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Welcome to the June 2013 edition of Arts Awareness E-Newsletter delivered to your desktop each month. If you know someone who may be interested in receiving this newsletter, please let them know how to sign up through www.artsawareness.com.

Spinning into Control

There are thousands of artists of all kinds asking the same things and doing the same things day after day.

• Artists and performers practice.
• They evaluate and restructure.
• As they create and perform their art, they often struggle, build on strengths, and face their weaknesses.
• They regularly yield to new ways and change their methods.
• They succeed and they fail. And they try again.

And while creating and performing takes effort—it’s a form of work—it truly moves them.

As I stood back and took a look at the growth in my own artistic life, I first noticed the increasing ability to do things I couldn’t do before, but it was truly life altering when I started to see the collection of those experiences from a larger perspective. The evaluation and changing patterns of action, thought, and habitual behavior that artists experience teach that sometimes you have to unlearn in order to learn!

Patterns are powerful:

• They each tend to be a problem and a solution all wrapped up together. We gain sophistication and precision by understanding patterns.
• In the arts they create a sense of momentum. It is the way we grasp a sense of movement and meaning. Movement and meaning is a motivating factor that helps artists become more aware of their processes.
• They help develop higher order thinking skills like problem-finding, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis.
• They develop and use personal strengths in meaningful ways and help connect us to an understanding of concepts that are sometimes difficult.

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók once likened his own artistic development to the pattern of a spiral—the artistic process that allowed him to deal with the same problems on an ever rising level, with correspondingly rising success.

The spiral is an interesting metaphor for the work of an artist. When you understand where you are in the process of creating art, that's where creativity, motivation, and artistic quality lie. There is beauty in this understanding that can be expanded to our experiences in daily life and work.

Spirals are expressions of creativity. They’re often found in nature and suggest the process of growth and evolution. Spirals convey ideas of fertility, birth, death, expansion, and transformation. They are cycles of time, life and the seasons—returning to each new sequence with a new understanding.

The spiral represents the evolutionary process of learning and growing. Life, just like the artistic process, doesn’t move forward in a straight line. We seem to pass the same point over and over again but from a different perspective each time.

Spirals represent trust during change—letting go of resistance and maintaining flexibility.

Patterns provide a sense of order in what might otherwise appear chaotic. When in the midst of chaos, imagination is a first step. But acting on those ideas is what moves us forward. Part of the reason it is sometimes difficult to move forward in the face of life's experiences is that we create self-imposed inhibitions due to fear of failure. Artists and performers experiment with various ways of creating motion. They expect that some won't work. They practice. This is the process of learning the art. It is these experiences that help artists treat challenges as experiments and move forward invigorated with new ideas and understanding. Try this thought process in daily life and work so challenges and disappointments don’t stop you in your tracks. The image of a rising spiral can give you a sense of motion, acting on what you discover with a more optimistic view of progression, discipline, and harmony.

Interesting—Check it out:

Contact Dr. Patricia Hoy for media appearances, to book her to speak at your event, or to engage her workshop or consulting services—

Customized Consulting; In-Service Workshops; On-Site Training Institutes; Seminars; Conference Sessions; Seminars; Round Tables; and Guest Speaking that provides motivation for launching the beginning a project, keynote theme inspiration, or setting the foundation for a goal to be achieved.

About the Arts Awareness Newsletter:

This newsletter is meant to spark ideas and develop a deeper understanding of artistic processes and their use in everyday life and work. Content, which comes from personal experiences and a variety of sources, is based on the Arts Awareness concepts developed by Patricia Hoy. Questions? Comments? Contact Patricia at patricia@artsawareness.com or 901-229-1955, Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA.