Creativity of the heart

Great meeting on April 20. Dr Nahid Mokhtari led our discussion on creativity of the heart. As a research PhD and a well known international lecturerer on creativity, Nahid zeroed in to our sweetspot --- her presentation was so riveting that nobody wanted to be interrupted by food, that's a first. Our previous discussions flirted around the edges of our creativity, Nahid drove a nail into our subject, the creativity of the heart we all share.


Nahid has devoted her life to lecturing and researching about creativity of the heart. So she comes to from a deep committed place. Her presentation and the discussion she inspired was a true gift.


Nahid reinforced why approaching creativity from diverse disciplines is really fun. The subject matter of our art is different but the drive for creative self expression comes from the same place. Nahid took us to that place of creativity and we thank her for such a wonderful treat.

Great meeting last night. It was wonderful to hear how each of us unfolded our creative paths. More to come at the next meeting -- we have important and hilarious work to do. In the meantime I think you will enjoy this poem by Rumi who writes about exactly what we were discussing, it's called 'Unfold Your Myth'.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Soloman cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow on drop.
Now there’s a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he’s wealthy.

But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.


from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

March 9 --- Show and Tell your creative project

Since our group is about the creative process, it would be fun to have a meeting where we focus directly on creativity in a personal, experiential way --- by talking about one of our favorite creative projects. It may be your first or biggest creative product or it could be a creative experience that transformed the way you think -- something concrete yet seminal to your life or in the way you think.

Talk about when it happened, how your saw your creation take form, the excitement of birthing something new and unique. Describe transforming raw materials into an artistic truth, molding working materials into what's seen in the imagination's eye.

Talk about the magic moment when your vision took form -- the gestalt from frustration to bliss. Do you remember that first moment that changed things, when you realized you can do it? Talk about it.

Bring the work that started it all, and hold it in front of the group as you speak. Could be a painting, a poem, a formula, an article, a book...

We get five minutes each, and go around the room to hear of first breakthroughs.

I can't wait to hear from you guys. Your creative gifts are incredible. My breakthrough changed me and set me on a wonderful, different path. I can't wait to hear about your magic moment.

Panoramic views

If you click on the painting above you will find a 360° panorama. This was created using software called 'Photosync' ---- which you can look up on your browser and create your own panoramas. This could be a great way for our painters to show a 360° panorama  of your studio highlighting your favorite paintings.

I created two panoramas of my backyards, both in Colombia and Brookeville. It's fun and painless -- -- you take a series of over- lapping photographs and then use a software package from Microsoft named ICE which stitches the photographs together and exports the result to the Photosync website.  All of this is free and fun to play with.

Glorious meeting at Najwa's studio

What a great time at Najwa's studio. The ambiance and discussion couldn't be better, surrounded by Najwa's and Shakir's beautiful paintings and our group of creative spirited artists. It is fascinating to hear from each other about how we nurture and exercise our art forms. It is all of fascinating, hilarious, striking, and magic hearing how the common creative spirit motivates and inspires us in our diversity of painters, poets, novelists, mathematician, scientist.

Najwa  thank you for a great evening, the food, drink, and discussion could not be better. And thank you for introducing us to your very talented and dear friends Ed and Shakir.  Please see Shakir's stunning work at http://alousiart.com/.

Your delicious Iraqi food and warm Iraqi hospitality were gracious beyond bounds --- wa alaikum salaam.

A poem inspired by Picasso

Mary's recent postings remind me of the important ways that poets are influenced by art.  I offer here the opening poem of my new collection (Red Has No Reason, Plain View Press, 2010) -- it came from my viewing of a sequence of several drawings by Picasso, works that progress from a carefully detailed ink drawing to a sketch of a few lines that, with extreme brevity, also gives us the bull.

     How Did It Come to This?     by JoAnne Growney


     Prints on exhibit walls—
     notions of a bull by Picasso,
     whose clear eye directed a deft hand.
     Careful likeness becomes surreal
     design then sketch
     and in the end
     a few fine lines.
     Poems also we make
     by erasing.

Another Ekphrastic Poem

Picasso's Insomnia After Final Self Portrait

idnight in the emerald garden,
and I long for the moon to drown
me in its shadow, the sky to soothe
with its blackness, for stars to stave off
the unshaven stubble of insomnia,
heavy and brown like mud.

If I could dream, my body would race
backward with the swiftness of the Seine.
I’d dance with a barefoot maiden
in a cornfield, my green forehead
obscured by a wide straw hat.
I’d inhale the apple of her hair,
see the lake’s mirror in her blue eyes.
I’d strut in the willows, limbs nimble
with the greed of youth.

Still awake, I find sleep slow-footed,
dragging its shackles.



Mary L Westoctt

Ghazals

Poetic Form: Ghazal



The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets--and typically no more than fifteen--that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet's signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet's own name or a derivation of its meaning.

Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafiz. In the eighteenth-century, the ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian. Among these poets, Ghalib is the recognized master.

Other languages that adopted the ghazal include Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Hebrew. The German poet and philosopher Goethe experimented with the form, as did the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

PIcasso's Last Self Portrait

A green fawn flees undaunted
by figs or orphan eyes,
hungry for a face fig-green,
stubble awed by angles and lines,
nostrils greedy for tears,
circling. Abiding desire to flee
absinthe, his face spikes blue,
steeple black against the dangling
retina of a moon. Greedy for steeples
and stars, rising in awed angles
and lines, a greedy orphan circles
the One.
 
Mary L. Westcott

This is an ekphrastic poem. I can't copy and paste the portrait...