"day 49: creativity block" by Jessica <3's you! on Flickr

I was exploring some of the groups on Flickr.com that feature the work of Christians. Some if the work is really amazing… some of it is really cheesy.

One of the things that I love about Flickr (and have been missing since my camera broke) is the interaction of the artistic community.  There’s a sort of esprit des corps among the participants (especially in the groups) that allows for encouraging words, honest critique and artistic development.

My photography improved measurably when I was participating in the discussion regularly.

But the format also allows broad room for one of the most rewarding and challenging creative endeavors:

Experimenting.

Left to my own devices, I like to do the same thing again and again.  There are two specific locations near my home in Denver that I really enjoy shooting. One is a hilltop park with views of the Continental Divide. The other is a small chapel adjacent to a mountain retreat near Rocky Mountain National Park.

Experimentation does not come naturally to me, but in these two locations (where I have already shot the most obvious images) I find myself looking for new angles, different perspectives and unusual compositions. In this case, my familiarity with the subject has given me the opportunity to experiment.

I’ve seen this at work in other artistic areas as well.

The choreographer that I am working with on Godspell has, on several occasions, tried out moves that she can “see being really cool” in her head. Most of the time, it works brilliantly… Other times: not so much..

I’ve known directors that would be nervous about any level of experimentation, but I love it. And I LOVE the way she goes about it.  One time, she even expressed the nature of the experiment out loud…

“Let’s try this and see if it works.”

While this particular young lady comes to the table with a broad understand of dance and choreography, as well as years of experience as a dancer, she knows that there is pure awesomeness lying just outside the realm of what she knows. She also understands that the only way to get at that awesomeness is to risk trying a move that is untested.

When leaders in a project can have this experimental approach, it invites collaboration, creativity and risk-taking from the entire team. I can’t wait until I get the opportunity to see the cast take this process to the parables in the show’s script.

So, the encouragement is to risk an experiment… You never know what beauty you might discover that was just beyond your conscious grasp.

What kinds of successes (or spectacular wrecks) have you experiences with your artistic experiments?

It takes more time and purposefulness to develop a good habit (like going to the gym) than to develop a bad habit (like eating a whole bag of chips in front of the TV)…

Maybe you experience the same struggle: the inertia of the status quo makes forming new, better habits hard… it’s work… and when I’m honest with myself, I don’t really want to do the work…

And here’s the circular logic that I get tangled up in:

Cultivating discipline relies on forming better habits and forming better habits is an exercise in cultivating discipline…

A few tips that I’ve gleaned from the www:

1. The 21-Day Rule… Everybody is different and some research in the UK has indicated that there may even be people who are “habit-resistant,” but the average person will form a new habit by repeating the desired behavior for 21 days.

2. It’s OK to Get Help… There is a reason that Alcoholics Anonymous is successful… It relies heavily on the esprit de corps (“spirit of the group”) to help group members form new habits, relationships and coping skills. Having a workout partner or Bible study group can make forming a new habit more challenging and more fun.

3. Attitude is Everything… Optimistic people are 4 times more likely to achieve their goals. If you are a generally pessimistic person (you will know this is you because you like to describe yourself as “a realist”) then your first goal should be to discipline yourself toward positive thinking. It won’t make your rich, beautiful or thin overnight, but it will open your heart to the possibility of substantial changes.

4. Remind Yourself… If I decide today that I’m going to drink 8 glasses of water everyday, I have got to remember to do it TOMORROW… Forgetting my goals is a real problem… Write it down, tape it to your bathroom mirror, or the fridge, or that bag of Oreos… Re-commit every time you see it… Decide everyday to do it again.

5. Suck it up… Sometimes, you need to just get to work… because nobody pays you to believe in the power of your dreams. Sorry to sound harsh, but some of the most pivotal times in my life have been those moments when someone cared enough to kick me in the butt…

You might find this website helpful: Habit Watcher helps you track your progress toward multiple goals…

What habits are you trying to make? or break? What tools have helped you?

