Response to Helen’s comments on paintings and other random thoughts

Helen, receiving your comments is such a gift! I feel like a kid on Christmas morning when I see them. Your comments are extremely insightful and helpful. It’s very exciting to see my work through your eyes – your comments help me see things that I hadn’t noticed. And I love how you’re able to articulate different things – it helps me to grow my artistic vocabulary and vision. I’ll be out of town until next Wednesday (driving to Ithaca NY for my youngest son’s graduation), so it will take me some time to digest everything and comment back, but I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your thoughtful and encouraging comments.

I’m loving this creativity coaching process with you. It’s extremely useful to have a forum to collect my ideas and get feedback. And using the blog is great – I’m going to ask my son to help me get the blog organized so that it’s not just a random bunch of posts.

One of the things I’ve noticed during this process is that my creative life comes in waves – I have times (like now) where ideas are flowing in like crazy. It’s very energizing, but can end up making me feel pretty scattered unless I have a way of recording the ideas and getting feedback on them. Your feedback is incredibly helpful, and the blog is a great way of recording the ideas. Eventually, I’ll reach a point where I want to make progress on some specific idea(s). I’m very organized and logical, so coming up with an action plan is something I really enjoy. But then comes the sticking point – there’s usually a part of the action plan that involves getting other people involved in some way – either as potential partners or clients or whatever, and then typically I get stuck and can’t get over that hump. Then I go through a slump, get frustrated and depressed, my energy is at low ebb……and then, at some point, the process starts over again. I’ve learned that I need to take advantage of the times when my energy is high to get started on an action plan. Once I get a set of tasks to work on, I’m disciplined about accomplishing those tasks, until I reach a critical task that I don’t know how to accomplish on my own. And that’s part of where I need my “tribe” – I have many great friends, and many of them are interested enough to listen to my various ideas, but most of them have a much more conventional mindset that mine, and don’t really “get” what I’m describing.

I think you are a person who will understand what I’m talking about, so I’d like to spend some discussing a particular concept during our next phone call, and developing ideas for how to get that concept from idea to something more tangible.