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March 2007 Contents
I.   Bring It On Home
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room, and the Shrink’s Couch
III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading
IV. Creative Links
V. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe

I. Bring It On Home
I’ll bet it’s not only coaches who have problems in their creative work from an inner slave driver. In my case, it’s a background voice that keeps reminding me to focus, to remember what I’m going for. It implicitly keeps the pressure on and makes me feel a bit guilty when I take a creative detour.

Julia Cameron* encourages us to have artist dates to feed our creative souls but I don’t think she meant detours like making an overly complicated Christmas gift for Aunt Maggie or cruising the paint stores for weeks collecting those big paint chips just to repaint your pantry. I’d been a bit torn about using my studio to airbrush some panels to solve a decorating problem in our sunroom. I wanted a clouds-in-the-sky look; thinking this was a detour and feeling guilty, in addition to being a novice at airbrushing, was not helping.

It was during this mild funk that an article about a grad school friend freed me up. I stumbled on an interview in American Craft**  magazine with potter Bennett Bean which had more photos of the house he’d created with wife Cathy Bao Bean than of his work.

To quote the article: ““What this place is about” Bean explains, “is not making a distinction between making houses or pots or gardens. It’s the same sensibility.” Like many visual artists, particularly those who maintain their studios at home, he sees his home as a natural extension of his art. His aesthetic decisions and design solutions are all of a piece. “You make a pot. Then you make a table for it to stand on. So where will it go? Okay, you make a room. Okay, so what else goes in there? And on it goes.””

So this afternoon I’ll be airbrushing away to create clouds in the sky. And because I’ve lightened up about when I’m making “a piece’ and when I’m decorating, I can have fun with them.
*Cameron, Julia. Finding Water. 2006; **American Craft, Oct/Nov pp 48-53.
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II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch
Goleman, Daniel. Social Intelligence. 2006.
On a different note entirely, have you ever gone to a meeting of artists with hopes of inspiration but left in a negative mood that you couldn’t explain? Goleman presents recent research in the new field of social neuroscience to show how mood changes get triggered without our awareness, especially in group situations. It’s all because the small amygdala in the center of our brain transmits the emotional impact of stimuli very quickly but below our conscious awareness (the low road of social intelligence). It is milliseconds later that the same stimuli are scanned through to the forebrain in a conscious, verbal, and more accurate, high-road way. By the time a negative trigger gets processed at a verbal level, you’re already in that amygdala-triggered bad mood. And don’t know why.