NEXT in this series: Suck It Up…

The view from here...

For a Christ-follower, using your gifts in worship is an act of heart… Something most creatives can easily wrap their right-brains around…

Heart… Feeling… Inspiration… Soul…

Virtually required elements for creativity.

Lately, Inspiration has been eluding me. I generally feel that I have a fairly deep well to go to when I need to draw out an idea… a image… a solution…

But not recently.

It’s like there’s a gate inside my mind that all of the good ideas are hiding behind… All I seem to be capable of is approaching the gate and knocking… But the gatekeeper is nowhere to be found and I seem to have misplaced my keys.

I haven’t even been able to write for a couple of weeks… In truth, I think my best writing is actually months behind. So, I dug deep and consulted a reliable source…

I prayed about it.

I wonder, often, about non-believers… How they access their creativity… Because I really identify with Jesus’ assertion:

I am the vine, you are my branches… Apart from Me, you can do nothing…

I’m not courting false-humility here… This is literally true.  I’ve tried to use my creativity outside of the realm of worship and “Christian service” and it’s always a dismal failure.

I understand that this isn’t true for every christian… I know a number of artists that are able to move in their creativity in “secular” situations.  I’ve always found this interesting and have recently just accounted it to differences in individual calling…

But true worship flows from the heart.  On another occasion, Jesus said:

The time is coming, and is already here, that the true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth…

Worship through artistic expression, therefore, must naturally flow from a true reflection of my innermost being… from a heart empowered by God’s Spirit. Whether I write or lead the band or doodle graphics or any of the other outlets for creativity that I offer up, it’s just not “worship” without integrity and connection with God.

When I suffer from “blocked” creativity, I start looking for a breakdown in either Spirit or truth or both…

I found an interesting combination of breakdowns when I prayed about this…

And I want to share these… If not for the sake of anybody but myself…

And, what are blogs for if not narcissistic navel-gazing…

Tomorrow… Part 2, All Stressed Up and No One to Punch…

It’s well worth the 19 minutes that it will take you to watch it…

One of the new buzzwords of our ‘green’ society has caught me by surprise and slowed me down. Insiders no longer use the term ‘recycled’, as in ‘recycled glass’, but ‘repurposed’.

Which I completely love, but not in a green way…. (read more)

photo credit: Daniel Owen (Daniel & Sonja on Flickr.com)

I’ve been seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for some time now…

It doesn’t seem to be getting any brighter.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

God plants a seed of himself in us, Paul called is a “deposit” of the glory to come… His Holy Spirit.  And this Spirit speaks to our innermost thoughts and desires, He enlightens our passions, He restores our hope…

Sometimes, when I’m feeling cynical, I think He teases us…

I know a couple of ministry-types that kinda flounder from position to position, church to church, looking for the right fit… To me, they constantly seem to be trying to shove the proverbial square peg into a round hole…

They don’t see their own shape…

If you know many ministers, you know at lease one of these guys:

The Evangelist who continually tries (and fails) as a Pastor…

The Missionary who settled for a job administrating other missionaries…

The Youth Pastor who thought it was time to “move up” to Senior Pastor…

Their work doesn’t bring energy and life to them… Instead of living “abundantly,” they have settled for a place of service that provides some counterfeit for life:  monetary stability, worldly prestige…

You get the idea?

I find artists to be especially vulnerable to this kind of thing… After all, there are only 32 new positions for “rock stars” that come available every year and 85% wash out by year-two… For the guy that has great musical talent, a job selling widgets seems more stable, reasonable and safe…

But Jesus didn’t say, I have come to give you a stable life…

Knowing this truth, however, is very different from walking it out… I struggle a lot to walk in my gifts and calling… I get discouraged easily when things appear to be trending away from the goal that I’ve set my heart on…

That’s when I eat Oreos…

Discouragement is the enemy of abundance, but I’m not convinced this is true of Discontent…

Discontent can be a catalyst… It can drive us to work harder, work smarter and really sell-out to our vision and calling…

Are you sold-out to your vision and calling?

