I have a love/hate relationship with the feeling of melancholy. It happens to me a lot…sometimes for inexplicable reasons. My mother had it too, and I always remember when she was sad and didn’t want to communicate with anyone she delved into some creative project- sewing… painting…or even building a tiki bar! Perhaps I inherited it, but the more overwhelmed I am by these “blue funks” I seem to want to create things. Most of my song lyrics for History for Music Lovers were wr

I often talk about, as an intro to my Creativity presentations, the fact that a lot of people who meet me for the first time ask, “Are you an artist?” At first I apologetically replied “no”, despite the fact they probably caught me in the act of sketching in public. (my new response is “aren’t we all?”). Another common one I get is, “you must be in the fashion industry”, perhaps because I am usually a tad overdressed or whimsically dressed and always in black. Identity in the

While brainstorming for an upcoming keynote on Creativity, I started thinking about the artists whose lives I have studied a bit (as a former World History teacher) and what we could learn from them – not particularly from their oeuvres, but from their creative process and the way they lived. At first I set out to make one comprehensive post, but then recoiled, thinking it would be too overwhelming. So, this will be a blog series of sorts, highlighting one artist per post. LE