Art of the Song Creativity Corner

Taking a Creative Escape

By Eric Maisel

“A creative escape is like getting away for a romantic weekend with your lover — except in this case your lover is your creative nature.”

A creative escape is a little time-out-of-time that you carve from your schedule to devote to running away to art. A creative escape is like getting away for a romantic weekend with your lover — except in this case your lover is your creative nature. It is a chance to fall back in love with music, poetry, and silence.

As you organize your time, using, for example, a three-month planner, pencil in one day every two weeks to get away from your usual routine and re-experience your love of art. This day away is a good idea whether you are stalled or working productively on a project. If you’re stalled, your escape will help you unblock. If you’re working hard, it will provide some needed rest and a breath of fresh air. Your creative escape can be at home, with a new art book, at the local lake or museum, or a long drive away, to a forest that inspires you or a mountain glen that moves you. Bring poetry; or be poetry.

Here are six creative escape ideas:

Put aside your current project, pull out an alternate project, and work on it for a weekend in the country.
Sign up for a one-day workshop on a subject that fascinates you: monoprinting, beading, computer animation, or whatever strikes your fancy.
Find running water — a river, a stream, a burbling public fountain — and sketch there; or just daydream.
Go to a bookstore, pull out all the books on Paris, take them to a table in the bookstore café, and visit Paris for three hours over coffee and an almond biscotti.
Set up a casual informational interview with someone whose work or profession interests you — a site-specific artist, a new genre public artist — and meet with that person for tea at his or her favorite café.
Go where there’s live music. Listen. Get lost in the music. When you get home, dive right into your current creative project.

Make a nice, long list of creative escapes. Number the items on your list and use stick-ons to mark your calendar with upcoming escapes. Ten creative escapes in a three-month period is really not too many! •

About the Author | More by Eric Maisel
America's foremost Creativity Coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D. is a frequent contributor to Art of the Song: Creativity Radio. These essays are reprinted with permission from his on-air segment and are excerpted from his books: "Creativity For Life"; "A Writer's Paris"; "A Writer's San Francisco"; and more. For a complete list of publications, podcasts and workshop opportunities please visit www.ericmaisel.com.

06/26/07

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