Talent Development Resources..........perspectives on talent  & creative expression : page 2

.. .. The creative process in women may emerge differently than in males, and in some women, it may have difficulty in emerging. WomenÇs perceptions of the creative process in art as well as other areas have been filtered through male perspectives and the cultural roles developed for women but not by women. Therefore, female writers, artists, scientists and creators in all domains deal with male conceptions of creativity and a creative process that has been accepted as the standard within that domain, but may only be the standard for male creators. from article Toward a Theory of Creativity in Diverse Creative Women -  by Sally Reis, PhD.

Research with women in their late 20s, 30s, and older indicates that these women do not fear success, but often regard it with some ambivalence.  This ambivalence occurs not because they fear rejection from either peers or individuals in whom they may have a romantic interest, but rather because they don't desire the trappings which may accompany success. from article Internal barriers, personal issues, and decisions  faced by gifted and talented females - by Sally M. Reis, Ph.D. Most of the talented women I studied exhibited specific personality traits including determination, motivation, creativity, patience, and the ability to take and, in some cases, thrive on risks. The one trait clearly exhibited by every woman was determination. Sally Reis, PhD. **from her book Work Left Undone:  Choices and Compromises of Talented Women

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We don't get to choose our gifts and I feel obliged to honor them  and I'm lucky to make a living by them. actor Celia Weston ... [Los Angeles mag., Feb 2004]

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.. .. And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them. Louise Brooks - in her book Lulu in Hollywood

.. .. Neve Campbell.. has a new project lined up, "Lulu" about the great silent screen star Louise Brooks ("Pandora's Box" is her most famous film).  Brooks' close-cut bobbed hair became all the rage, but she was too smart, too restless, too much of an iconoclast to fit comfortably into Hollywood life.  She quit films to read, paint, write books and film criticism. She died in 1985. Campbell, a serious, intense actress, with a similarly independent spirit, would make a fine Louise.  Liz Smith column February 17, 2004

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I'm hardly Hollywood material - they're interested in youth and perfection and I lay no claims to either. It's not a place that's particularly interested in talent.  Juliet Stevenson... [imdb.com] her current acting credits include films "Bend It Like Beckham" & "Mons Lisa Smile"

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**Museums of the Mind: Magritte's Labyrinth and Other Essays in the Arts - by Ellen Handler Spitz Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte's mother committed suicide by drowning herself when he was 13. Spitz, a psychoanalytic critic, interprets his enigmatic paintings as signs of a lifelong struggle with this loss.  In this dense but intriguing scholarly miscellany, Spitz (Art and Psyche) muses on the absurd as manifested in Chekhov's play The Bear and in Freud's dissection of jokes; interprets Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as an avant-garde postmodernist work; and explores themes of nonconformity and rebellion in the film Dead Poets Society and in Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip whose six-year-old protagonist creates a florid fantasy life with his toy tiger.  In Sophocles's Antigone, Spitz finds an ethical imperative: conflicts in life must not be avoided. Her poignant concluding essay on Brundibar, a Czech children's opera that was performed many times by child inmates at the Nazis' Terezin concentration camp, illumines the power of art to inspire hope and a will to live. [Publishers Weekly]

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I was on fire when I went to meet him [writer director Neil LaBute - about being cast in the play "The Shape of Things"]. You don't ever read plays like that.  It's just very funny piece of writing which is about some very important profound issues on how couples are trying to change each other, and contemporary society's obsession with the surface of things like appearance and the way people look.  I was a fan of Neil and he's a wordsmith. ... I also love his writing because he's not an elitist. He writes plays that anybody and everybody can understand and they are about really big important issues.  He's provocative. He's a provocateur. People leave the cinema and already they are in a hot debate and I like it when writing does that. [Everything your character Evelyn did was for art. Did you ever have barriers in your own life about art? Did you have the similar type of credo like, "I will do anything for my art?"] No. I don't believe I'm good enough to have a credo like that. I think that you have to really believe you're good at what you do. I'm joking.

