A friend took this photo of a pomegranate on the tree in front of my house. It had been looking sad and neglected—for some reason, it never ripened. I let it sit there, forgotten, while the rest of the fruit was picked, and the tree lost all its leaves for the winter. Then Suzanne came…
My new favorite art book is Picturing and Poeting by the renowned graphic designer Alan Fletcher. British writer Fiona MacCarthy offers an intriguing insight in her foreword to the book. She describes the “moment of crystallization when an idea changes state. The point at which the word transforms itself to make a picture. The stage…
Isamu Noguchi, the celebrated Japanese American artist and landscape designer, once described the creative act as a process of awakening: “I don’t think art comes from art… I think it comes from the awakening person. Awakening is what you might call the spiritual… Everything tends toward awakening.” This idea—that creativity stems not from art itself but…
When I teach, my focus isn’t on the content itself but on creating space for learning and magic to unfold. In the grand scheme of things, rich and fertile space is far more important than any single piece of information. So if space is so vital, why do we so often focus on the specifics—the…
I’m learning how to draw, and let me tell you—it’s nothing like I expected. Drawing doesn’t require years of art classes or fancy tools. According to Betty Edwards in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, we already know how to draw. The key is getting our left brains out of the way so…
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