If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.David Bowie (via saladdinane)
Creativity comes easy to a man who is loose and natural. Whatsoever he does becomes a creative phenomenon. Wherever he touches, it becomes a piece of art; whatsoever he says becomes a poetry. His very movement is aesthetic. If you can see a buddha walking, even his walking is creativity. Even through his walking he is creating a rhythm, even through his walking he is creating a milieu, an atmosphere around him. If a buddha raises his hand he changes the climate immediately around him. Not that he is doing these things, they are simply happening. He is not the doer. Calm, settled inside; tranquil, collected, together inside, filled with infinite energy overpouring, overflowing in all directions, his every moment is a moment of creativity, of cosmic creativity.Osho (via oceanofmind)
You yourselves have known veterans of music who were seemingly transfigured, energized, eternally made young by their relationship to the music that they play. That’s what your goal should be: to find the relationship right now that will carry you through your life. The real story in any art is “going the distance” and establishing the habits that will sustain you as your life unfolds. No matter what unexpected, sometimes thrilling, sometimes vexing things may happen, you will have that powerful inner core to find your own way and to find colleagues who believe as idealistically as you do in the real joy of music. With them you can reshape and form the greatest possible future for our wonderful art. To truly be for music and for your colleagues is the greatest responsibility and joy an artist can have.Michael Tilson Thomas (via gronlandicedit)
It’s about music! Not one music style is better than the other, not one music style is more truly than the other. The whole thing is based on respect. It’s all about respect, respect to the music, respect to the DJ’s, respect to the crowd and respect to each other. It’s all music, music never separates people!Carl Cox (via electronicdancemuse)
If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble. Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. Inevitably, your work (like, uh, the preceding syllogism…) will be flawed. Why? Because you’re a human being, and only human beings, warts and all, make art. Without warts it is not clear what you would be, but clearly you wouldn’t be one of us.
Nonetheless, the belief persists among some artists (and lots of ex-artists) that doing art means doing things flawlessly — ignoring the fact that this prerequisite would disqualify most existing works of art. Indeed, it seems vastly more plausible to advance the counter-principle, namely that imperfection is not only a common ingredient in art, but very likely an essential ingredient. Ansel Adams, never one to mistake precision for perfection, often recalled the old adage that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, his point being that if he waited for everything in the scene to be exactly right, he’d probably never make a photograph.
Adams was right: to require perfection is to invite paralysis. The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work toward what you imagine you can do perfectly. You cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do — away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the work of your heart. You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes. Believing that artwork should be perfect, you gradually become convinced that you cannot make such work. (You are correct.) Sooner or later, since you cannot do what you are trying to do, you quit. And in one of those perverse little ironies of life, only the pattern itself achieves perfection — a perfect death spiral: you misdirect your work; you stall; you quit.
From Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland. (118pp, ISBN-13: 978-0-9614547-3-9, Amazon UK, Amazon US)
I can not recommend this book enough. Every page contains purely expressed, honest, direct truths that speaks straight to the heart and mind on the barriers we put up for ourselves when trying to create.
It’s the sort of book I want to buy a dozen copies of and force onto most folks I know (sorry, gang, you know how I roll).
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.Henry David Thoreau (via dailyinspiredthoughts)
Patterns establish reality, so break all patterns. Do it one way today, and another tomorrow. Periodically break all habits, regardless of how good they are. Learn something new. Teach by example. And share the excitement of your discovery with a child by letting him see your own genuine excitement in discovery.Alexander Shulgin (TiHKAL: 334-335)
Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.Rumi (via oceanofmind)
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” - Charles Mingus
(via Presentation Zen)