.. .. Yeah, I have tons and tons of boundaries all over the place as to what I will or won't do for the sake of the art. There are different degrees.  I wouldn't do anything to hurt anybody to do my art but I'm away from my family for months and months, so I hurt my family. Maybe I already crossed that boundary. Rachel Weisz from article The Shape of Things : An Interview with Rachel Weisz -  by Wilson Morales blackfilm.com May 2003

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.. .. writer/director Neil LaBute on his film The Shape of Things  Q : In reference to [performance artist] Evelyn's character, do you feel that often artists to make a statement will cross the line into what can be considered exploitation? And do you think there's ever a justification for artists putting issues ahead of people? Neil LaBute : Well, that's a good question, because I have definite feelings about Evelyn, and I do understand her.  I understand her drives. I don't know if I could ever agree with the methods that she used, but I understand her feelings.  Especially as a student -- I can actually, yes, still think back to when I was a student and can remember thinking that theater was more important than, certainly all my other classes and maybe life in general.  "I'm sort of alive when I'm in the theater and working and/or sitting and watching an audience watch what I've done. That's the best thing there is out there."  That's a little bit of the ends justifying the means. I don't know that I could personally create at the cost of other people's feelings or lives or that sort of thing. But I don't feel comfortable putting myself in a place to judge an artist who does that. //

.. .. I don't know if art is ever too much -- is there ever too far that we go.  There are places, personally, where I can say, "Yeah, that looks like art to me. Hmmm... that looks like pornography." Or this is good to me and this is bad.  But they are personal lines. I never feel strongly enough about them to say, "This is the way I think, and I also believe it's the way that you should think." from ART IN THE FLESH: An interview with The Shape of Things writer/director Neil LaBute. By Warren Curry cinemaspeak.com 5/7/03 ~ ~ Catching her about to deface an artwork, Adam (the excellent Paul Rudd) engages Evelyn (a revelatory Rachel Weisz) in conversation, establishing a rapport which amazes him by resulting in a relationship. Gradually she transforms him, from geek to chic. But as his friendships with lost love Jenny (Gretchen Mol) and her fiancé Phillip (Fred Weller) flounder, is his change for good or ill? Ditching a dodgy jacket is one thing, but how is Adam's transformation affecting his soul?    from BBC review The Shape Of Things  DVD  //  book

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The sainted Pauline Kael taught us: The movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we might as well stop going. Roger Ebert - from review of "Gothika" Nov 21, 2003

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The concept of genius, in the sense of a postulated set of specific personality characteristics and related thought processes determining whether or not one achieves greatness, is thus based on assumptions of questionable validity about how great creative works come about.  Based on the point of view to be elaborated in the rest of this book, we all possess the thought processes underlying creativity. Actual production of creative works, on the other hand, involves much more than cognitive processes -- among other things, very high degrees of persistence and motivation, which we do not all possess. In addition, once a creative work is produced, other factors, mostly out of the creator's control, determine whether or not the creator will be considered to possess genius. Robert Weisberg, PhD - in his book Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius

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....Creativity and Disease: How Illness Affects Literature, Art, and Music -  by Philip Sandblom, MD, PhD With a medical background and an interest in the arts, my attention was naturally drawn to the diseases of creators. Often I noticed a connection between their suffering and their work and have studied this in a number of authors, artists and composers. ... there are reasons to believe that connections between illness and the arts are close and common.

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....The Soul of Creativity: Insights into the Creative Process - by Tona Pearce Myers Assortment of essays offers personal stories about what creativity means to each of these renowned teachers, artists, and spiritual leaders. Don Campbell shows how attentive listening has fostered his creativity. Sark tells of her home's "Magic Cottage" (once a tool shed) where she writes all her books while lying on a futon mattress. Michelle Cassou speaks to her dream of "erasing the fine line between creator and creation." ... Five chapters: Brush with Inspiration, The Creative Process, The Dark Side, The Healing Power, and The Spiritual Practice.

