Artistic Accomplices

I’ve been contemplating community lately, especially since I’ve been feeling a bit lost and disconnected from my creative community. In this episode, I discuss how David and I became artistic accomplices and how important it is for creatives to have a community of support.

Nothing takes the place of being in the same physical location as your artistic accomplices and creating together, and the ability to get positive feedback and to grow is much greater when creating in a community than it is when creating in isolation.

This episode is a bit of a ramble though it’s a short one, but I just wanted to share somethings that I am dealing with and feeling at the moment, and to give a little bit of advice on connecting or reconnecting with a creative community.

Samuel Peck holds a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Rhode Island, and an MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sam is currently a Phd Candidate in Art Education at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.

I have known Sam now for ten or twelve years, and in this episode, I talk with him about his art about where his desire to make interesting images comes from and how process is important to him and his work. We discuss how he explores the notion of surprise in his work and how he works with finding artistic problems.

It was a pleasure to sit down with Sam and talk about his printmaking work as well as his drawings and paintings, and to get a glimpse into his ideas about art education. I hope that you enjoy the conversation.

If everyone is creative, why do so many people believe that they are not? This is the question that I posed in Episode 4: Creative Myths, but in this episode, I explore this question even further by taking a look at creativity as a spiritual act, examining the role the ego plays in creative blocks, and exploring how we can recognize when our ego is stifling us and preventing us from being creative.

By taking ideas from Eckhardt Tolle’s book, A New Earth, I delve into how creativity is all about becoming present and how resistance, judgment, and attachment are the ego’s way of stopping us in our tracks and keeping us from tapping into our innate creativity.

By recognizing when we are resisting, judging, and attached to things, we can become more aware of our creativity, and the quality of our creativity can and will change.

If everyone is creative, why do so many people believe that they are not? In part people may have simply closed themselves off from their creativity, and over time they may have bought into some common myths about creativity. We live in a culture that speaks of creativity in magical, mystical terms, and it’s easy to get caught up in the misconceptions that many of us have about creativity

Ken Robinson defines creativity as the process of developing original ideas that have value, and perhaps at it’s root, creativity is more mundane than we believe. I discuss this and more in this episode as I look at the myths that surround creativity and how we are all creative in our everyday lives. We simply take it for granted and don’t see it for what it is.

David R. Modler is an artist, researcher, and professor originally from Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Education in Art Education from Towson State University and his Master of Fine Arts in painting from James Madison University. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Contemporary Art at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

David creates mixed media work and assembles the work into site-responsive installations, and the visual journal is a key component of his work. As an off-shoot of his journal work and as a way to explore creative collaborations, he has teamed up with good friend Samuel Peck to create the tet[R]ad: Draw and Play Here project where they facilitate one-on-one journal exchanges.

About ten years ago, I came up with some rules for myself as a reminder for me to get in the studio and make art. Now, these are not completely original and I borrowed heavily from the likes of nun and artist Corita Kent and writer Patti Digh, but I put my on slant on them and adapted ten basic principles to help guide me.

They’re not hard, fast rules that cannot be broken, but they are reminders of the things that I need to do in order to keep myself creating and making, and when I feel disconnected from my art, I turn to these rules to help give me a kick in the pants.

In this episode, I share the rules and try to give a little insight into each of them through general discussion and personal anecdotes.

As an artist, educator, and a writer, I believe that we are all creative — that we all have this innate creativity, but we may have gotten disconnected from it. In this inaugural episode of Artistic Accomplices, I introduce myself, explain a bit about my journey, and lay out the reasons why I wanted to begin this new venture. I give a little bit of my personal history, discuss my mission of helping people connect with their creativity, and share my vision for the podcast.

To connect with me and find out more about the things that I do, find me on the internet and on social media.

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