Skip to main content

Exercising the creative mind

Exercising the Creative Mind

 One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The creative mind is truly unique.  There is no beginning or end to the possibilities that it can provide.  Images, stories, ideas, concepts, thoughts, are borne from this mind and it can exhaust itself to the point of collapse.  Stands to reason when there is so much of a thought process going on;  a bombardment of everything, constantly.  Nietzsche describes it as chaos.  I'm going to have to agree.  For the creative mind there may never be rest and while it is a precious thing to have, it can be also be destructive.  Withdrawal into this world, all alone can be a common escape, for it is the world that is ours, one that we can only see and one that we can only understand.  This though, is not conducive to long term productivity of the art form and in looking at successful creatives there is one stand alone act that they all employ to serve their craft successfully.  Exercise.
This can be hard to maintain because the body can become so tired when it is in constantly thinking, conjuring up plans and ideas.  When I did a short stint in primary teaching, after teaching in secondary for a while, I took it upon myself to be a little creative in the way that I approached my class.  I used to take my class out every morning before formal teaching for a run or a walk around the oval, twice.  This made the world of difference to the students learning capabilities.  I found the students were calmer, receptive and eager to participate in the curriculum that I had devised.  Therefore their minds became open to new ideas, not only that, but their thinking took on a more systematic structure.  Their ideas could flow.  Anyone in business understands that 'Flow' is what drives the work environment, for without 'flow' there is no effectiveness.  Applicable in the classroom and most certainly applicable to creatives whose minds in many ways never stop.  

Exercise for the creative has to be daily in some form or another.  It allows the mind to stop for a while, re boot, systemise those wonderful thoughts that swirl unabashedly forever, begging to be turned into entities in the physical world as creations for all to be enjoyed.  

It doesn't have to be tedious.  It has to be enjoyable.  I dance, always have, ever since I was a little girl, and I do this at least four times a week in the studio, the rest of the days may not be as strenuous or sweat inducing, but that is ok.  My productivity, flow, creativity has been able to become a better reality, in that my creations are orderly, systemised.  It is such a necessary part for any artist or creative, exercise the physical body in some way and the mind will find a way to make the chaos make sense.  Let the dancing star come out from all the chaos, as Nietzsche so aptly reminds us to do! 








Stella Dimadis
July 2014

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

"Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. "   Corrie Ten Boom Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker, who had helped many Jews escape during the Holocaust, was a prisoner and then a writer.  She held many memories, no doubt, fears; images that would stay forever and haunt her, but they were able to unlock a future for her that she would never have imagined.  Her writing and her boldness initiated her knighthood by the Queen of the Netherlands, The King's College in New York City named a new women's house in her honour, her book "The Hiding Place", was  made into a feature film, twice. Locked away in our computer hard drives are examples of our work and lives that we lock away when our computer sleeps, forgetting about their importance because we are always told to focus on the now, forgetting about our past.  Well, perhaps it is time that we also learn to love our past, regardless of what it was like, so that we can understand what our...
Post a Comment
Read more

Silver Linings Playbook-Cinematography

Cinematography "Photography is truth.  The cinema is truth 24 times per second." Jean-Luc Godard. It comes as no surprise that I made a point of watching 'Silver Linings Playbook', directed by David. O Russell for the one and only  reason that Bradley Cooper is the lead.  I admire his ease and fluidity as an actor in front of the camera, coupled with the control that his eyes muster with each line of dialogue that he delivers.  'Silver Linings Playbook' revolves around Bradley Cooper who plays Pat Solitano, a teacher with Bipolar disorder who has been released from the psychiatric hospital, under the care of his mother, Jacki Weaver and his father, played by Robert De Niro.  He is determined to win back his ex wife, but in the interim meets Tiffany Maxwell, played by Jennifer Lawrence, a recently widowed sex addict who tells him that she will help him get his wife back, providing he enters a dance competition with her.  It is a feel good story by ...
Post a Comment
Read more
  Apocalyptic Art 'This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." T.S Eliot For centuries, artists and creatives alike have depicted the Apocalypse, which is the fantastical, unimaginable end of the world and all life on it.  At some point it is going to happen, maybe about 5 million years away when the sun burns out, so perhaps it is this truth that has artists thinking of what this end may look like.  Since it will happen, down the track. Recently it has felt like humanity was in the midst of it with the advent of Covid, but also with the devastation that climate change has been and is inflicting on the land and people globally.  It is very easy to start to think of the end, grim as that may sound. When I had created yesterday's art piece, even though I wasn't happy with the art work, I was very much intrigued by the colours in the background which reminded me of an apocalyptic feel, vibe.  So today's challenge I set ...
1 comment
Read more