Fernando Botero

"When you start painting, it is somewhat outside you.  At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting."

— Fernando Botero

Columbian Artist

1932 - 

Do you become a part of your art?  Your writing?  When you are finished, do you leave a part of yourself on the canvas or on the page?  Do you leave a part of yourself inside the characters you create?  Those who believe that they are separate from what they create are not being honest with themselves.  You and your art are connected at a very deep level.

Woman Drinking with Cat

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Sam Savage

"I really do think that art can save you in some sense.  It's the last meaning, unless you're religious — and I'm not religious.  It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have.  It's an immediate self-validating experience.  It lifts you beyond your mortal clay."

— Sam Savage

American Novelist

1940 - 

Art is a form of salvation.  Through art we can discover something beyond ourselves to believe in.  Through art we can discover who we are and who we are meant to be.  Through our art we may even find eternal life.  We can live beyond the grave.

The story of Sam Savage provides hope for all unrecognized painters, poets and novelists.  He toiled for years as an unpublished writer.  At the age of 55 he gave up writing.  A part of him died.  At the age of sixty, he picked up the pen again and wrote.  He said: "I started writing again because I'd given up.  I didn't expect anything from it."  In 2006, Coffee House Press published his first novel, Firmin, told from the perspective of a book eating rat.  The novel became an international best seller.  

Sam said in an interview with Kevin Larimer, "I just sort of quit — gave up completely.  I was fifty-five years old and I just gave up.  And it was total and sincere."  I believe he probably gave up because he felt like a failure.  And society would probably call him a failure.  But I don't think he was.  We make a mistake when we think that one has to be published to be a success.  

For me, success comes from the creative process itself.  If you create, you are a success.  The marketing and selling of the work is a business issue.  Just because there is not an audience for your work does not make you less successful as an artist.  Don't confuse the business of art with the creative process.  Remember that the creation of artistic works is a form of spiritual salvation.  

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Bernie Siegel

"Refusal to hope is nothing more than a decision to die."

— Bernie Siegel

American Author/Physician

1932 -

This week I received the latest issue of Poets & Writers magazine in the mail.  Inside, I found a story of Sam Savage who wrote for decades without publishing.  His debut novel was published when he was sixty-five.  Now he is an international best-selling author with his third novel being published.  There is always hope.  After writing for 36 years like I have, it is easy to settle for less than what one hoped for.  One convinces oneself to be satisfied with what he was given in life.  But there is always that slight sliver of hope that just maybe another opportunity lies just around the corner.   Choosing not to hope is a decision to give up — to die empty handed.  Don't give up on your dreams.  There is always hope no matter what your age.  

Listen to what Bernie Siegel has to say about play.

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Fryderyk Chopin

"Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties.  After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."

Fryderyk Chopin

Polish Composer/Pianist

1810 - 1849

Have you achieved simplicity in your artistic works?  Or is your work full of complex, paradoxical ideas?  I have been accused of making things too simple — of boiling down complicated ideas to the simplest of ideas.  Writing haiku for seven years taught me a lot about simplicity.  Simplicity does not mean dumb or stupid or ignorant.  Sometimes the most brilliant ideas can be expressed in a few simple words.  Sometimes wisdom can be conveyed in a single brush stroke of black ink or a few notes on a piano. 

Take a break and relax to this piece by Chopin.  It may release your creative juices.  

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Robert Mapplethorpe

Self-Portrait
(1980)

"My work is about seeing — seeing things like they haven't been seen before."

— Robert Mapplethorpe

American Photographer

1946 - 1989

One of main functions of any art form is to help people see something they had not seen before — to open their eyes to new ways of viewing the world.  Does your creative work shed new light on the way we view the world?  Does it help us see beyond our small private worlds and help us grasp a greater meaning about life?

Part of our role as creative leaders is to show people that there are multiple ways of viewing the world in which we live.  There is not just one reality but multiple realities.  Great art changes people in multiple ways.  Our hearts and minds open and begin to see in ways we have never seen.

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Pearl Buck

"I never look at the papers again.  My secretary types them out and my husband edits them.  I never had anything more to do with a book until it is published . . . . I cannot stand to read over anything I write.  My husband takes care of everything for me except the first draft.  He works in the other half of the house."

— Pearl Buck

American Novelist

1892 - 1973

I am fascinated by the work habits of writers and artists.  Each one is unique and different and brings a special insight to the creative process.  We all find ways to draw on the creative spirit when we need it.

Pearl Buck was American born, but raised in poverty-stricken rural China by missionary parents and her Chinese nanny.  Her father, Absalom, was always traveling, attempting to convert the Chinese with little success.  He had ten converts in ten years.  Her mother, Carie,  buried most of her children in China and filled Pearl's heart with stories of America.  Her nanny, Wang Amah, filled her mind with tales of demons, dragons and spirits.  Educated in an American college, Buck returned to China with her husband, John Lossing Buck, only to be abandon for months at a time by her traveling husband, much like her mother was.  Both her father and her husband were obsessed with work.  Her father wanted to spread the word of God and her husband was passionate about Chinese farming.

Pearl Buck began writing at age 35.  Always a storyteller, Buck's most famous second novel, The Good Earth, was published in 1931 when she was 39 and she was honored with a Pulitzer Prize.  In 1938 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.  She published 38 novels, 16 collections of short stories, and 11 works of non-fiction between 1930 - 1974, sometimes as many as two books a year.

Hilary Spurling, in her biography, Pearl Buck in China, says: She spent every morning at her desk, emerging exhausted, dazed, and stupefied from these sessions with what she called her book people, or sometimes her real people.  She wrote longhand without revision or correction, seldom pausing, covering page after page at phenomenal speed in a small compact script, producing on average 2,500 words at a sitting."  She gave her manuscript to her second husband and publisher, Richard Walsh, who edited them for publication.

Every creative leader has different work habits.  What are yours? 

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Albert Camus

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads."

— Albert Camus

French Algerian Novelist

1913 - 1960

Are you in harmony with the life you have chosen to lead?  Or do you have multiple personalities?  Do you behave one way today and another tomorrow?  Are you in conflict with yourself?  Or are you at peace with the person you are?  Sometimes we spend a lifetime searching for happiness.  And we only find it when we make peace with who we are and what we have done.  Shake your hand and give yourself a hug.  You are all you have.  Accept the person you are.  

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