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SAMSARA is an amazing movie/documentary that
captures an array of different cultures events from around the globe. The documentary is visually stunning & intriguing, but also conglomerate and culturally diverse.

Shows art being destroyed - could be relevant to ritual using destruction of art as a metaphor for the regenerative capability of the imagination..

Consistent use of time lapse - could also be relevent

Cultural Irony - Inmates dancing
- Gang member cradling child
- Pistol coffin used for burial

MIKE LEACH: TED TALK

Concentrates on the importance of sharing rituals with others.

- Personal/Private
- Specific to a relationship between
people or to one person
- The importance of Habit

Painful Rituals

- Religion
- Pride
- Honour
- Human Behaviour post rituals

DIMITRIS XYGALATAS: TED TALK

SAMSARA

JAN STANLEY: TED TALK

Routines:
- Constrain Choice
- Enable Action
- Offer Coherence
- Stability and Mutability

TUI DE HAAN: TED TALK

Importance of having the ability to stop and notice. Seize the moment.

Passing of her mother allowed her to embrace ritual in memory of her by pleasing & entertaining herself.

"The thing about a ritual is that it's a container around the moment."

Sobonfu Somé - The keeper of the Ritual of the Dagara Tribe;
"We see ritual as being to the soul, as food and water is to the body"

ABSTRACT

CHRISTOPH NEIMANN

ILLUSTRATOR

"Athletes and musicians have to practice everyday, why should it be any different for artists?"

Works 9-6 focused at desk; drawing, painting, experimenting & creating.

Seems to allow his imagination to control him.

EZ DEVLIN

SET DESIGNER

Begins every single project with a stack of blank paper and a pencil. Nothing else on table.

PAULA SCHER

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Day-to-day;

"You have to be in a state of play to design. If you're not in a state of play you can't make anything."

"It's very fast paced. I'm solving things on scraps of paper."

PLATON

PHOTOGRAPHER

"The old man would sit in that chair for five hours. When you are still and sitting, your powers of observation go through the roof. If someone walks by it's a massive moment."

On drawing;

DAILY RITUALS: HOW ARTISTS WORK

Mason Currey's book 'Daily Rituals' describes how 161 inspiring minds maneuver the “many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do.”

Examples:

W.H. Auden on passion: “A modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the say, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”

Thomas Wolfe, Mason writes, “had been unconsciously fondling his genitals, a habit from childhood that, while not exactly sexual … fostered “such a good male feeling” that it had stoked his creative energies. From then on, Wolfe regularly used this method to inspire his writing sessions, dreamingly exploring his “male configurations” until the “sensuous elements in every domain of life became more immediate, real, and beautiful.”

ARTISTS

RESEARCH

GERHARD RICHTER

He sticks to a strict routine, waking at 6:15 every morning. He makes breakfast for his family, takes Ella to school at 7:20 and is in the studio by 8. At 1 o'clock, he crosses the garden from the studio back to the house. The grass in the garden is uncut. Richter proudly points this out, to show that even it is a matter of his choosing, not by chance. At 1 o'clock, he eats lunch in the dining room, alone. A housekeeper lays out the same meal for him each day: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil and chamomile tea.

CHRIS OFILI

First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."

"They're not a guide," he went on, they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."

WILLEM DE KOONING

''I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.''

Typically, de Kooning and his wife Elaine rose late in the morning. Breakfast consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with the milk they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury.

Then the day's routine began with de Kooning moving to his end of the studio and Elaine to hers. Work was punctuated by more cups of strong coffee, which de Kooning made by boiling the coffee as he had learned to do in Holland, and by many cigarettes. The two stayed at their easels until fairly late, taking a break only to go out for something to eat or to walk up to Times Square to see a movie. Often, however, de Kooning, who hated to stop working, began again after supper and pushed far into the night, leaving Elaine to go to a party or concert.

"Every morning, before he started to compose music, Ludwig van Beethoven would prepare his own coffee. It was important for him to use exactly 60 beans per cup that he often counted one by one for a precise dose. Reading about the rituals and routines of famous artists is fascinating.

Every creative person chooses a different path to follow their muse. They rely on habits and rituals to activate their senses, elevate their moods, and clear their minds. It may be as simple as waking up at sunrise, drinking three cups of coffee, taking a jog in the park, or reciting affirmations. Their actions impact their psyche and influence their creative productivity. By reading about artists’ rituals we learn another aspect of their creative process and what makes them tick."

RENEE PHILIPS;

GARY PANTER

Get up at 7:30 in the morning -- feed cats, drive daughter to school, read the NY Times and drink chocolate milk. Do chores and tasks and try to get time to make art. Make art. Take naps. Before each 5 minute nap I read a page or two. Right now I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Make art. Go to sleep at 3:00 in the morning.

ALWAYS.

MAKE.

ART.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso would often go to bed late and wake up late. He would arrive at his studio in the early afternoon and work until dusk, often standing for several hours in front of his canvas. The artist stated;

“While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Muslims take off their shoes before entering a mosque.”

