Creativity

I dearly love making my leather journals, and will keep doing that, but lately I've been feeling an itch to try something new, as well.

One of the things I enjoy about other people's blogs is seeing how they develop new ideas for their work. When I'm thinking about a new project, thinking isn't really the right word for it. I'm a very visual/tactile sort, so, in a magpie-like manner, I usually just start gathering bits of things that interest me, photos, bits of rock, thread, you name it. Eventually, I pick out some things that seem to belong together, but it's still all very vague. I actually really enjoy that part -- maybe vagueness is my natural state. :)

I decided to try out FreeMind to do a little mind mapping and see if that would be helpful. I downloaded the program (it's free), and after a lot of sweating and mumbling, came up with this:

It's a little hard to read, because I couldn't figure out how to print it in landscape mode, so I had to squeeze it onto the page. Of course, I could have accomplished the same thing in about 10 minutes with a piece of paper and a pencil, but printed up like this, it looks so, I don't know, serious, or official, or something. Like something might really be going on here. Which may not actually be the case. But then again...

For those of you who don't feel like squinting, here is my unabridged list of items/concepts/whathaveyou that might or might not become part of this project:

-Easter Island

-wood

-fossils

-thread

-leather

-roughness

-implicitness

-simplicity

-tranquility

-naturalness

-clay tiles

-handmade paper

-stones

-mica

-volcano

-horses

-skinny

-window

-rope

Make of that what you will. :)

Here is a quote from artist Chris Ofili, that sums up what I love about starting new projects:

"In the process of making art the mind wanders and gives way to instinct, which feeds off areas the intellect doesn’t. The process is one of distillation to the point where it’s just essence, just itself."

Chris Ofili