The Adjacent Possible Blog
Explore The Adjacent Possible, a foundational pillar for creativity on The Artist’s Journey. Insights into intersections of art, psychology and science.Sign up to get weekly Art & Creativity Blogs from Nancy Hillis
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Creativity & Illusion
Creativity & Illusion It's the New Year and we're back! The temptation today is to write about American politics or perhaps COVID or some other disease of the body and mind, but we will resist this temptation. Instead, Bruce will turn to one of his heroes for insight into more permanent things, the inimitable Einstein. Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein Bruce's Story People have wrangled over what this quote meant ever...
The Creative Journey Through Darkness Into Light
The Creative Journey Through Darkness Into Light In The Cycles of Creativity we talked about the special properties of this dark time of year, a season that seems drab and dreary and moribund, but is paradoxically anything but. This is a time of marshaling of energies. In the landscape, a leafless and brown terrain belies the activity that is occurring unseen and underground. Much of the world is invisible to human eyes and must be seen by the power of thought, the magic of...
Of Coffee, Creativity & Immortality
Art has one foot in the unchanging and the immortal. The other foot is in the physical realization of it, the blob of impasto paint, the rosin on the cello bow, the granite and the chisel.
Evolving Your Art: Q&A With Nancy Hillis
We had a lively Q&A session after the webinar last week. Artists enjoyed it and I think you might too.
Creativity & Fame: From Zero to Infinity
As we digest the excesses of Thanksgiving here in the US, we invite you to explore the transience of fame
through the lens of art, creativity and physics My Little Pony and Euclid make cameo appearances And we end up ten feet underground.
Creativity & The Journey Of Un-Forgetting
Remembering what you didn’t know you lost can be one of the hardest things you ever do in your life. Water gives us access to our primordial origins- to a state of possibility, infinite in all directions. Creativity is like the un-forgetting of swimming, a liberation into a whole new reality, an ocean of possibility.
Memetic Barium & The Languages Of Creativity
Combining two things to create a new third thing is one of the two pillars of generating novelty in the evolution of ideas, the other being mutation. We build accelerators to smash particles together to divine their inner structure.
What if we could build an accelerator that instead smashed concepts together to create new ones?
We decided to try it out. Come see what we found, no radiation suit required.
Art & Complexity
Art is a kind of poised instability. Art is poised between creation and collapse and the juice is at the edge. Most epiphanies are not sudden and surprising if you dig into them deeply, they basically are the result of lots of previous work which the outside world may not recognize. If you continue exploring with one foot in the known and one foot in the unknown, you will create things that you weren’t able to see before. And in some cases didn’t exist before. That’s the unknown, unknown.
Creativity, the Universe & Nine Billion Names
We live in a world where stepping into the adjacent possible affects the spectrum of possibilities that open up after that, the only concrete question in life is what to do next. Everything else is abstract. But deciding what to do next requires an awareness of what we *can* do next. And this requires search.
Start Your Art Interview & Demo: Misty Olsen & Nancy Hillis
The time to start your art is now. There is an old saying: “Find joy in your life, it’s later than you think”. Dead women don’t paint, write books or play cello.
Procrastination & Creativity: The Hidden Lessons
Procrastination affects us all, but offers insights into creativity. A theory about the origin of life can help us get stuff done.
What You’re Afraid Of Is Where The Juice Is
Trust yourself to explore the things that scare you in your art. These are the nascent, unexpressed, unexplored parts of yourself where your un-lived dreams reside. This is the realm of play, improvisation, and pure creativity. This is where the juice is.
FREE WORKSHOP: The #1 Secret to Creating Authentic Abstract Paintings You Love!
You question your talent, and painting becomes arduous and painful. You feel lost, wanting to express yourself but not knowing how. But when you learn the #1 secret to creating authentic abstract paintings, it all changes. Finally, you're able to paint with joy and create art you love.
