug it in to her website.

This went well.  The code was not complicated and required only a bit of customization.  With this success under her belt the heat had been turned up on her simmering stew of readiness to fix the audio situation. Finally, with the completion recently of a composition project, the decks had been cleared and she could devote her mornings and nights to researching the code available to slick up the audio.

We are always challenged to see the dark cloud or the silver lining, to view a half-empty or half-full cup, to focus miserably on what we don’t have or to feel thankful for all that we are given.  You are full of energy today, full of hope, focus and readiness for the special gifts and blessings coming your way today.  Your Creator needs you as a partner in his Work, and he is giving you the special tools, the special insights you need to smash through a critical roadblock today.  Open your eyes, see the challenge before you, feel that readiness for it, pick up the tools and get to work!

Spark on!

midisparks

 

Creative Cycle: Early Stages

We have a general idea of what we want to do.  In this case, our Composer of Art for Music is determined to make her blog a more user friendly, enjoyable experience.  All she knows at the outset is that the theme she is using, or the manner in which she is using the theme, is not acceptable.  She hates that all the content is in one middle column, and that the user needs to scroll endlessly to see anything other than the actual day’s post.  She knows what she hates but she does not know what she wants.

Her initial response to this design dilemma is avoidance.  She would rather write, build content, optimize content, and put off redesigning the visual appearance of her blog to a later date.  But as the days grind into weeks, as she returns day in and day out to a blog which she does not enjoy viewing, her creative soul slowly pushes her into the initially painful process of new learning.

Why, we wonder, is this initial leap into new learning such an effort?  Our lady contemplates this question for a little while.  For her, it has to do with the need for instant gratification.  At the onset of new learning, she realizes, she is about as far from a solution to her problem as she can get, and consequently about as far from realizing any creative satisfaction from a solution, in this case to improvement of her blog site.

In her infinite wisdom, and as a result of experience, she does realize that every journey ultimately requires a first step.  She realizes that learning informs personal growth, artistic growth.  The artist who does not cultivate technique, learn more about the physical worlds and worlds of ideas which she tries to illuminate, is the artist that soon ceases to produce, or continues to produce the same work over and over.

This happy reminder that ongoing learning is essential to her survival as a vital artist provides a bit of motivation for our Composer to set out exploring the variety of themes and theme options available to her.  And low and behold, once she has taken that leap into the new world of themes and theme options, her mind begins to sort things out.  She identifies the widgets that are critical to her, she identifies the functionality that is important to her, she envisions the kind of content she wants to share, and how she wants to share it.

For each of us that cares to grow, especially to grow artistically, engaging in the learning process is like breathing in and out, it is essential to remaining vital in our creative work.  And more often than not, at the outset of new work, be it a new sculpture, or a new design for your blog, you will find a way to engage in some exploration, some new learning to inform your new work.

This is a moment in the early stage of your creative cycle which is rich in discovery.  You are planting new seeds in your creative garden.  You are assuring a rich new harvest of creative work and of sharing to, and deeply moving, an ever growing group of fans.

spark on!

midisparks

 

Creative Process: Fear of Feedback

Soliciting feedback takes COURAGE.  After all, you may not like the answer to your question “What do you think?”.  It might be bad news, hard to swallow opinions, bitter reality checks.  But be strong!  First of all, if you disagree and choose to ignore, for whatever reason, comments or criticism, of course that is your right.  Bottom line, you are determined to continue, to grow, to refine,  and this process can’t happen in a vacuum.  We all “sharpen” one another.  We are limited in our ability to self-assess.  There are a lot of smart people out there, with a lot different kinds of “intelligences”.  We sell ourselves short if we don’t tap into all of that.

In fact, a lot of our mundane existence, the routines and contacts with the world in our day to day life, can serve as very important feedback.  We can take lessons from daily experience and use this learning to sharpen our creative process.  If we are still holding the day job, we practice to maintain focus in a gentle, energy preserving way.  We seek to maximize productivity with a minimum expenditure of energy.  And we are motivated in this regard by the need for energy for creative production.

We have opportunities to learn how we interact socially – how to motivate and be motivated, how to be diplomatic, how to self efface when necessary, how to assert in a winning way.  This kind of feedback on social effectiveness is critical to our efforts to promote ourselves and our work.

When you view the process of soliciting feedback as an integral component of your overall creative process, and when you view mundane daily experience as natural feedback relevant to your creative life, you can enjoy a sense of unity which allows a graceful flow through your day in a positive state of mind to those  points in the day when you actively put pen to paper, brush to canvas.  You can understand soliciting and experiencing feedback as a form of self-nurture, an important process to enable your continued growth as an artist.

Spark on!

midisparks

 

Creative Process: Organization

Our Composer of Music for Art is taking advantage of her manageable hangover this morning to take stock a bit.  And that taking stock seems to be drawing her into some basic organizing.

Having created a body of over 70 blog posts, most of which have gone unread, our Lady has decided to finally think a little about optimizing her wordpress site.  This led to some review about basic definitions of “category” and “tags”.  It led to facing up to the reality that her understanding of these terms was exactly backwards.  Categories are the chapters.  Tags are the “back of the book” index entries.  The categories are the searchable terms.   The tags, on the other hand, serve to gather up all posts which contain the tag word or subject.

The concept of our Girl’s blog is to illuminate aspects of Creative Life, Artistic Personality, Creative Process, in ways which are inspirational, motivational.

