There are thousands of artists of all kinds asking the same things and doing the same things day after day.
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- Artists and performers practice.
- They evaluate and restructure.
- As they create and perform their art, they often struggle, build on strengths, and face their weaknesses.
- They regularly yield to new ways and change their methods.
- They succeed and they fail. And they try again.
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And while creating and performing takes effort—it’s a form of work—it truly moves them.
As I stood back and took a look at the growth in my own artistic life, I first noticed the increasing ability to do things I couldn’t do before, but it was truly life altering when I started to see the collection of those experiences from a larger perspective. The evaluation and changing patterns of action, thought, and habitual behavior that artists experience teach that sometimes you have to unlearn in order to learn!
Patterns are powerful:
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- They each tend to be a problem and a solution all wrapped up together. We gain sophistication and precision by understanding patterns.
- In the arts they create a sense of momentum. It is the way we grasp a sense of movement and meaning. Movement and meaning is a motivating factor that helps artists become more aware of their processes.
- They help develop higher order thinking skills like problem-finding, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis.
- They develop and use personal strengths in meaningful ways and help connect us to an understanding of concepts that are sometimes difficult.
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Hungarian composer Béla Bartók once likened his own artistic development to the pattern of a spiral—the artistic process that allowed him to deal with the same problems on an ever rising level, with correspondingly rising success.
The spiral is an interesting metaphor for the work of an artist. Read more…
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