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Talent is, indeed, a slippery concept, no matter what the form of creativity. But perhaps "artistic talent" has always seemed rare and out of the ordinary only because we expect it to be rare and out of the ordinary. We have become accustomed to thinking of artistic ability as basically unteachable...  Yet we do value creativity. We constantly seek ways in which to be more creative ourselves... But must we have a mysterious God-given talent to be creative? Or is it possible that creativity can be taught?  ....Betty Edwards - from her book Drawing on the Artist Within

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.. .. excerpt from article: Vassar's Groups  by Diane Swanbrow  [Michigan Today / University of Michigan, March 1993] Mary McCarthy's The Group is about bright, emotionally brittle Vassar women. She got the idea for her novel from a real-life study of Vassar grads in the summer of 1954. To find out what happened to McCarthy's prototypes, long after McCarthy's story ended, ask psychologist Donald Brown. .... Brown... details the findings from the study in two chapters of Women's Lives Through Time: Educated American Women of the Twentieth Century.  For nearly 40 years, through 1991, Brown's team repeatedly tested and probed the psyches of approximately 850 Vassar women from the classes of 1929,1935,1957 and 1958. ... [and] identified five predictable life patterns, five "groups" instead of the one crafted by McCarthy.  According to Brown and [co-author Rosemary] Pacini, the five groups are these:  SOCIALIZERS - About 60 percent of the college women studied fit this pattern, a percentage that's probably higher than would be found in many colleges today. Instead of focusing on their academic performance, they preferred spending time with peers.  Having fun in a socially acceptable way was their main preoccupation. "This group tends to show very little personal or intellectual growth during the college years," Brown says.  "They keep the same values, beliefs and ideas they had when they began their college years. They are capable of personal growth later in life, but it generally takes a serious problem, like divorce or the illness or death of a child, to shake them up and trigger change." .... OVER-ACHIEVERS - About 15 percent of the college women studied fit into this group, performing better academically than their college entrance scores would suggest.  Usually they came from affluent, well-educated families. Getting high grades was extremely important to them, and they didn't hesitate to use manipulation or flattery to reach their objective. "They tend to be quite insecure and unsure of themselves," Brown says.  After graduation, their lives were cautious and conservative. These "good girls" seemed to have the hardest time of any group navigating through the identity changes accompanying menopause and aging. .... UNDER-ACHIEVERS - The college grades of about 12 percent of the women did not reflect their abilities. Nevertheless, these were the women most likely to be judged "ideal" students by college faculty for being open, curious and valuing the life of the mind. During college they showed more signs of intellectual and emotional growth than any other group. .... HIGH ACHIEVERS - These women, about 12 percent of the sample, tested and performed well in college, then went on to intense and high-powered professional careers. ...  In childhood and adolescence, high achievers were likely to have experienced intense conflicts with domineering but uneducated mothers, toward whom they continued to feel considerable repressed hostility and guilt. .... IDENTITY-SEEKERS - A scant 1 percent of the women studied were unhappy, confused and unable to achieve stability in their lives without prolonged therapy, drastic changes in their environment or both.  In youth and middle age, their intellectual interests and personal growth were largely abandoned in the maelstrom of their personal struggles. The most likely to divorce, they seldom had mates. Later in life, however, some of these troubled souls bloomed, having discovered their personal and professional strengths. "The most encouraging finding from this study," Brown concludes, "is that change is always possible. Some of these women found personal and intellectual growth more difficult than others, largely as a result of their early family backgrounds and experiences.  "But women in all five groups demonstrated the capacity to learn and change throughout their lives-some of them well into their 80s."  Pacini also sees reason for optimism in the lifecourses of these women. "Their lives show that you can have a lot of problems and make a lot of mistakes and still wind up okay," she says.  "You don't have to pick your life's course at the age of 22 and rigidly adhere to it. You can change paths midway through, go back to school, resume a career or start a family. The one lesson of their lives for today's college women is that life is fairly flexible ff you have the motivation to make the changes that are necessary." ~ ~ ~ ....book: Kathleen Day Hulbert, Diane Tickton Schuster. Women's Lives Through Time:  Educated American Women of the Twentieth Century photo above from The Group (1966) [VHS] starring Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett,  Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight, Joanna Pettet and others ....based on book: The Group by Mary McCarthy related articles: Gifted Women: Identity and Expression by Douglas Eby Internal barriers, personal issues, and decisions faced by gifted and talented females by Sally M. Reis related book: Sally M. Reis, Ph.D. Work left undone: Compromises and challenges of talented females

