commentary

Today’s exercise is “How does your art… taste, feel, smell, sound?” This one’s a little weird. The idea is to engage the creative juices through a non-standard interpretation of the work. Amusingly enough, literalist that I am, I immediately pull up some of my stuff and my imagination starts feeding back what it would feel like to run my hands over it… something that I can never do as that it’s on the computer. The result is surprising. The brain’s an amazing machine. It picked out sense impressions from a hundreds of memories and just put them right in. I don’t think that’s what Ryan’s looking for though. I think he wants abstractions, not concrete sensual experiences.

Today’s is “What Music Moves You”. We’re to find our “power song”, a song, which Ryan describes essentially as causing a kundalini response, though he didn’t use the term. The description though was perfectly familiar to me. I can name several such songs (which I’ll list below the break.)

Ok, now with the rules, which empower  and which limit ? Finding this difficult to some degree. Some are pretty obvious, if they focus on external validation they’re out of my control and therefore limiting. Others though don’t seem to empower or limit, they just seem to be. #7 particularly is sticking for me. It feels limiting… but I’m not sure I can discard it. It’s so core to how I think about art.

So I was surfing back through my inspirational artists and I landed on Ryan Kingslien’s site. He’s offering a free class called the “30 Day Challenge” that appears to be a psychological deconstructor for artistic blocks. While I’m not feeling blocked, I’m not yet where I’d like to be as far as my career goals go. And it’s Ryan. I’ve found his advice useful over the years. So I’m giving it a shot. The class being free also helps make the pill easy to swallow.

The first exercise is a verbal one involving journaling. I’m not a fan of old paper style journals, so I figure I’d just use my blog. I need ten of each of these to unpack my psychology. That in itself seems a bit daunting, but enough. Let’s move.