Review: Creative Time and Space

There is a reason Rice Freeman Zachery 's book, "Creative Time and Space" has five stars at Amazon.  It is terrific.

It took me a few days to read it, or rather savour it, and today I finished on a high note after watching this video at Ted.com talks about how we can easily make small changes, or try new things for 30 days.



One of several reasons the book is "terrific" is Rice Freeman Zachery's capacity to elicit both the mundane and the marvelous from each interview, regurgitate it into the written word, or in the case of her Notes from the Voodoo Lounge pod casts, spoken word, into meaningful, authentic responses.  It always seems as if she puts people at ease with her own ability to be real and spontaneous.

Although I was not familiar with many of those interviewed in Creative Time and Space, by the time I finished the book I felt as if I had been sitting beside them at a cafe sharing experiences.   And for those few artists I had read about, or followed over the years, I learned new information--all of which enriched my body of knowledge about how they work, what they think and who they are as people.

How it translates into my own "creative time and space" is yet to be tested, but what I do know is I accelerated cleaning up my "studio,"  have painted every day since I started the book, and feel a lightness that can be seen by Matt Cutts in his Ted.com talk.

I did many of the "try this" exercises, keeping my present journal at hand and jotting down the questions, and often stopping my reading, to do them.

One of the sections, "Soul Space" really hit me.   It covered to some extent, "play, " and most importantly "permission to play."  Playing is not something that comes easily to me and I am going to work on this as a concept and a reality in that "everyday matters" mind set.

On a scale from one to ten, I'll rate this book a whooping 9.