“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.“
Jean Dubuffet

I love that. After a week of writing, getting lost in alternate worlds and spending more time in my head puzzle solving, inventing and musing, it can be hard to bring myself back to reality- in whatever form. Though I will never be as bizarre as the artists below, I love them for their creativity, for their imagination, for their bravery. I wish I had more friends like that, people who understand that it’s much too easy to be sane, to conform to a societal mold, to dismiss all of God’s gifts by putting human restrictions first.
It’s the artist who breaks free that intrigues me, that wins my respect.

( From 1942 to 1985, Dubuffet found himself drawn to the art of children and madmen, which he endowed with legitimacy and credibility as Art Brut. This in turn inclined him towards extreme forms and the expressive scrawls and scribbles of graffiti, and prompted him to begin experimenting with materials such as bitumen, sand and plant fibers, which made him one of the earliest and most prominent Matter artists.)

Manoir d’Essor, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

Jean DUBUFFET, Galeries Lafayette, 1961, gouache sur papier

of course I’ll mention some well-known experimental writers: Italo Calvino, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, Michael Ondaatje, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Julio Cortázar.
they will change not only the way you read, but the way you think.
As will Robert Olen Butler if your read his book, Severance.
(a sequence of monologues from decapitated heads working on the concept that a head can live for 90 seconds after decapitation and humans speak at a rate of 160 words a second when in a “heightened state of emotion,” for a grand total of 240 words for each monologue)

I won’t even go into all the other literature devices ( read more here) but I do thank Shannon for introducing me to oulipo. A form that gave me a new exciting place to play, opened up a piece of me that needed exploring.

Musicians – way too many to mention in way too many fields- you know who I mean.. and we may not agree… but each one in their way changed the course of music by going out on a ledge with their ideas, by rocking the norm, by choosing to believe in themselves. And then there are musicians that take chances like this:

I love to discover quirky new music, watch odd, smart independent films and challenge myself every day to see something from someone else’s perspective, to ask, “What if…”

With that thought, I’ll share what I found this morning- how one guy found music in the ordinary

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Diego Stocco – Music From Sand from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.
Loris Malaguzzi