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The constraints of personality are no more rigorous than other, better known constraints: the opportunities and limitations of one's historical time, for example, the styles that it seems to permit, the patronage it offers, and the regressive level of expression it seems to require.  Artists need not be aware of these constraints in order to work within them any more than they need be aware of the constraints of personality, but we may well wonder why the historical ones seem easier to accept than the psychological ones. I should think it is because we have come to see personal expression as the assertion of freedom against the constraints of the past and present, and to be compelled to view the personal as constrained in its own right seems like an insult to our narcissism.

.. .. Pavel Machotka ....from his book: Style and Psyche :  The Art of Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John Pavel Machotka is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Creativity photo by Todd Phillips from UC Santa Cruz site related page: painting

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"Roses" [1925] photo by Tina Modotti

We can think of talent as being made up of three elements: individual traits, which are partly inherited and partly developed as a person grows up; cultural domains, which refer to systems of rules that define certain ranges of performance as meaningful and valuable; and social fields, made up of people and institutions whose task is to decide whether a certain performance is to be considered valuable or not. ...  Folk wisdom holds that "talent will out"; in other words, we shouldn't worry about supporting individuals who show promise in certain domains, because if they are truly talented they will express their gifts regardless of help or hindrance. ...  We take the opposite position,, we claim not only that potential talent often remains unexpressed, but also that the very concept of talent is meaningless except in a context of cultural forms and social recognition. ...  Talent is a process that unfolds over many years... Historical conditions always affect the flowering of talent. ....from book: Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.  Talented Teenagers   << related article: Creativity and Flow Psychology

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We need the stories from artists, we need the poetry, we need the music, we need the artwork, everything. We need that in order to know what life is. And how to go on and make any kind of relationship with other people. We need it to have any kind of apprehension of what it is to be human. Otherwise we're always at the forefront, moment by moment, and we have only the fumbling ways of getting there, and we learn by our mistakes. No wonder it takes an entire life to finally get a tiny bit of wisdom. Well, wisdom is available in the arts. That's where it is! Free. Almost free. We need everything we can get to have a little bit of wisdom about living. Ruth Stone.. [LA Times, January 5, 2003] - she won the National Book Award for "In the Next Galaxy" and has received the $150,000 Wallace Stevens Prize from the Academy of American Poets ....In the Next Galaxy   //   Ordinary Words

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Artists see things with different eyes and allow us to take a step back and reflect on what we do. Scientific research is supposed to be about everything, but even at universities we are pushed to be quite narrow. We lose sight of the big picture, so this [project] is a good thing for us.  The artists I had met before were so non-concrete, so touchy-feely. I appreciate their work, but I didn't think the collaboration would be easy. But the artists we are working with understand our mind-set very well, maybe more than we understand theirs. We are much closer than I thought. Pietro Perona, director of Caltech's Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering - about "Neuro," a yearlong art-science collaboration between Art Center College of Design and Caltech.  [LA Times Feb 16 2003] *related page:**awareness / thinking

image: stand-in for project of  Jennifer Steinkamp:  "..projecting computer-generated  graphics in Caltech's Athenaeum."  [from Neuro site]

