Author: Kyna Leski File Type: pdf Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writers block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In this book, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process. Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us -- if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions only when we realize what we dont know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence -- with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects -- propelling the process. We perceive and conceive we look ahead without knowing where we are going we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaudis Sagrada Familia. Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery. BThe Creative ProcessBUnlearningProblem MakingGathering and TrackingPropellingPerceiving and ConceivingSeeing AheadConnectingPausingContinuing **Review A definitive guide to swimming through creative chaos, The Storm of Creativity shows us how to flow effortlessly through the process of birthing new, original ideas into the world. (Joe Gebbia, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb) We spiral through our lives trying to do our work, and Kyna Leski understands the elusive complexity of it all. I love the air and light in the book. Thank God she has written a how-not-to book that helps us understand how to do it. And not do it. (Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty) This is a book about the thoughtful journey of creativity. Life is about going from not knowing to knowing. This blank, this zero from which I start every project is understood by Kyna Leski. Going from not knowing to knowing is my time of peace, and it is the time of creativity. This theme, threaded throughout the book, is a source of confidence and terror all at once. It is how we give up comfort and preconception to discover the essence of design. You will enjoy reading Kyna Leskis illuminating account of the creative process. (Richard Saul Wurman) I have always believed that a true creative process begins with a state of ambiguity because true creativity happens when it deviates, and your judgment can rely only on your level of impulse. In The Storm of Creativity, Kyna Leski vividly describes with precision and in a few words how such initial ambiguous emotion and imagination can become, from beginning to finish, a form of clarity. (Wang Shu, Dean, School of Architecture, China Academy of Art 2012 Pritzker Prize winner) There is perhaps no intellectual who is as in tune with the vulnerability of the creative process and the uncertainty from which innovation emerges as Kyna Leski. On the one hand, her focus on unlearning takes us back to our most elemental moments of learning as a child, but also, on the other hand, to our most corrupted ideological predispositions. In her thinking, she develops critical mechanisms that braid the arts, sciences, and humanities to bring the various disciplines into conversation as part of the process of discovering. In this book, Leski brings the best of Cooper culture, as a school of thought, to a broader audience. (Nader Tehrani, Dean, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union) About the Author Kyna Leski is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and a Founding Principal of 3six0 Architecture.

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa File Type: epub A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual lifeIn the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation--penned by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today. Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot--whose essay Notes Toward a Definition of Culture is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished--Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition he will not bite his tongue. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

Author: Steven Naifeh File Type: epub Jackson Pollock was more than a great artist, he was a creative force of nature. He changed not only the course of Western art, but our very definition of art. He was the quintessential tortured genius, an American Vincent van Gogh, cut from the same unconforming cloth as his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and James Dean--and tormented by the same demons a cowboy artist who rose from obscurity to take his place among the titans of modern art, and whose paintings now command millions of dollars. Here, for the first time, is the life behind that extraordinary achievement--the disjointed childhood, the sibling rivalry, the sexual ambiguity, and the artistic frustration out of which both artist and art developed. Based on more than 2,000 interviews with 850 people, Jackson Pollock is the first book to explore the life of a great artist with the psychological depth that marks the best biographies of literary and political figures. In eight years of research the authors have uncovered previously unknown letters and documents, gained access to medical and psychiatric records, and interviewed scores of the artists friends and acquaintances whose stories had never been told. They were also the first biographers in twenty years to benefit from the cooperation of Pollocks widow, Lee Krasner. The results of these unprecedented efforts lie before you a rich, sprawling, landmark biography of one of the most compelling figures in all of American culture a brilliant, explosive portrait of the artist, intimately detailed, abundantly illustrated (with more than 200 photographs from Pollocks life and work, many of them never before published), and filled with new information and new insights. In a style as richly textured, engrossing, and poignant as the best of contemporary literature, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith give us the family crucible out of which the artist and his art emerged. Beginning with Jacksons birth on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, we follow the Pollock family on a relentless trek across the American West, as their dreams of a better life somewhere else are repeatedly frustrated. We see the young Jack Pollock as a struggling art student in New York, escaping into drunken rages or throwing himself into the Hudson River in one of several attempts at suicide. Later, we see Pollock, by turns, gently affectionate and outrageously cruel, creatively bankrupt and heroically productive. We see him alternately fascinated and intimidated by his contemporaries Clement Greenberg, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Harold Rosenberg, Clyfford Still, Tennessee Williams. We see him enter into a tumultuous marriage with the painter Lee Krasner, creating a powerful alliance that will lead first to triumph, then to decline, and finally to death when, with his mistress at his side, Pollock smashes his car into a tree. But Jackson Pollock is more than the epic story of a tormented man and his sublime art, it is also a compulsively readable, sweeping saga of Americas cultural coming of age. From frontier Iowa to the dust bowl of Arizona, from the twilight of the Wild West to the desolation of Depression-era New York, from the excitement and experimentation of the Mexican muralists to the fanfare of the Surrealists visit to America, from the arts projects of the WPA to the explosion of interest and money that marked the beginning of the modern art world, Pollocks story unfolds against the dramatic landscape of American history. Here then is a definitive record of the journey of an artist, filled with piercing psychological insights, that brings us to a truer understanding of the power and pathos of creative genius. **

Author: Didem Havlioglu File Type: pdf The early modern Ottoman poet Mihri Hatun (14601515) succeeded in drawing an admiring audience and considerable renown during a time when few women were accepted into the male-dominated intellectual circles. Her poetry collection is among the earliest bodies of womens writing in the Middle East and Islamicate literature, providing an exceptional vantage point onintellectual history. With this volume, Havlioglu not only gives readers access to this rare text but also investigates the factors that allowed Mihri to survive and thrive despite her clear departure from the cultural norms of the time. Placing the poet in the context of her era and environment, Havlioglu finds that the poets dramatic, masterful performance and subversiveness are the very reasons for her endurance and acclaim in intellectual history. Mihri Hatun performed in a way that embraced her marginal position as a woman and leveraged it to her advantage. Havlioglus astute and nuanced portrait gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman poet in a highly gendered society and suggests that women have been part of intellectual history long before the modern period.