Look and Listen #34: Titus Underwood, Nashville Symphony
Titus Underwood is the Principal Oboe for the Nashville Symphony. You might assume that, as an artist with a highly educated and elite ensemble like a symphony, he wouldn’t encounter …
Conflict in the Warrior Archetype: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda
One of the most interesting aspects of the warrior archetype is the conflict between being a warrior and a soldier. This is at the center of Aïda, Giuseppe Verdi‘s opera about a tragic love …
Quote for Today: Chaim Potok
Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the …
Quote for Today: F. Sionil José
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve …
Quote for Today: Ken Robinson
The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; …
Of Mud and Poetry Contests: What Kind of Creative are You?
Flowers don’t often grow in clay and piles of mud seldom win sculpture contests. Are you using your creativity effectively? Mud is a substance with a myriad of uses, from …
Collaborations with the Self, Nature, and God: Sharon Strong’s Masks
Sharon Strong is a psychologist, a painter, a performance artist and a maker of masks who studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Sharon has worked as a …
Quote for Today: Michael Chabon
Yet entertainment–as I define it, pleasure and all–remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness …
Quote for Today: Stephen King
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the …
Quote for Today: Doris Ulmann
A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this …