HENRI MATISSE

Matisse had a long and prolific career, never stopped working, even when he was forced to create his “cut-outs” from a wheelchair. With a pair of tailor scissors he cut sheets of paper that had been painted with gouache and often crayon, into various shapes and sizes. His daily routine consisted of three hours of morning work, breaking for lunch, followed by a nap, and then working from 2:00 until the evening. He even worked on Sundays.

RITUALS

EXERCISE

FOR THE IMAGINATION

"A good way to begin increasing the number of images available to your imagination is to study books, magazines, and websites that provide a lot of photographs and artwork. Variety is the key to success in this endeavor. Photos of diverse landscapes, plant life, architecture, and animals are wonderful image builders. Going through back issues of the National Geographic provides a lot of varied material from other environments and cultures. Books and websites that specialize in historical material are also very helpful because they are often illustrated with artwork depicting other times. And remember: don't just look. Try to imagine how all your other senses would be affected if you were actually in the scenes you're studying. How would the steaming, insect-plagued humidity of the Amazon jungles feel on your skin? What foul odors would assail your nostrils onboard a festering Roman slave galley? What sounds whispered on the winds during moonlit Druidic rituals at Stonehenge? How did the wine at Cleopatra's banquet taste? Use all your senses. Close your eyes and really put yourself in the scenes you contemplate."

'Strengthening the Imagination'
- Simon Jester

"In a truly creative classroom, teachers need to plan time in their lessons for change and growth. They must allow children to transition from knowledge gathering and memorizing to synthesizing and puzzle solving. This comes from teaching with imagination and encouraging students to learn in the same way.

Imagination is what stays when teachers are gone from their students’ lives. It's what students have taken from a creative classroom and into real life. While basic knowledge and facts are important building blocks, imagination is the synthesis of that knowledge. It's the vehicle that gets learners from point A to point B on their own.

We can’t actually teach how to have imagination—we can only teach using our imagination."

'This is why we must be teaching with Imagination, and how to do it'
- Lee Watanabe-Crockett

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

- Albert Einstein

"Everyone starts off as an artist, the trick is staying that way."

"For people who enjoy drawing as a hobby or job, the benefits could be huge, with improved levels of happiness from doing something you take pleasure in, reduced stress levels, feelings of achievement and many other positive psychological effects..

Psychological benefits from drawing for adults could be substantial to the point where it affects a persons day to day living. By drawing out your thoughts and ideas, and letting your imagination loose on paper in a tangible form, you might find yourself releasing some inner tension that you were previously unaware of or you might just find the experience relaxing and refreshing, a sort of catharsis that allows you to restructure your mind and think more clearly. This could then lead you onto solving a problem that you had previously not been able to find a solution to without the therapeutic nature of drawing. Drawing ideas down on paper can also help you share your thoughts and feelings with other people that you might find very difficult to express verbally or otherwise. Self-exploration through drawing could lead you to some insightful conclusions about yourself, as well as improving your mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.”

BENEFITS

OF DRAWING

- Lisa Frasier

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW!

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

DRAW

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DRAW

“Does drawing serve as a way to vent emotions and thereby work out conflicts and tensions? Or does it serve as a form of escape?”

“You might assume that drawing works on mood by allowing people to express negative emotions and thus release them. This is the catharsis view of art, But we find something different: What works best for mood repair is distraction from negative emotions through drawing. This is consistent with the emotion regulation literature, which shows that getting people to think about something other than their negative emotions is more effective [than venting them].”

-Jennifer Drake, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College

IMPROVES MEMORY

Research has shown that doodlers may take in more information than if they were simply listening to something. In a 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, people who were encouraged to doodle while listening to a list of people's names being read were able to remember 29% more of the information during a surprise quiz later.

HELPS YOU DE-STRESS

The rhythmic, repetitive movement of drawing helps calm the mind. 'It's similar to mindfulness and meditation, yet it's more tangible and visual,' explains art psychotherapist Karin Angstrom. 'Sitting down to meditate can be quite daunting, but drawing and doodling takes that pressure off. It calms the mind and helps us deal with the overwhelming world we live in.' Karin believes just 10 minutes a day is enough to see really positive effects.

STRENGTHENS CREATIVITY

Free-range drawing makes use of your imagination and encourages the mind to wander. 'I believe we're all inherently creative beings, but because we're so constantly wired we can lose that natural instinct,' Karin tells us. 'Once you practice and achieve that stillness of the mind, drawing will help you reconnect with your creativity – which will help you in all areas of your life.'

HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOURSELF

'Drawing and creativity in general help put you in contact with your inner self,' says Karin. 'It acts as a channel to your unconscious.' She explains that, if you do a bit every day, you'll be able to look back on it as diary: 'Visuals can be much more telling than words,' she explains. And a bonus point of understanding yourself better? Increased empathy. 'If you become more in touch with yourself then you can become more in touch with other people,' she concludes.

HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOURSELF

-Jessica Bateman