Free Idea Factory

Following posts about aiding the creative process. My old life-drawing teacher made an exercise, whereby the model moved to a new position every 20 seconds. The students had to produce a new image for each pose. She went on to say that if you saw someone jump off a ten story building, the truly confident artist would have drawn them before they hit the ground.
I suggest an excercise , whether artist or writer, sit in a cafe or restaurant where you can see people walking past through the window. Sketch, or write a description phrase, for the next person you see each time you look up from the last - as many people as possible over ten minutes. You should end up with a notebook full of material. An excercise in beating hesitancy and building confidence.

A watch whose dial, instead of being divided into 12 hours that repeat twice, and shows minutes 60 seconds long, is divided into the 26 letters of the roman alphabet, and shows minutes 52 “seconds long” (upper and lower case). No more “one thirty”, instead we can say it’s about “L after C”, or “I’ll be there in a few letters.” or “I have to work until F.”

this idea is based on a few things: Susan G. Wooldridge’s book “Foolsgold, Making Something into Nothing and freeing your creative progress” (Harmony Books, 2007) and also the collage boxes of Joseph Cornell…

take a small box or bag out with you on walkabout. collect stuff that resonates and make a collage box of your own. photograph it. do it daily for a week. go to different parts of town or country.

post the results on a blog and tell us all about it

a vinyl window sticker in a freehand rectangle shape with a colored background done in the colored dots of comic book coloration and the hand lettered text: “Meanwhile…” so that people trapped (by themselves or others) inside and looking out can have a constant reminder that they could and should be out in the world doing.

Put poetry in bottles or little boats and throw into the sea or rivers. Let it find a reader, if ever. There would be something very special and intimate about the relationship between writer and potrntial reader when the work had to survive in this way.

write a short poem and then change it in every way visually and systematically. make it a left-based spaced poem, center it, add spaces, make it vertical. spin it round, set it in motion if you can. i use an old program called microsoft photodraw to do this, but there are others.

Work in your least favorite medium for two weeks, no matter how annoying it may be initially. Again, disequilibrium allows for increased learning and growth, see Exercises in Creativity #1.

-If you paint, take up sculpting
-If you write childrens stories, dive into sociological research
-If you are an actor, take on a character you despise or are indifferent towards
-If you aren’t anything (everyone is something, don’t worry, you can figure it out), consider involving yourself in a creative endeavor, who knows what you’ll discover along the way.

Go out side right now, look up, and draw! You see so many things that you could possibly draw when you just look up into the sky! From buildings to trees the possibilities are endless! I say Draw and Enjoy!

I noticed that Christian Wiman, the current editor of Poetry magazine, has a new book out in stores. How fun would it be to type in all of the poems in that book, and then run a full concordance on the text to extract the complete vocabulary used in it, and then write a few new poems that use only the re-arranged language contained in that book, and then submit those poems to Poetry for consideration.

Was at a reading in an art gallery last night and while checking out their lighting set-up I had an idea for a way to do an art show. Hang the work like normal, but, instead of the normal lighting, the gallery should be as near to total dark as possible. When visitors arrive to view the work, they are given miner’s helmets with forehead flashlights on them. I can picture the beams moving about the gallery, the pieces with more than one viewer lighting up with more light, the show’s overall visibility shifting and changing with the way the viewer’s line of sight changes.