Making Art and Experiencing Flow

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I've been making a lot of art lately and loving every single minute of it. I really didn't realize how much I had done until I started putting this post together and photographing all of the work. Teaching and making art are really the only things that I have accomplished in the last week or two.

I just finished writing a to do list for this week and have decided that I need to put some dedication into, putting away my laundry, cleaning the house, and getting some grading done at school as the first marking period is about to end. I always feel like I never have enough time to create everything that I want to.

I have been spending a lot of time studying creativity, manily creative thought, what it is, how it works. And one common theme that has popped up in a lot of the books that  I have read is the concept of " flow". The idea behind flow is the ablity to lose oneself in what they are doing, to expreience ecastsy. While studying flow, to help determine when people reach this state, people were given beepers that went off at random times throughout the day, whenever the beeper went off, the people had to write down what they were doing and how they were feeling. You can do this with yourself and your cell phone to help you determine what if anything that you do, puts you into the state of flow.

For me I really didn't need a beeper test, making art is the time that I experience flow, and it really has become something that is so pleasurable for me, that I rarely want to do anything else. Flow is normally reached when working on something that is challenging, but not so challenging that one can't solve the problem. It also tends to appear more in people that have been working in that perticular area for about 10 years. The reason for the 10 years, is the fact that to experince flow you normally need to have some form of mastery over a skill set.

Watch this TED talk for more information on Flow

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