Or shall I pass the Oreos?

Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. -The Bible, Psalm 37:4

Painter, Moyra Blayney sells her landscape work through a coffeehouse that donates their consignment fees to charities…

Gloria Mendez teaches craft and beadwork classes at her church and works with a local nun to help her become self-supporting…

John Prichard, a student-filmmaker, produced a short film to promote the new work of a foreign missionary…

Mixed-media artist, Kathie Luther, mixes artistic expression with prophetic and end-times images to express provocative ideas about the Christian life…

Stagecraft-trained writer, Tim Jones, uses his gifts to produce dramatic presentations for church outreach…

What kind of service/ministry are you doing with your gifts?  Share thoughts and ideas here…

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Untitled by Moyra Blayney

I’ve been chatting with Moyra Blayney, our Featured Artist, about her work and her recent reboot.  She had been inactive with her art for 15 years before opening a small show earlier this year at a coffeehouse in Belfast. Since I have also had a reboot in my writing and theatre in the last year, I thought that it might be encouraging to share a few thoughts…

It’s easy to get stuck in the routine of your “real life” but I think that artists (and this is probably especially true of Christian artists) abandon real living when they trade a day job for their artistic passion. For me, it was selling sprockets (not joking) that totally consumed my productive hours and kept me wishing I could do something artistic rather than doing it.

Dreaming takes a lot less effort than actually putting paint on a canvas or words on a page. Guitar Hero is easier to master than guitar. Watching TV is easier than appearing in a play… you get the idea.

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my own reboot until I started talking to Moyra… but her story and mine share some of the same elements… Elements that might actually form some foundational principles for rebooting… I wanted to share them.

1. FEED YOUR INNER-ARTIST… It struck me that Moyra stayed interested in reading about art and art technique even when she was inactive. For me, attending plays and reading classic literature kept my imagination active even when I was too busy to write.

Passion is something that needs fuel. This is true in art, in relationships, in faith. If you’ve stopped fueling your imagination, pick up a book…

2. FIND A MUSE… For Moyra, it’s the Irish countryside… For me, it’s the Colorado foothills… But everyone has a place, an activity or a person who ignites our imagination…

For the Christian artist, there is a wealth of inspiration to be had in our relationship with God. I’ve found that the more I seek Him, the more inspired my writing becomes. Every good gift comes from God, after all, and our artistic talents are no exception… Ask Him to bring inspiration and He will.

3. TALK ABOUT YOUR DESIRE… Nothing fuels desire like speaking it out loud… And I can’t think of many things that are harder to talk about. It’s kinda scary to talk about a reboot. Our fear of failure kicks in and we freeze up.

Find a trustworthy friend and start talking about your reboot… For me, I started saying things like, “I’m writing that novella I’ve been thinking about.” My friends were very supportive… Moyra’s friend actually set up her first show… If your friends aren’t supportive, get some new ones.

4. SET UP A PLACE AND TIME TO WORK… Moyra had a deadline for her first show and not a single, completed canvas… She set up a studio in her home and set aside time to work… There’s nothing like a deadline to motivate you to work.

I did something similar with my novella, publishing the drafts of each chapter every Monday in my blog… Pointing my desk out the window and at the mountains gave me even more of a reason to sit down and write…

If you have a “day job” it is especially necessary to set aside a certain time (maybe the hour right after dinner) to work, otherwise, you will get derailed by business.

5. JUST DO IT… Talking and planning are great motivators, but eventually you have to pick up the brush, dust off the piano or fill the balloons with paint… You don’t have to write the Great American Novel or create a masterpiece with your first effort, but if you’re ever going to do something noteworthy, you must start somewhere…

Remember that the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step…

Want to add something or tell us about your own reboot? Comments are always welcome!

Read more about Moyra’s art here.

Read Tim’s novella, The Warrior, or check out his new live nativity script, bethlehemEXPERIENCE.