Author: Neera

Public art of Canberra

Neera

Canberra has some weird public art pieces dispersed throughout the territory. But there are a few I like a lot.

This sheep on a chair is a satirical salute to one of Canberra’s early pastoralists—James Ainslie, who came to the region in 1825. A sheep watches while the other one is sitting on an armchair with its legs up, its jacket neatly folded on the side, which reminds you of the politicians.  

Canberra, Australia’s capital, is memorably known as “a good sheep paddock spoiled.”

Another one of my favorites in the city precinct is Bush Pack by Amanda Stuart, a pack of seven bronze dogs in three groups that appear to be running down City Walk. 

In a gully where a creek used to run, three overgrown Casuarina seed pods appear to have dropped out of a grove of Casuarina trees and to be rolling down the grassy slope. At night, the seed pods are lit from within by a gentle fiber optic light. These bronze pods are by the artists Mathew Harding.

Another one of Mathew Harding I like is called Cushion, for apparent reason. People have often seen lounging on this large stainless steel cushion. A poem by Marion Halligan lies on scattered pages on the granite plinth below the cushion to form a tribute to Garema Place.

This bronze and copper sculpture by Keld Moseholm, called ‘On the staircase’ contrasts a series of small human forms with the architectural weight of an oversized staircase. The artwork has a philosophical aspect by reflecting on the effect of reading on the spirit – ‘the more I read, the smaller I feel.

Tour of the Gorman House Arts Centre upgrade works and the official launch of the relocated On The Staircase sculpture.

This relatively new sculpture (commissioned in 2011) recreates an iconic photograph of John Curtin (1885-1945), Australia’s fourteenth Prime Minister (1941-45), and Treasurer Joseph Benedict (Ben) Chifley (1885-1951), who would become Australia’s sixteenth Prime Minister (1945-49). Curtin and Chifley routinely walked along this route to the Provisional (Old) Parliament House from the nearby Kurrajong Hotel – where Labor Members of Parliament generally stayed, while Parliament was sitting. Curtin and Chifley are two of Australia’s most respected Prime Ministers and they were strong supporters of the development of Canberra as the nation’s capital.

This one is by far the best.

Known as The Parcel (by Alex Seton) looks real, but is a carved illusion where an everyday object is transformed into an object of art. The artist has sculpted green and white marble to recreate a package with the creases and dents of a long journey. The contents are yet to be revealed.

More next time…

Deep dive in creativity

Neera

Below are ten things I find worth sharing this week.

  1. This week I explored creativity. From trying to figure out What is creativity, I explored Is being creative means being original, and shared the Seven Principles of Creative Living.
  2. “Creative is not a Noun” post by Austin Kleon is priceless. I recommend that if you do nothing else this week but find an hour to listen to his video you will have the magic formula you are looking for to unleash your creativity.
  3. Did you know that 72% of people have creative insights in showers? Or that trauma has hidden creative properties? 7 Surprising Facts about Creativity reveals how the brain’s creative circuitry holds some unexpected secrets that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
  4. The most impressive post on beloved writer Oliver Sacks’ Creative Process, his never-before-seen manuscripts, brainstorm sheets, and notes on writing, creativity, and the brain.
  5. My deep dive into understanding creativity got scientific with Your Brain on Creativity article on Psychology Today. Check it out, it might be a little heavy reading, but the conclusions or two scientific studies are priceless.
  6. How about this for an everyday story? A humble seven-year-old boy, Jack Berne, started Fiver for a Farmer campaign with his schoolmate with a goal to raise $20,000 for drought-stricken farmers has unexpectedly raised a massive $1 million.
  7. I found this inspiring story of a home cooking blogger who is replacing her lawyer income with a blogging income. Libby Hakim of Cooking with Nana shares how a series of four mini-breakthroughs led to her discovering how to replace her previous job as a lawyer with income from her blog.
  8. What is synaesthesia and what’s it like to have it?
  9. It is so accurate that it is almost freaky. I took this 16 Personalities test and finally found out why I do what I do. Try it, it is free.
  10. The book I am reading and immensely enjoying at the moment is Deep Work.

Seven Principles of Creative Living

Neera

Lawrence G Boldt, a writer, career consultant, and personal coach, gives seven principles for creative living in his book How to Be, Do or Have Anything:

1. Among human beings, creativity is a natural, and not an exceptional, trait. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create.

2. For the individual, personal freedom and self-fulfillment depend upon the conscious expression of his or her innate creative capacities. Without such expression, one will meet with unhappiness and unnecessary limitation.

3. Social and psychological factors may limit or impede an individual’s innate creativity. These factors can be overcome.

4. The creative process follows a definitive pattern and is essentially the same for all outcomes.

5. The creative process is knowable and understandable. It can be taught and learned.

6. The more one creates, the more confident he or she becomes in his or her ability to create.

7. Experience gained in applying the creative process in one area of life can be transferred to other areas.

Is being creative means being original?

Neera

What is being creative mean to you?

If you think a creative is someone who creates something unique out of the blue, then you are as wrong as I was when I didn’t understand creativity.

