Videos: Creative Insight
While working on the final edits to my long-term photography project, there were days when listening to other artists came in really helpful. Below are a few favorite, good listens, if you are interested.
–Interview with Charlie Rose, 2015. One of my favorite quotes by Sally Mann, “Yes. Again, I don’t know if it’s an intellectual process, although I may ask myself intellectual questions. I think the difference is that I used to be taking pictures to save things. The impulse was to either take pictures to save something or to try and see what something would look like when it was photographed. It was really just kind of an aesthetic exercise, and now it’s a lot more important to me to actually say something as opposed to save something. I’m working from an intellectual construct and I’m trying to use the photographs in service to a concept, which I didn’t start out that way.”
Another favorite quote by Sally Mann, “I’m frantic. I don’t waste any time. I don’t waste time. I work all the time. I never leave home. I mean, I just — I just stay honed in on what’s ahead…It’s the only way.”
–Dani Shapiro: Office Hours, 2017.
–Good Life Project, “Writing as a spiritual practice,” 2014.
–Marie Forleo, “Dani Shapiro’s Writing Process & the ‘Myth of Inspiration,'” 2018.
A favorite quote from Dani Shapiro, “In order to do what we love — whether we are woodworkers, legal-aid attorneys, emergency room physicians, or novelists — we must first know ourselves as deeply as we are able. Know your own bone. This self-knowledge can be messy. But it is at the center of our life’s work, this gnawing, this unearthing. There is never an end to it. Our deepest stories — our bones — are our best teachers. Gnaw it still.”
Another favorite quote by Dani Shapiro, “It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged alert, and alive.”
–TED Talk, “Success, failure, and the drive to keep creating,” 2014. One of my favorite quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert, “The only trick is that you’ve got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don’t budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either a great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to the home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, form long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it’s all going to be ok.”
–TED Talk, “Your elusive creative genius,” 2009. Another one of my favorite quotes by Elizabeth Gilbert, “And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.”
Another favorite quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, “I live a creative life, and you can’t be creative without being vulnerable. I believe that Creativity and Fear are basically conjoined twins; they share all the same major organs, and cannot be separated, one from the other, without killing them both. And you don’t want to murder Creativity just to destroy Fear! You must accept that Creativity cannot walk even one step forward except by marching side-by-side with its attached sibling of Fear.”
–99u Conference: Why Your Critics Are Not The Ones That Count, 2013.
–Chase Jarvis: LIVE: Daring Greatly to Unlock Your Creativity, 2010.
A favorite quote from Brene Brown, “Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment, sorrow, and shame.”
Another favorite quote by Brene Brown, Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation, and change. It’s also the birthplace of joy, faith, and connection. To create is to make something that has never existed before. There’s nothing that is more vulnerable than that.”
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