Showing posts with label Book Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Reviews. Show all posts

Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic by Lisa Congdon (2019)

, 8 Oct 2022

This is a very enjoyable, simple-to-read sound book with great advice for artists (from beginners to emerging) on how to develop our artistic voice. It delves into what an artistic voice is, why is important having one, how to find it, and the struggles to get one. 
 
The book inserts ten interviews with renowned professional artists (mostly illustrators and mostly women) and asks these and other questions to them. They also discuss the creative process in general. The artists interviewed are: 1/ Sean Qualls & Selina Alko. 2/ Andrea Pippins. 3/ Fin Lee. 4/ Kindah Khalidy 5/Andy J Miller 6/ Danielle Krysa 7/ Kate Bingaman-Burt 8/ Libby Black 9/ Ayumi Horie 10/ Martha Rich. My fav interview was, Kate Bingaman-Burt's. 
 
Ireally love Congdon's delightful humorous illustrations spread throughout the book.
Our artistic voice is the art that we make when we listen to our inner truth and convey it to the world in our personal way. Our artistic voice is made of "all of the characteristics that make your artwork distinct from the artwork of other artists, like how you use colors or symbols, how you apply lines and patterns, your subject matter choices, and what your work communicates." (p. 7).

Congdon says that to find our voice we need to show up, make art every day, be disciplined, practice-practice-practice, 'positivize' boredom and embrace our fears and self-doubt. We also need tons of patience because, as mastering a musical instrument takes years of hard work, so does Art. Embracing our fears and doubts is especially important for beginners, and, that being the case, we have to have compassion and patience with ourselves and our mistakes, with the disasters and the ugly pieces, because they're the stepping stones on which our artistic voice is gonna be built. For the rest, all the interviewees agree on the fact that hard work and expressing our personal truth, who we are, are the recipe to find our artistic voice. Except for some 'geniuses', most professional artists have to work at it. Congdon says, "The unfolding of your voice requires showing up and working hard. It requires being willing to create failures, to ask for feedback, and to go back and try all over again. It requires staying open. It requires moving outside what’s comfortable and being vulnerable." (p. 119).
 



STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP YOUR VOICE
Congdon recommends twelve strategies for developing our own artistic voice, and they are:
1/ Make art every day, even for a few minutes. 
2/ When things get hard or tough don't stop; keep going. 
3/ Embrace monotony and boredom to break through and experiment. 
4/ Create challenges and stick to them, no matter who's paying attention to them, even if it's just ourselves. 
5/ Learn to practice mindfulness when we go outside into the world to notice new things, new colours, curious weird stuff. 
6/ Find a space to be alone to create. 
7/ Find a feedback partner or critique group. 
8/ Take classes. 
9/ Brainstorm. 
10/ Develop your vocabulary of interests, knowledge, and ideas. 
10/ Support other artists and learn from other artists. 
11/ Stay open to all experiences.
 MIND
The book is intended mostly for artists who want to have an artistic career or are professional artists. Yet, the advice is great also for everyone, even beginners like me, who want to have a distinctive voice and express their own world view through Art.

THINGS I MISSED
The interviews with other artists are very interesting, but I see them fitter for a blog or art magazine. Besides, some of the most important points they make could have been summarized for the reader without the need to go through the whole interview. Also, I would have loved having the invited artists' artwork featured in the book (like 2-4 medium size images per head) as well as their website and social media accounts listed.
      
 
 

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Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang (2016)

, 8 Sept 2022

Some images simply work, they feel right to us. We don't consciously know what makes images work because many times, when we look at an image, we attribute value to what we like. However, an image works or doesn't regardless whether we like it or not. So, which elements or principles make an image work?

This is the premise for Picture This. Molly Bang asked herself this question 25 years ago, dived into the world of imagery and then came up with a series of principles that make any image work and give it more or less expression and emotional content.