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In America, we often hear the phrase "the best and the brightest," as if we in any remote way consider them to be the same thing. In reality, we always appreciate a president, like Reagan of Bush, who leaves the country a little stupider than he found it, and we never fail to swoon for a smear campaign that labels some poor bastard an egghead...  It's not that other countries have any more or less intellectuals than we do, it's just that in other places they seem to be admired instead of despised. After America has broken down so many prejudices based on race, sexism and religion, isn't our bias against brains still the most dangerous of all? ... If you don't believe that America is anti-intellectual, then why is it that on Gilligan's Island the character who had the worst billing was the Professor?  *from book:*Does Anybody Have a Problem With That? : Politically Incorrect's Greatest Hits by Bill Maher

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I have very different reactions to my work. For example, in Europe I'm kind of a hero for all young girls. I give them the feeling that you can redo your own stuff and if you are a little fanatic on your profession, that you can really do your own thing.  I get a lot of personal direct reaction from people -- "It comforts me" or "It excited me" or "It made me think about things," and I have files filled in with letters of reactions. In life, the imagined problems are bigger than they really are.  So if you want to do something, you think you cannot do it, but if you could just forget the rules, it is always less difficult than imagined. Our possibilities are bigger than we think.  Pipilotti Rist   from interview on EGG the Arts Show - pbs.org still from her video: Ever is Over All: woman walking along a sidewalk, then smashing a car window **Pipilotti Rist by Peggy Phelan, et al  /     Pipilotti Rist: Apricots along the Streets by Pipilotti Rist

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The sheer size of the Cultural Creative population is already affecting the way Americans do business and politics. They are the drivers of the demand that we go beyond environmental regulation to real ecological sustainability, to change our entire way of life accordingly.  They demand authenticity - at home, in the stores, at work, and in politics. They support women's issues in many areas of life. They insist on seeing the big picture in news stories and ads. This is already influencing the marketplace and public life. from The Cultural Creatives : How 50 Million People Are Changing the World  by Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D.

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People who come out of an older generation are from what the Japanese call a "manual world"-- when a show of Push Pin Studios opened in Japan many years ago, the person introducing the panel said, "And now, some people from the manual world"-- as opposed to the new digital world.  They really made a demarcation between the digital generation and people who were trained through drawing and through physically creating things, which I think has a profound effect on the way you look at the world, the structure of your brain.

The world of the computer is more a world of potentially collage-ic activity, using the existing world and applying it.  It extends the reach of some people who are not capable of doing things manually, who are not skilled enough, or interested enough, but it also puts you in a realm where everything already exists -- you modify what exists, but it's much harder to originate material at this point in the technology.     Milton Glaser  [LA Times September 2 2001]    [photo from miltonglaser.com] **book: Art Is Work : Graphic Design, Interiors,         Objects, and Illustrations - by Milton Glaser

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"We know now how to train creativity, and I think we should be providing every child with the skills he or she needs to express creativity throughout his or her life. We give all of our children basic basketball skills. Why not give them basic creativity skills?  "I think novel behavior in and of itself has value, even if people are just reinventing wheels. Let's give every child the skills he or she needs to reinvent the wheel. If we could tap that kind of potential, with nearly everyone generating art, science and invention, think of the enormous pool of novelty that would be available to us."   Robert Epstein, Ph.D.    Editor-in-Chief, Psychology Today       book: The Big Book of Creativity Games

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< Ingrid Sischy      Camille Paglia >

Ingrid Sischy: "Here we're living in a time when so many advances are being made,
especially in science, that one would think that this would lead to incredible new
ways of looking at the world.

Camille Paglia: "You're right, those advances are fantastic, but they're not carrying over
into humanities departments where social constructionism is still the dominant code.
Students going into the arts may be tech-savvy, but they're being indoctrinated with
anti-science bias. ...

PC voices at the elite schools are training students to dismiss science as ideology. ...
It's absolute madness -- when one of the best ways to help an aspiring artist is to
open the mind to the enormity and grandeur of nature, to recognize how little we
actually know about ourselves."

    [Interview magazine, Sept. 2001]

   Ingrid Sischy is editor in chief of Interview magazine;

   Camille Paglia is author of a number of books including  Sex, Art, and American Culture

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