Creativity is nothing more than a process. A process of creating something. From imagination to reality. From an idea to a tangible thing. We all create something all the time. That should be enough to make us all creatives.

But we don’t feel creative because we don’t think we are creating something ‘original.’ Because the literary definition of creativity is the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something new.”

Most of us get fixed on the idea of being original.

How to be original when everything has been done before? All story plots have been used endlessly, every emotion has been exploited, songs repeat themselves and there is no new way to paint the sky.

We get so obsessed with being original that we stop creating. We get frustrated because we can’t find a new way. All the time we are looking for a completely original way to do things.

This is where we are mistaken.

The true creators know there is nothing new under the sun. The concept has been best explained by Jobs, a genius in creativity. He writes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.“

James Webb Young offered the same point of view many years earlier:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Creativity belongs to the artist in each one of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to ‘fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters, but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together, we are creating—whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, or a day.

“This energy which we call “making” is the relating of parts to make a new whole. The result might be a painting, a symphony, or a building. If the job is done well, the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy—a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, and divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

In this video, How to be Creative, a web series exploring art, internet culture, and people creating it, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson urges people to let go of this romanticized idea of “originality.”

He agrees ideas don’t actually come out of thin air; in your subconscious, you were still processing all these influences from memories, education, experiences, etc.

He also mentions that humans create new ideas by copying, transforming, and combining other ideas.

Artists take existing ideas that nobody would have thought of combining and connecting them; making them work.

So, in nutshell, creativity is nothing more than connecting pre-existing ideas into new ideas.

We all are capable of doing it.

What is creativity?

Neera

If you are going to live a creative life, it is better to understand what creativity is. 

The Oxford dictionary defines creativity as the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something.”

But this definition is in direct contradiction with a much more cited quote from the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

If you need more of an artist’s definition, this one by Pearl S. Buck is quite up to the mark.

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create… so that without the creation of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

Albert O. Hirschman spoke about the elusive nature of creativity.

“Creativity always comes in surprise to us; therefore, we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage in tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

Don Roff validated the fears of many of us with this quote.

“Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.”

Mary Oliver put in words why many of us never lead creative lives.

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

But it was Lady Gaga who put the finger on the pulse of creativity.

“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.”

10 Tips on finding stories in everyday life

Neera

For the last two weeks, I have been talking about everyday stories. Here are my tips on finding stories in your daily lives.

1. Become a collector of stories. You will not only find enjoyment every time you read them but also will learn how to write them. Stories are all around you, in newspapers, magazines, books, TV, internet. Austin Kleon wittily points out that you might be able to write a popular brain book with them.

“Here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pet anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or a narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.”

2. Learn to observe like Martha Sweeny or Jean Georges in my earlier posts: A story that will touch your heart and Evoke the senses with your writing. Both stories are about life’s little moments captured by writers’ keen observations.

3. Talk to people. In shops, at community places, in libraries, or wherever you can find them. Ask specific questions and you will find they are more than willing to tell their stories.

4. Go looking for them, like the one below, which I wrote about once walking through the woods.

“At about two-thirds of the hill, I had a perfect view of the dried Lake George, now covered with brown grass. The tall windmills on the surrounding hills stood as sentries as if guarding the lake’s treasure now that it was bare.  The slop at the back of the hill, from where I was standing, was covered with trees and broken branches. It was new terrain, quite unfamiliar.

The path I was following was covered by yellow leaves shed by nearby trees. A butterfly came and sat on my cheek. I jerked, and it flew away. I should have stood still and felt the touch of its tiny legs. Moments later, a tiny lizard blocked my way. This time, I stood still. It stood there for a moment, looking at me. I held my breath and waited. This was her domain. I was an intruder. I had no right to be there uninvited. She moved her head at an angle, had a final look, and then disappeared under a nearby log. I took it as a sign of acceptance. From that point on, I felt I was part of the landscape, as much as that tiny lizard was.” 

5. Use triggers to access stories in your memory bank. Like the story, my father’s hands triggered.

6. Look for a change in your life—wherever there was a change, there is a story waiting to be told.

7. Interview interesting people. A blogger made a very interesting blog by interviewing women she met in her local shopping center.

8. Talk to old people, they are walking repositories of stories.

A grandchild playing with his nana pointed at her wrinkles and said, ‘They are ugly.’ Nana laughed and said, “Oh no! Each one has a story.” The child hesitated and then shyly pointed at one of them. ‘Tell me about that one.’

9.  Listen to TED talks, subscribe to sites, and read about men and women who inspire you.

“Michelle Obama, a symbol for women, has successfully balanced the needs of her family and herself. Sky-high popularity, comfortable in her skin, now struggling against, not caved into the nation’s expectations. Smart as Eleanor Roosevelt, glamorous as Jacqueline Kennedy and devoted as Nancy Reagan, with pitch-perfect fashion sense, genuine smile, and fierce intelligence, not striving for perfection but by embracing her own authenticity. Every bit of her is saying, I am going to try to be honest, hopefully, funny and open, and share important parts of me with people.“

10. Research them. Every achievement, every invention, and every successful event has a story behind them.