The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women. Gail McMeekin
paintings is breathtaking, and she continues to paint prolifically. When she moved to America, she opened the Painting Experience, workshops where she offers the richness of uncensored expression to all participants. Had Michelle ignored her attraction for painting and had she not surmounted the obstacles in her path, including the academics telling her to quit, she would have forsaken her true work and her inner self.
We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness—either enforced or voluntary.
—AGATHA CHRISTIE, MYSTERY WRITER
For June Levinson, bliss is getting down and dirty with her beloved clay. For years as an art dealer and more recently as owner of the Levinson Kane Gallery on Boston's famed Newbury Street, June succeeded at the business of art. She became a dealer because she wanted to collect art and didn't have enough confidence in her talent as a painter. But ultimately she couldn't hold back the artistic sense within her. After closing her gallery, she began beading, making necklaces and other jewelry, easily selling them to friends despite her determination to keep her art fun and not turn it into a business. She then discovered that she loved making the beads herself, which led her to the wonderland of ceramics.
June has been both a friend and a fellow explorer of creativity. She has a daring about her as well as a grounded practicality that is refreshing.
I'm still fascinated by the surprise of images. . . .
—ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, PHOTOGRAPHER
These days she is luxuriating in the opportunity to study ceramics at the Radcliffe College Ceramics Studio, meet interesting people, and express the artist within her, instead of promoting the artwork of others. Without all her previous responsibilities, June delights in being a beginner, “I have a lower standard for myself in ceramics than I did as a painter when I compared myself unfavorably to great artists like Robert Motherwell. When I made my first bowl, it was cockeyed and off center, but I was so excited. I brought it home and said to myself, ‘The popcorn won't mind.’ I use it all the time. I'm more forgiving of my results now. How censorious can you be about a bowl? On the other hand, I look at it and say there's all the wonder in the world in a little bowl.” June's utter joy in the process has unlocked a whole new focus for her life. Like her grandchildren, with whom she takes exciting adventures, June's playful jubilation with ceramics has reconnected her with her own childlike wonder.
Challenge: PERSONAL ATTRACTIONS
Reserve for yourself at least fifteen minutes of quiet time every day to simply listen to your thoughts. Find yourself an impenetrable hideout (you can if you really want to) and relax into the silence. Allow your inspirations to flow into your awareness. Leave your internal censors at the door and accept whatever shows up. Sometimes ideas that seem silly hold great wisdom. What inspires you? What do you feel excited or passionate about? What kinds of books or magazines do you read? What kinds of people do you most like to talk with? What kinds of interests or projects are you drawn to in your leisure time? If you went back to school, what would you most like to learn about? What do you fantasize about? What are your aspirations?
What kinds of activities stimulate your creative expression? Do you long to paint, write, build, organize, sing, or play something? Select a method for capturing your images, such as writing, taping, drawing, role-playing. Save any thoughts or feelings you want to, but honor them all. Note everything and anything that comes to mind. What is your intuition urging you to explore or experience? Let this exercise be the beginning of a creative journal, idea book, or collage. You will be surprised at the wisdom in your own internal guidance. This daily date with your creative voice could change your life. Trust your process.
Creativity is not a driving force. It happens. It creates itself and you have to be open.
—MAYUMI ODA, ARTIST AND WRITER
Communing with Your Senses and Nature
The women profiled in this book describe an uncanny openness to the stimuli all around them. They notice the unusual and make connections. For instance, while I was on the phone with Emmy-nominated actress and jewelry designer C. C. H. Pounder, she commented, “I'm talking to you right now and three hummingbirds zoomed by the window, and it was almost like they stood there in mid-motion, posed, and said, ‘Hello.’ As that vision comes, I think, ‘Wouldn't they be great in the back of a painting or on a piece of jewelry?’ So it's just a little flash, but I'll remember it.”
When I interviewed harpist, musician, composer, and singer Deborah Henson-Conant, she had been up all night composing. I asked her how she could do that, and she explained, “When I'm not in the ‘all night’ mode, I can't even imagine doing it. But the minute I need to work that way, I can suddenly do it. Sometimes I do it because I'm on a deadline, like when I wrote my first scores to debut with the Boston Pops, and the adrenaline gets me through. Other times I feel like a scientist working all night in my laboratory. At those times, it's not ‘work,’ it's exploration and discovery, and it's nearly impossible to stop once I catch the scent of what I'm trying to express. Composing, for me, is putting the sounds together so they have meaning, so they speak for my heart. My mind speaks to me in stories, but my heart speaks in music, and it's music that adds the dimensions of color, emotion, sensation, mood, and movement to the stories.”
Deborah recalls a life-changing experience that occurred at age ten, when she first heard a piece by Claude Debussy: “It can't have been the first piece of classical music I ever listened to, but when I heard La Mer playing on the radio one day, I was so overwhelmed emotionally that I was really incapacitated. I remember I could not get close enough to the stereo. When my parents came home, I had actually crawled underneath it, under its little feet, and was lying there sobbing. I remember feeling like a craven animal; it was like needing drugs or something.” In this moment, Deborah discovered the power of music to move her profoundly both emotionally and physically. Her life ever since has been the pursuit of this rapture.
Stress management consultant and humorist Loretta LaRoche uses strategies to create and stimulate new routines. Loretta is not just funny. Her humor teaches people to stop “awfulizing” and “catastrophizing” the unimportant things in their lives and to quit stressing themselves needlessly. As a result, she finds an endless array of material in the everyday: “I'll tell you what really gets me going. I walk a lot. I find that when I'm taking a walk, sometimes I'll burst out laughing because something will just hit me. I also get a lot of new stuff when I'm actually doing a talk, and I do what I call my ‘Oprah’ portion, where I ask people to tell me their stressors. And that gives me a whole new arsenal of material. I'll do a little repartee with people and feed them back what they're saying, and then we'll add to it. Because the whole idea of what I'm trying to promote is to exaggerate the very thing that disturbs you. Also, being out in nature certainly stimulates my creative bent. And then I try to be alone as much as I can. I really feel that's sacred time for me. I get up early, I sit in my chair in the morning, and have my coffee, reflecting on what stirs my creativity. And I read voraciously.”
This ability to be receptive through the five senses is fueled by passion and curiosity. Writer, photographer, and stone sculptor Maureen Murdock talks about this communication with the medium: “The way I work with photography is that I'm responding to the images I see in nature, isolating them, and then pulling out what I see. I may see a feature in a stone that you might not notice until it's printed in my photograph. So, it's always a kind of looking—maybe a way of saying it is that I am looking for the nature spirits. As a stone sculptor, too, I'm trying to find the face in the rock, or what the stone has to offer. A lot of my ideas come in dreams, but what inspires me most is looking at other people's art and nature.”
The natural world is often a source of inspiration for creative women. Multitalented designer Diane Ericson describes her own alliance with the power of nature: “I've been making things since I was a tiny kid. I pretty much lived in the canyon behind my house. I feel like the best thing that happened to me in my childhood was that I got left alone—not left alone physically, but left alone to be who I was and explore what was important to me. So I really got to be in my own rhythm most of my childhood. I would