Initially, she developed a plethora of categories.  Ultimately she refined her categories to the following:

Artistic growth

Artistic Personality

Creative Cycle

Creative Life

Creative Process

She then eliminated subcategories, and began assigning them, instead, as tags, to particular posts.  These tags include:

isolation, commitment, purpose, feedback, inspiration, learning, technique, channeling, self destructive, collaboration, creative destruction, creative thought, organization, problem solving

She looks forward to elucidating the various categories and tags for her readers.  She looks forward to making the site more attractive, more useful, to building a community of thinkers on Creative Life and Process.

midisparks

 

creative process: problem solving

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”  Our Chinese proverb suggests that problem solving is not only about wrestling with the complexities of the issue at hand, but also wrestling internally to identify the personal adjustments and preparations necessary to effectively engage in the process.  And as we grow in creative life, in our consciousness of attachment in a unique way as artists with the Creator, we become more sensitive, more aware, that each day brings a readiness to look at a particular issue – to walk the stepwise or random path necessary to reach some problem’s answer.

What does that process look like?  More often than not, of course, it starts with an articulation of the problem.  What exactly are we struggling with?  What exactly are we trying to achieve?

Once we have articulated the problem, we ask ourselves, “What is the very first thing needed to get at a solution?”  This goes back to the readiness point in the first paragraph.  Readiness is a combination of  motivation and ability to honestly and carefully evaluate what the very first step might be to solving the problem.  That very first step may not be complicated, but it may be time consuming.  In other words, it is as likely as not that a significant challenge we are facing will not resolve simply because we put a clear mind to it for a few days.  What that clear mind applied for a few days might achieve is the correct identification of a first step.  But that first step might take months or years to complete.

An example.   www.midisparks.com associates audio clips with visual art.  For the 3-4 years that our Composer of Music for Art has been chipping away at this site, she has used the site host’s media player for each picture, which really looks pretty awful.  It was clear that she needed to incorporate some original HTML5 to make the audio presentation slick.  Somehow, that notion of learning HTML was pretty daunting.  Although she had some Basic programming as a little girl, she just did not want to get involved in learning a programming language at this point.  That is why she chose a website building platform to develop her site, namely webs.com.

Ultimately, a rather pressing concern arose that opened a door for her to solve the audio presentation problem.  That concern related to making the art posted on her website “copy proof”.  Without an ability to offer artists this reassurance, she could not hope to build content for the site.  She was definitely motivated to dig into this problem.  What she discovered is that webs.com does provide a fairly flexible platform for entering original HTML5.  And it turns out that there is plenty of code out there in cyberspace if you research enough.  All she needed to do was find the code and master the ability to plug it in to her website.

This went well.  The code was not complicated and required only a bit of customization.  With this success under her belt the heat had been turned up on her simmering stew of readiness to fix the audio situation. Finally, with the completion recently of a composition project, the decks had been cleared and she could devote her mornings and nights to researching the code available to slick up the audio.

We are always challenged to see the dark cloud or the silver lining, to view a half-empty or half-full cup, to focus miserably on what we don’t have or to feel thankful for all that we are given.  You are full of energy today, full of hope, focus and readiness for the special gifts and blessings coming your way today.  Your Creator needs you as a partner in his Work, and he is giving you the special tools, the special insights you need to smash through a critical roadblock today.  Open your eyes, see the challenge before you, feel that readiness for it, pick up the tools and get to work!

Spark on!

midisparks

 

Creative Cycle: Pressure and Production

Lolita, our mature yet still ravishing Composer of Art for Music, is definitely the competitive type.  Suggest to her that she may not be keeping up productively, or creatively, with her colleagues, and you light a fire best admired from a safe distance.  She has learned to tap into this powerful source of motivation.  But benefiting from the sagacity of Deuce the Spaniel Muse, she has also learned to temper that competititve drive and spirit so it does not devour her.

Part of what Lolita values in her daily process is the connection to creative thought, and thereby with the Creator, and the translation of that thought, step by baby step, into physical, concrete expression.  Like the best meat stews that Deuce creates, the magic comes from the hour of simmering.  Their is no rushing a good stew, and in important ways there is no rushing good art.

Nevertheless, allowing ourselves the simple satisfaction of having engaged, once more, in that day’s wrestling match, and having in fact moved our project forward a bit – giving ourselves that daily pat, on the back proves to be more difficult than expected.

Why is that?

Well – to be sure – if you are starving and relying on the sale of your next painting, and that next painting is still in process – well – admittedly – acknowledging a good day’s work versus a ready for sale project is something of a challenge.  Sometimes there is an element of momentum – we have generated excitement about our work, our website, our blog – and maintaining that excitement probably involves at least in part producing timely a steady stream of new work.  As a composer, Lolita is part of an online community of composers.  She sees in that community not just talent – but truly prolific talent.  Not only are these guys posting awesome stuff, but they are posting a lot of stuff.  She wants, she needs, to be one of the players.  So the ego kicks in – she should be able to produce like that also.  The ego is a real driver, putting on the pressure from the inside while a certain amount of community pressure is felt from outside – all of which is a drumbeat pounding: “Produce more, and better, and NOW!”

Each of us, of course, needs to monitor how these internal and external pressures bear upon our creative work – for the better or not.  Some of us thrive on competition and realize our best work in a competitive environment. Some of us do our best work when it grows out of the balance we work to achieve in our lives.  Most of us are some combination of the above and other drivers.

Find your motivations and your drivers.  Understand how your creative clock ticks.  Be sensitive to the conditions which foster your best work.  Recognize that occasionally producing your best work may take back seat to external demands for faster project turnarounds.  Tuning in this way to the externals and internals may prove a powerful recipe for effective engagement in your daily creative process.

spark on

midisparks