Category: Creativity

I came across this provocative quote of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry this morning:

One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Came across a wonderful interview with legendary designer Milton Glaser in a new magazine, Generation Monthly, in which the interviewer asks Glaser his views on art:

"To summarize, what I have ended up with as a definition now is that first off, art is a successful mechanism that our species has come up with – and a device we use – to determine what is real."

From a thoughtful, provocative, must-read op-ed piece in the NY TIMES this week, here is an excerpt from Tim Kreider's "The Busy Trap."

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Came across this wonderfully simple but telling observation by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser:

“I move things around until they look right.”

The corollary for a photographer is equally simple: moving the camera around until things look right…

Just a quick clarification of the previous post.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd suggest that what Bradbury really means is not "Don't think" but rather: don't let thinking get in the way.  Came across this observation along similar lines:

Artspeak always sounds like a bunch of twenty-dollar words used to obscure the artist's inability to articulate what he or she is doing.

It's like over-thinking when throwing a rock at a street sign. Don't think about it, just do it, and you hit the target.

Start thinking about the outfit you should wear while throwing rocks at street signs, or how your body moves while throwing the rock, or what rock should be thrown at which street sign,  and you're gonna get a lot of misses.