 
BASIC PRINCIPLES SUMMARY
These are basic staple principles that Bang lists and are grounded in our instinctive positive or negative responses to the world. The concepts are always used in combination and within a given context.
> Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm.
> Vertical shapes are more exciting and active. Vertical shapes rebel against the Earth's gravity. They imply energy and a reaching.
>  Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension.
>  The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness and power; objects placed in the top half also often feel more spiritual. The bottom half of a picture feels more threatened, heavier, sadder or constrained. Objects placed in the bottom half also feel more grounded.
>  The center of the page is the point of greatest attraction.
>  The edges and corners of a the picture are the edges and corners of the picture-world.
>  White or light backgrounds feel safer to us than dark backgrounds because we can see well during the day and only poorly at night.
>  We feel more scared looking at pointed shapes and more secure or comforted looking at rounded shapes or curves.
>  The larger an object is in a picture, the stronger it feels.
> We associate the same or similar colours much more strongly than we associate the same or similar shapes.
> Regularity and irregularity—and their combinations—are powerful.
> We notice contrasts as contrast enables us to see.
> The movement and import of the picture is determined as much by the spaces between the shapes as by the shapes themselves.
I LOVED
> The book  feels fresh despite this being the 25th anniversary of the first edition.
> The book is short and sweet and gives artists some tools to consciously create images and scenes that work. Some of these rules might sound simplistic, but most of us would not come up with this conclusions when looking at any sort of artistic imagery. //
>  Bang explains everything in simple language and using minimal imagery that shows, without a doubt,  how and why images work.  
> The initial chapter "Building Emotional content of Pictures" in which Bang uses simple shapes, basic colours and an exploratory approach to build an image for Red Riding Hood. as she verbalizes her art process. I also loved the example she gives at the end of the book, with imagery from her illustration book When Sophie Gets Angry—Very, Very Angry, exploring her depiction of the arch of feelings in the book.
> The  exercises mentioned at the end of the book. Even if I haven't done them yet, because the advice given is sound when creating an effective picture. One of my takes from this section is also the fact that, sometimes, we tend to focus on the details in a picture, but the question is, are the details necessary and contribute to enhance the feeling or message or emotional impact of the picture, or a distraction? 
 
 
DOWNSIDES
> The epigraphs font size is too big and there is no gradation in sizing when there are sub-epigraphs or big sections. That's an edition problem that can be easily fixed in the Kindle edition.
>  Bang mentions that the principles are a work in progress. Since these principles were explored and listed 25 years ago, I would have loved Bang mentioning if any others can be added . 
 > I would have loved having some famous paintings being analyzed following each of the principles listed, so that we could see them working in action. This would have rounded the book beautifully and it is easy to do digitally. 

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The Design Book: New Edition by Phaidon Editors

, 6 Aug 2021

I purchased this book because I wanted a work to add to my interior design Taschen books, and this seemed to be comprehensive. It is indeed a nice coffee table book, both informative and entertaining, and nicely printed. It is not as tiny as some of the other reviewers made me think. It is on the small size, for sure.

I LIKE
> Portable and compact coffee-table sort of book.
> Elegant cover and inner cover design.
> Pleasurable paper stock.
> Informative without being a bore. Easy to read.
> Mix of design pieces (think Aalto, anything produced by Alessi or Jansen) and invented/patented pieces that are part of our daily lives (zip, Dixon pencil, safety pin, metal dustbin, cylinder lock, door handle, corkscrew, etc.).
> Very good photos overall. Many of them are vintage images of the designers or of the adds used to sell the products.
> Excellent binding. You can comfortably open the book and read both pages without fearing that they will come out.
> Index of products at the end. 


 
DOWNSIDES
> The paper is too thin and a bit transparent-ish.
> No fabric page marker included in the binding, something that is common in similar design books by Taschen.
> The lettering is very small and I need a magnifying glass to read the text.
> The body of the text is not justified, something that always annoys me.
> The book has no introduction with the criteria used for the selection of the pieces included in the book, period covered or any other relevant information on the matter.
> The selection lacks cultural diversity, as there is a constant rotation of specific designers and areas of the world. I would have liked a bit of more open-minded, to call it something, because it is difficult to understand why there isn't any South-East Asian, African, or South American designer in the book, and why France and Spain and so under-represented. Because, you aren't going to tell me that there designers from those parts of the world haven't designed anything we use or didn't contribute to the history of design at all. 



