Creative relationships, including romances, have inspired many artists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, and Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

[These are explored in a book by Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration]

This scene from the film Sideways (2004) shows the kind of casual meetings - parties, wine tastings, dinners, whatever - that can also stimulate our creative ideas.

Sometimes those meetings become more formalized, such as the Bloomsbury Group in the early 1900s, which included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, E. M. Forster, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and other writers and artists.

In her visually luscious and intellectually stimulating site The Soul Food Cafe, Heather Blakey has a section called Salon du Muse and notes, “Salons are informal gatherings where people talk big talk, talk meant to be listened to and perhaps passionately acted upon. Salons are incubators where ideas are conceived, gestated, and hatched… Salons are the frontiers of social and cultural change… They’ve been flourishing since ancient Greece.”

In her article Zen and the Art of Team Blogging, she talks about a kind of virtual version of a salon, in which participants “are provided with threads, which inspire them to write or complete artwork… They are given ideas, which are sown and planted and worked with.”

Individual blogs can do that too, of course.

Designer Susan Kirkland, for example, in her Graphic Design Forum blog post Separations, talks about the creative pleasures of freelancing, but also a common challenge: “If you get the axe, or you’re canned, fired, sacked, terminated, dismissed, discharged or even euphemistically, laid off; don’t despair because your new found freedom may just be the spark you need to change your life.”

While the old-style literary salon such as the Bloomsbury Group may be impractical for most of us, blogging can be a way to express ourselves, connect and gain support and inspiration.

In my article Gifted Women: Identity and Expression, I note that one of the issues related to being exceptional such as creative, may be social isolation. True peer relationships can be rare and demanding. And for those of us who are highly sensitive and disposed to solitary work, isolation can be both protective and a welcome choice.

So rather than having to sit around in a “smoky drawing room” to benefit from the creative stimulation of a salon, we have blogs - on our own or in a team - which can be a way to say what we want or need to express, and maybe get creatively stimulating responses.

> related pages:
collaboration
writing sites
sites : enhancing creativity

02.09.06 |
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