Taking a Creative Escape
6 Ideas to Get You Started
By Eric Maisel, PhD | Posted 6/1/07 | Updated 9/24/20
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.
6 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 cafe.
- 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!
©2007 Eric Maisel. All rights reserved.
Eric Maisel is the author of Making Your Creative Mark, Brainstorm, The Van Gogh Blues, and other books on creativity and living a meaning-filled artistic life. more