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Dream Wisdom: Uncovering Life's Answers in Your Dreams by Alan B. Siegel (2015)

, 29 Jun 2019

Dream Wisdom is a book that focuses on dreams in specific phases and development stages of one's life, from the womb to death.

 THE GOOD

Dream Wisdom is a roundup book because it has everything you want to know about dream recall, dream writing, dream tending, specific types of dreams.
You will learn why attending to your dreams is important to highlight emotional discomfort, anxiety, insecurities and fears associated with life transitions to integrate them.
The book is written in a very accessible language and, therefore, easy to read, engaging, and entertaining.
The dreams selected and short and sweet and are perfect to exemplify what Siegel is talking about. Right to the point, and never too convoluted, to lengthy or too personal not to be understood by the reader.

I especially loved chapters 11 and 12. In chapter 11 Siegel goes through the history of dreamwork and examines the contribution of different dream schools to the field, but explained in a simple language.  I agree with Siegel that an eclectic approach to dreamwork, instead of siding up with just one system or school, has many advantages and allows a multifaceted approach to dreams that, in the end, benefits the dreamer. Chapter 12 is a practical guide to work with your dreams. Among other things, you'll learn:
  • How to remember dreams.
  • How to write a dream diary.
  • How to use active imagination to work with them (he calls it dream space, dreaming the dream onward, dream reentering), gelstat (dream dialogue), dream art, embodied dreamwork through dramatization.
  • How to create your very own dream symbol and theme dictionary.
  • How to work with nightmares.
  • How to use dream incubation.

Chapter 8 on PSTD nightmares, plus what he says on nightmares in general in chapter 12, highlight the healing properties of our dreams and how important is to paying attention to them after traumatic events to heal that trauma and possible preexisting ones.
I especially loved the chapters on children's dreams (chapter 3) and the dreams related to pregnancy from expectant parents (chapter 4) . Especially fascinating are what Siegel calls fetal identification dreams, something of which I knew nothing: "In these dreams, the father-to-be unconsciously expresses the power of his prenatal bond with his child by taking on a role that is directly parallel to the experience of the fetus in the womb. Late in pregnancy, it is not uncommon for men to dream of popping out of caves or emerging from underwater bubbles." (p. 23)
The advice Siegel gives to therapists on how to incorporate and use dreams in therapy is also important:   "therapists working with dreams should not overemphasize or push an agenda of seeking out recovered memories. They should weave a balance between taking upsetting dreams and their possible connection to past trauma very seriously and being cautious about taking dream symbols too literally." (242-243).

 

 THE SO-SO

The Structure

The two final chapters seem to me to be the foundation of dreamwork, and therefore should have been at the beginning of the book. I think people who pick up the dream and have never read anything about dreamwork, would appreciate these being at the beginning, not at the end.

Repetitive

The same concept and ideas are repeated over and over again with different words and applied at most dreams in different phases of one´s life. From that point of view, there is nothing specific about those dreams, they provide the sort of information one find in all dreams if one pays attention to.

Some chapters

I didn't find the chapter on grieving and dreams especially inspired. 

In the chapter on middle age, Siegel states: "Menopause requires mourning the loss of identity as a woman able to bear children. When a woman’s grief can be expressed and resolved, a new birth occurs: the beginning of a new phase of life that offers the excitement and challenge of new roles and identities and new sources of fulfillment. (p. 150).

I found this to be a bit of crappola and bordering offensive. Statements of this type basically stand on the principle that women define themselves by their womb, by having children and by being able to conceive forever ad infinitum. There must be women like that, certainly, women for which giving birth and being fertile are the core of their being, but I don't think most women would accept Siegel's statement without frowning or being irritated. Menopause has undeniable hormonal changes, which affect the body, but these effects vary from woman to woman; however, menopause can also be a period of sexual freedom and heightened libido (so many men want to forget that altogether because they don't want to hear it)  and a period of true maturity. Of course, if you are in your 30s or 40s, wanting to conceive and get an early menopause, that's a terrible thing. I think that the crisis that many women experience at middle age is not related to their fertility but mostly to upheavals in their relationships, career and empty nest syndrome.
The bibliography at the end of the book is a bit outdated, something that can be easily fixed on the Kindle edition. 

