You can become the predominant creative force in your life partly by not having to be. So, while you are taking all necessary action to accomplish your goals, you are not manipulating the conditions by which the results take place. You may find you are capable of very hard work on behalf of your aspirations, but you are not rigidly and obsessively

Neither approach can be productive. We need to have both elements, which means to narrow our attention on what we are creating, while, at the very same time, broaden our awareness to allow unimagined insight to surface.

The stronger the expressive quality of the art, the more it is able to create its own unique universe that the audience can live in.

In the

One exercise I teach in my workshop for artists is this one. I invite you to try it out. Take a sheet of paper and list a number of words down the page. Any words. Nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives. The idea is to list words without actually spending any time thinking about what words you might list.

Surrealism tried to tap into the Freudian idea of the power of the unconscious. It was a child of the Dada movement, which loved to defy reason and logic. Dada came out of a group of artists’ reaction to World War l and was one of the most interesting periods of art, inventing collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.

3 Principles First, energy follows the path of least resistance. Second, the underlying structure will determine that path. Third, we can change the underlying structure, and thereby change the path of least resistance.

Once you have established structural tension, a’ la Russian piano technique, you are ready for action. While you act, you have the overall outcome of your piece in mind, while simultaneously tracking current reality as it changes. What motivates the actions steps you take come directly from the underlying structure you have established. The

Often, we don’t like the secondary choices. We may not like to practice hour after hour. We may not like doing planning for a film project. We may not like going to dance classes or acting classes. We may not like mem-orizing lines or having to keep in physical shape. We do those things, not for themselves, but for the outcomes they support.