July 2009 Contents
I. Emotional Bookmarking* and Creative Decisions
II. Summer Reading
III. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe

I. Emotional Bookmarking* and Creative Decisions
Wonder of wonders. In the midst of having summer company, I made a great progress on a mixed media piece I’m working on. It did set me wondering.

The back story is that I’ve created a family tradition of nephews and nieces visiting the area spending some time playing in my studio. As a creativity coach, I’ve had to work through layers of my own opinions about this; they range from considering more protective boundaries for my workspace to sharing my studio more generously. Now that I’m up to greatnephews and greatnieces, I’ve become pretty comfortable with a wide range of options and have accepted that I probably won’t make much design progress when I decide to share the studio.

So it was a great surprise to move my current piece from its separate elements to the ready-to-assemble stage during the recent visit of a greatnephew. He started out drawing while I was tweaking the shapes of various elements for a background I’d already worked out. As we talked about other tools in the studio, he thought he’d like to tie-dye some of his t-shirts. I briefly juggled how I would switch gears to bring out the right supplies, agreed, and mentally let go of hoping for more progress on my piece.

It turns out that this young man (he’s 18) is very good with his hands and has a natural awareness of where spills and spatters are most likely. It didn’t take much attention from me once I’d shown him the basic steps. I turned back to my piece,  placing elements on their background. But, of course, there were pretty frequent shifts of attention to the dying taking place a few feet away. I’d look over just to check and, also, responded when he was appreciating some neat combination of colors that was emerging.

Each time I’d turn back to my piece, I saw it with fresh eyes and I reacted to a placement problem at an instant gut level. I might get a few words with that awareness, but they were not very articulate, more on the order of “oops, the blue one is way off.” If I’d had my more normal situation of sustained work, I might have taken the time to analyze what was wrong each time, but since I was jumping in and out of the process, I was way quicker than usual moving the element until my gut relaxed. Again, not much articulate logic was going on here, maybe just a phrase like “ah, that’s better.”

 Now, none of this process is very new to me (and probably not to you either!). What was new for me was this acceleration of the composition process by what I’d normally call an interruption. I was pondering this idea of using interruptions intentionally to keep me working more at this gut level, when another “interruption” from the family visit helped out.

“We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.” Gonzales, L. Deep Survival, p. 6.

Several of the guys in the clan were talking about a book on survival skills in extreme sports.* I took a look as it was getting passed around, and saw that the author had coined a term for how people use their instantaneous gut judgment for good or ill in survival situations: emotional bookmarking. He described various types of bodily memory that come into play to quickly access past experience; it matched perfectly for me what had been happening in my studio. I was facing my composition and using my gut feelings to make quick aesthetic decisions based on my body-based past experience of moving collage elements around with “good” or “bad” outcomes.

I have worked with many of my creativity coaching clients on how to accommodate summer visitors and maintain their creative momentum. I had worked through many of my own decisions as well. Never before had I encountered such an unexpected gift of momentum, plus a clarity of how “emotional bookmarking” can support my work.
*Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival. 2003. See below.
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“Survival is an act of art and craftsmanship. It involves the order of craft and the spontaneous invention of art.” Gonzales, L. Deep Survival. p. 209-210 .

II. Summer Reading.
Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival. Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. 2003.
The author has woven a beautifully written analysis of those who go out into nature and how their neurological wiring leads to “good” and “bad” outcomes. His concepts, such as the “emotional bookmarking” above, can help humans understand their decisions whether they are engaged with nature or making art.

Robinson, Ken. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. 2009.
This widely experienced consultant to both corporations and artists has many stories of people finding and embracing their life’s work once they click with a particular medium. His examples, many of them from first-hand interviews, are arranged to demonstrate and pull together much of other folks’ current work on creativity and how it works.

Gruber, Michael. The Forgery of Venus. 2008. An engaging novel inviting the reader into the details of an oil painter’s odd career with many twists and turns. Fun summer reading about the world of art forgery with a redeeming dash of education about the work of Velazquez.  
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