NOT SURE   

One of the items of advice that Sielgel gives to favour dream recall is: "Review the day’s events in the evening before going to sleep. You can write your review in your journal or share it with your partner. Focus on interactions and events that provoked strong feelings. This can make you more sensitive to the issues that you’re most likely to dream about and heighten the probability that you’ll remember a dream." (p. 246). This might be useful, especially if you are starting to write your dream journal. However, in my experience this is not necessary. I find revising some stressful events in my day at night a way to keep me away, not to induce me to sleep well and recall more dreams.  It might be just me.

 

KINDLE EDITION

Overall, this is a polished Kindle edition with not typos or oddities on sight, and with notes and most cross references properly hyperlinked. I say most, because there are some that aren't. The hyperlink to Siege's own website directs to a Japanese unrelated site. Also, some parts of the text might have been linked, especially references to the book index; e.g. p. 254. Also the link to the educational page  of the Association of Study of Dreams devoted to nightmares in p.  8. has changed from the one in the book to this one. 

OVERALL

This is a very nice and readable book with plenty of practical information about dreams on transitional periods of life. It can be read from beginning to end, or by choosing isolated chapters. Its price is a bonus!

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Cicada by Shaun Tan (2018)

, 21 Feb 2019

This is a short story about a cicada who works in a  human corporate building, and feels mistreated and unappreciated.

The way the story is painted and the main character are an example of Tan's artistic mastery.  I love the grey and green main tones of the story, the wondrous Etcher-like settings, and the awesome atmosphere, something that looks effortlessly easy because Tan is a genius at what he does.  The precision of his drawing pen and the artistry of his paintings are totally awesome, as well as his chiaroscuro work. The book has a cinematic feeling to me, too.

The story, though, is simplistic, which is understandable as the target readers are both children and adults.  As an adult who has read almost everything published by Tan, I feel that the story is a bit sketchy and might not resonate with everyone. That's my case. Yes, for sure I can get the story lesson. I'm sure that it will help children and adults see that one can always escape oppressive circumstances, people and settings and fly away, choose how one lives; however, the way the story is narrated feels a bit lacking to me. Put it differently, the book feels more like a sketch of a story to be further developed than a round story.

I love everything that Tan draws and paints, and buy almost everything he publishes, but the storytelling here feels a bit hurried up and not polished enough to me.


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Healing the Nightmare. Freeing the Soul. A Practical Guide to Dreamwork by Margaret Bowater (2016)

, 10 Feb 2019

If you have never read a book about nightmares and want to start with one that is written in lay language, simple to understand, enjoyable to read, and with a good selection of nightmares, this is your book.

The first part of the book, Groundwork, the conclusion chapter, and some of the bulleted items of advice presented at the end of each chapter are the most useful items of advice you'll find in the book. The Further Reading selection and some of the information collected from secondary sources referred to throughout the book is excellent; the footnotes are really professional, and linked back and forth, nothing I take for granted.
The collection of dreams used throughout the book is really good and show well how trauma appears in dreams and how dreamwork can heal the psyche and the soul wounds. The book is organized around different specific traumatic experiences that generate bad dreams or nightmares. Thus, we find examples of:
> War veterans, after-surgery, work-related stress, and natural disasters dreams.
> Children nightmares related to bullying, sexual abuse, domestic violence of hospitalization.
> Nightmares resulting from physical and mental illnesses.
> Nightmares related to spiritual issues like, for example, loss of meaning, loss of love, religious crisis, encounters with the evil, spiritual emergence, spiritual invasion and spiritual healing.
> Psychic nightmares like telepathic and telesomatic dreams, precognitive warning dreams, clairvoyance, past-life and prophetic dreams. 
> Dreams related to psychological death and dreams that appear before dying. 


