And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk more.
Erica Jong

How dull a life must be without taking risks.

Keep a daily risk journal.

The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances –
are the primary sources of creativity.
Margaret Wheatley

Does the corporate world pay lip service to encouraging creativity?

It is more important to spend more time on your vision than developing a marketing plan.
If you are open to change, to connecting, to transformation; you will need a new plan every day.
Anonymous

This truth is contrary to everything you have been taught about marketing.
What if you did create a new marketing plan each day?
Try it on for a week and see how it feels to focus on your vision.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A.A. Milne

What is your relationship with chaos?

I’m not an abstract artist …. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else.
I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.
And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures
shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions …
The people who weep before my pictures are having
the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.
Mark Rothko

What artwork have you seen that made you weep?
I have been to the Sistine Chapel a half dozen time.
It always brings me to my knees.

Worrying about the future is like trying to eat the hole of a doughnut. It’s like munching on what isn’t.
Jerry Braza

This is kind of like there being no there there.

Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time.
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off,
and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly,
except to people who don’t understand.”
From The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery Williams

I vow to read The Velveteen Rabbit every year until I get real.

And you?

Be who you is,
Not who you ain’t.
‘Cause if you ain’t who you is,
Then you is who you ain’t.

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Detail from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam

Fresco – Sistine Chapel

Sooner or later most visual creators find themselves drawing, painting, photographing, writing about hands. This idea stimulator may help you take that exploration to new places. Here are a couple of dozen idioms related to hands. Use them as a point-of-departure for new ideas.

Sleight of Hand

This Stimulator grew from an article by Michael Frank Ashington for an exhibition on the human hand. Read this excerpt:

Aristotle called it the instrument of instruments. He said that it “is for the body as the intellect is for the soul,” and he saw it as ideal for grasping in senses both actual and figurative. Quintilian believed that the gestures it made were almost as expressive as words. The great Greek physician Galen found the intricate relationships among its muscles, bones and ligaments “amazing and indescribable.

Leonardo dissected it. Rembrandt, when he came to depict Dr. Tulp teaching anatomy, portrayed his subject taking it apart. The English monk Bede developed a system of finger reckoning on it. The deaf have articulated it to represent an alphabet since the 16th century. The future has been divined upon it for as long as there has been a future to divine.

The hand. The remarkable, nimble, fluttering, fingering, caressing, knowledge-giving, beauty-rendering, seldom-still hand. The music-making, pencil-holding, brush-guiding hand. The praying hand. The hand that takes up arms; the hand that sets them down again and shakes another to make peace. The hand of the artist — his style. The flipping-off hand (in the Middle Ages Isidore of Seville reported that the offending finger was known as impudicus, or shameless). The law, given to Moses, “a sign unto thee upon thine hand.”

It is everywhere: in science, in literature, in legends, in paintings — and in more than 80 fascinating and varied images on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library here, where they have been mounted together in an exhibition called “Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.” The show is a piece of genuine curatorial flair: it edifies, it amuses, it’s packed with knowledge. It is often handsome to look at; sometimes it’s a little bit top heavy with exegesis. There isn’t much narrative to link together all these representations of the hand, but there are a lot of ideas.

The exhibition spans the years 1466, the date of the earliest printed image on display, and 1700, the year that, Claire Richter Sherman, its curator, writes in the catalog, “marks the waning of ancient patterns of thought regarding the body as nature’s or God’s highest creation in favor of a mechanistic world view.” (Some pieces do, however, spill into the 18th century.)

How many words or expressions can you come up with referring to the human hand?

Out of hand. Hand’s off. Guiding hand. Hand out. Outstretched hand. Shake hands. Handyman. handkerchief. Lend me a hand. I want to hold your hand. Hand made. How about handcuff, hand down, handicap, handle. Hired hand. Old hand. Sleight of hand. Upper hand. Ships’s hand. Off hand. On hand. On the other hand. Raise your hand. Do not raise your hand to me. Put your hands together. Hand over fist. Wait ’til I get my hands on you. Clap hands. Hand me down. Laying on of hands. Waiting on someone hand and foot. First hand. Second hand. She/he was putty in my hands. He is my right hand man. Put your hands where I can see them! I have to hand it to you.

Use hands as a point-of-departure for new work.

Hands On

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
St. Francis of Assisi

What combination of laborer, craftsman, and artist best represents you? If you are not an artist, how can you put more heart into your work?

Many omit the heart and consider it frivolous. One of my clients recently said, “I would develop a portfolio of personal work, if I knew how people would respond and if it would lead towards increasing my business.” Certainly the marketing of creativity is a business. However, the creation of art is heart energy. What holds you back from working with your hands, head and heart?

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong

Answer Ms. Jong’s question.

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