Over the past several months while preparing new pieces for a gallery art show, I learned a valuable lesson regarding how stress can affect creativity. I had a limited amount of time to come up with creative designs, and there was the unknown of how long it would take to actually complete a piece once the idea was conceived. I knew the deadline for completing the work but it was the other unknown factors that sent me into a tailspin.
The tailspin set the scene for the problem at hand: CREATIVE BLOCK. If you are a creative person of any kind, you know the agony I'm talking about. The ideas just won't flow. There is a vast emptiness in the chasm of ideas and thoughts that would otherwise come collectively to the surface in the form of a new creation. You sit idly in your studio, playing around with an old, unfinished piece, hoping something will click, and you'll be moving in a forward direction. But no, the days go by and as they pass with no productivity, panic sets in and you realize that what you are enduring is "block".
It's a vicious cycle. The inability to create plus fear equals creative block. FEAR is the operative word here. Without fear in the equation, we can concentrate on purposefully relaxing so that creativity can flow. I discovered the power of removing fear from the equation after doing a Deepak Chopra meditation called Manifesting True Success. I found that when I visualized creative energy flowing into my head and out through my hands and intentionally relaxing, that ideas began to come to me. I wrote the words, NO FEAR, NO PRESSURE, NO ANXIETY on paper and stuck it on the wall in a highly visible place in the studio. It worked. I learned that it was important to be confident, to deeply KNOW that I would complete a body of work that met my expectations and that it would be completed on time. And, it was and I did.
www.piedmontcraftsmen.com Threads and Timbers beginning July 3, 2015 (above image:Three Dreams)
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