REALLY USEFUL TIPS
One of the main takes of the book for the lay reader is how beneficial dreamwork is for people who suffer from nightmares and bad dreams, and how transformational it can be.
Some of the things I found more useful and practical are the following:
> The seven-step model to start working with a dream: 1. Ask the dreamer to tell the dream and sketch it. 2. Notice the setting. 3. Identify what the ‘I-figure’ of the dream is feeling and doing. 4. Ask how this fits with the dreamer’s life context at the time. 5. Get the dreamer's associations with dream elements. 6. Does the dream story need a better ending? 7. Consider possible meanings. To which an eight can be added: choose a nightmare and imagine a new ending for it.
> What to do if a child shows trauma reactions: 1. Calm the child down and reassure them of your protection. 2. Encourage the child to tell you the nightmare in detail and to draw it. Don't minimize the feelings involved. Help them to create a different ending that  supports the child's self-esteem. 3. Take seriously repeating nightmares in which the child’s body is invaded and listen to the child without making any suggestion. If the child’s behavior is seriously disturbed, consult a child psychotherapist.

> The five stages of healing process that appear in series of nightmares: 1. Self-protection. 2. Acknowledgement. 3. Effects. 4. Growth and understanding. 5. Renegotiation.
> The method to work with our shadow in dreamwork.
> The 'Martian Interview', which is a kind of gestalt technique.
CORE MESSAGES OF THE BOOK
> Dreams in general and nightmares in particular have all a beneficial function for the psyche if they are dealt with appropriately.
> All dreams present a similar format, except for the fact that the storyline is interrupted at the heated point in nightmares.
> Series of nightmares, when working on them, through dreamwork, tend to show a favourable positive progression, until the core fear or issue is faced and resolved, and then the nightmares also stop. However, those series of nightmares that are persistently or increasingly disturbing need of psychological or medical attention.
> Children having nightmares need to be listened to, and attention given to their dreams to see what is creating stress in their waking life. Never disregard a child's dream or tell them that it is only a dream.
  

DOWNSIDES
Bowater has great experience working with traumatic dreams and nightmares; however, her voice  is muffled by herself and she appears more like a dream compiler than an independent strong voice. It is a pity because she could have provided us with more practical tools to explore nightmares and rely more on her own experiential work as dream-worker. Unfortunately, some of the most interesting information used in the book comes not from direct experience but from secondary sources.
The chapter on psychic dreams barely has any nightmare in it except for those associated to the past-life section. 

Some of the items of advice Bowater gives are too generic or too common sense to be of help or something you expect to find in a book written by an experienced dream practitioner. Some of the self-help items mentioned at the end of each chapter can be easily found on the web.
I would have loved a bit of more detail about how to work with dreams, more specifically directed to people starting as dream practitioners, and a bit of more personal reflections derived from Bowater's own experience and less references to other people's work.
Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven, which Bowater mentions in her book, has been highly criticized as untruthful or scientifically questionable, and labelled a con by many people.

EXTRA
Some of the dreams are illustrated, and the illustrations are really fun and cute.However, the quality of reproduction is not good on Kindle for Android or in Kindle for PC.

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Instant Enlightenment: Fast, Deep and Sexy by David Deida (2007)

, 8 Jan 2019

The secret to gifting your life’s deepest purpose is to open through what you most resist, so your love’s mission can bless the world—untrapped by your accumulated history of memories. (p. 118).
Instant Enlightenment is a book of exercises that will surprise you, challenge you and provoke you. You can read the chapters in order or choose one at random;  read the book from beginning to end or do an exercise for some days and then retake it. The book is very experiential, not only because some exercises are involved, but because some of the exercises will make you experience concepts that are very difficult to describe or explain by writing. Some of the exercises are liberating and sexy, others are thought-provoking, others a retake on things you might have already heard, and others plain odd.

