Dear Artist, Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have published a study that says we weren’t always this creative. Creativity, they say, has been the deciding factor in…
Dear Artist, “Unschooling” is an educational philosophy and practice that allows children to learn through natural life experiences. Play, games, fantasy, hobbies and social interaction are supposed to take the place of traditional schools. The theory is that current curricula…
Dear Artist, “Because nearly all good ideas are based on others that came before them, clothing that resembles a vintage style or an earlier design may be praised as “smartly referential,” wrote Ezra Marcus recently for the New York Times.…
Dear Artist, Yesterday Leslie Kimball of Tehachapi, CA wrote, “I paint with a bunch of wonderful women. We are a tight group, no envy, etc., but I have begun to understand my needs better. I need more but I’m afraid…
Dear Artist, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, director of the Creativity and Emotions lab at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, recently surveyed artists to learn what emotions they feel when working. While love, happiness, sadness and nostalgia were heavy hitters, the…
Dear Artist, My recent mention of “Can fundamentalists be creative?” had readers scurrying to the Psychology Today article. When neurologist Ken Heilman and technologist Russ Donda’s observations were first made public in 2007, there was, of course, a great howl…
Dear Artist, This is a risky, time-consuming maneuver that involves pulling out a bunch of staples with the dream that I can do it again, only incrementally better. I used to beat myself up for this neurosis, thinking of it…
Dear Artist, Recent studies of “runner’s high” — the well-known euphoria that kicks in when humans run or jog — seem to show an evolutionary base. Apparently humans have traditionally enjoyed running for its own sake — even when avoiding…
Dear Artist, In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” English novelist George Orwell identified four reasons: political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm. For example, Orwell believed that no book was genuinely free from political bias and that…
Dear Artist, Researchers at the Volen Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University have taken a second look at “imitation learning.” It seems that when natural talent is added to one’s flagrant imitation of others, what results may be the…