Category: creativity

Reflections on an exhibition.
After the festival.

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Everyday Magic at the National Arts Festival

In my usual jump-all-four-feet-in way, I neglected to ask important questions before setting out from home to put up my work in my allocated exhibition space at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. On second thoughts, that’s not entirely true. I had thought about all sorts of things I might not have considered usually, and believed myself to be properly prepared. Unfortunately my planning had been for an imagined environment, not the space I found myself confronting. Dismayed, I surveyed the large room that had been divided into four separate areas. My space was lined with dingy grey screens of …

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Making a space for something new.
Letting New Year’s resolutions make themselves.

Leda van der Post1 Comment

This year has been a long and difficult one for me. Albeit with lots of good things and high points. It was a relief to come to the end of the last semester, close my office door, and welcome the holidays. The busyness of Christmas is now over too, and here I am, a month of unplanned days ahead of me, ready for the new… So where to begin? I learnt long ago the value of letting something, especially something of value to me, go. Because, once I let it go, a new space opened up. I remember clearly sitting …

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Use your creativity to heal your pain
Art as therapy

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I have just read an article, Healing Trauma by Nanice Ellis, which explained so clearly the background to something I have always believed, and frequently put into practice. That is, art, of any form, can be powerful medicine. Nanice describes how to heal trauma from a karmic perspective, but does not specifically advocate art as a form of therapy. So let me explain myself more clearly. Firstly, I think that, no matter what your spiritual belief system is, the main point in Nanice’s article about healing trauma holds true. Repressing emotional wounds, whether by medication, work, social activities, addictions, or …

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So you want to be creative…
My belief about the nature of creativity

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I never stopped to think about whether or not I was creative. Until people started saying things to me like “I wish I was creative like  you” or “I don’t have a creative bone in my body”. This was usually when they discovered I was a painter. Some people are probably innately more creative than others. But at the same time, if one wants to be creative, or develop one’s creativity, it can be done. Think of young children. When given coloured crayons and paper, they don’t stop to think about whether or not they can, they just draw. Then …

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