SO WHAT'S INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT?
Deida doesn't offer a definition at the beginning but in different instances throughout the book. Deida uses the term instant enlightenment in a very spiritual way most of the times, but his enlightenment is that also that of the flesh. If we put together the mini-definitions of IE spread throughout the book we get that IE is total openness to experiences and people, no matter how good or bad they are, a total openness of the heart even when things go wrong and we are hurt. IE is the right-here-right now, being free of the past and the future. IE is love, the Universal type, pervading anything and everything. IE is responsibility, so love is also responsibility.  IE is "awareness ringing open as space, to love and feel all, every animal, plant, rainstorm, and idea." 

I LOVED
I just love the way Deida makes us open our hearts and see things differently. Deida mixes exercises, ideas and advice that come from counseling, body heat telepathy, Jungian psychology Manifestation and Universal laws, meditation, visualization and Zen Buddhism backgrounds, but the result is a very organic unique coherent combo. My favorite chapters/experiential exercises are Oral, Swear, Hate, Masturbate, Speech, Romance, Radio, and Hero.

Like James Hollis, Deida reminds us that "You are a link in a chain of suffering that affords you the luxury of reading these words. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility." (p. 162). I think that's always a good reminder of how fortunate we are having a normal life.
I HAD TROUBLE WITH
Deida tends to say beautiful things that touch one's heart, but he can be also very abstract and his advice impractical. I feel that he talks from his heart, from something he has experienced, but he's not always able to convey that in words, perhaps because that cannot be properly conveyed in words but has to be experienced. Some other things he says are difficult to do unless one is meditating and scanning our body in a meditative state. Some examples:
1/ So, instead of trying to view it, relax open as this ever-present background of feeling-openness. Take care not to seek blissfulness as an aspect of your true self. Who you truly are is an openness of love in which bliss may or may not be noticed. (p. 129).  
2/everything you do is love’s gift, unless you are unwilling to be lived by love’s force.  Do nothing, but if doing happens, do it as love’s most fully offered art (pp. 160-161). 
3/ Be utterly lazy, and then do whatever you find yourself doing, as an offering for others. For instance, if a blink happens, feel the blink as a work of art, offered outwardly for love’s sake. If others were to see you blink, they would feel, “Now, that is a beautiful blink.” (p. 160).

QUESTION
Deida states "So few people seem to have exhausted their desire for 'better' that very few models exist for a life lived from the perspective-free openness of being." (p. 209).
My question is isn't Instant Enlightenment a way of bettering?

I DIDN'T LIKE  
I couldn't connect with some of the exercises at all and with some of the statements made in them. Perhaps the chapter Nipples was my last favourite, because of some of the statements made in them. For example: 
1/ "Squeeze your own nipples until they almost hurt but are still tingling with pleasure. (…) Offer this feeling in your nipples to your ancestors, in gratitude for the suffering they experienced so you could be born and have your nipples squeezed to pleasure." (pp. 73-74). 
2/   Imagine that you were a great spiritual being, perhaps Jesus of Nazareth, or the Buddha from India, or Yeshe Tsogyal of Tibet, or Mother Teresa from Albania. Also imagine that your whole body is as sensitive as your nipples. (p. 75).

I don't want to think of my ancestors when I squeeze my nipples or of Mother Theresa when I feel my body in full-bloom pleasure to get enlightened, sorry. I know it makes sense in Deida's mind, but to me is a bit irreverent, even though I'm not a religious person; I think it might offend religious people. Personally, I thought that the exercises were good per se without the need to invoke the saints into the party. 
I WANTED MORE OF 
I wanted more sexy enlightenment, more taboos explored, and more couples enlightenment. I know, I sound so frivolous, but I guess expected this book to be more about sexy enlightenment than about instant enlightenment.
IN SHORT
A beautiful, albeit odd uneven book, that it is still enthralling to read, with a beautiful message of Universal love and openness of the heart. You can practice some of the exercises without a problem and get a lot of enlightened juice out them. Others are difficult to do, at least to me, unless you are into proper Buddhist/Zen meditation or  familiar with Tantric Yoga.

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