Essays on Creative Process.
Reflections on art, culture and meaning.
Articles for the Creative Professional
On Creative Process and Career Growth
by Barbara Bowen
This page consists of articles and essays inspired by Barbara Bowen’s insights about the creative process and creative careers. Search the titles that resonate with your creative path. Mine them for universal themes that clarify your own unique experiences, and for insights to enhance your creativity and career. Call me any time to learn more about the art coaching process and its benefits.
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You may use these articles at your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is that you include the following with the active links: *Article by Barbara Bowen of GatewaysCoaching.com – a rich source for artists and creative careers in transition. Contact Barbara for help on the creative process and art career growth. She would love to hear from you.*
The Creative Process and Goal Setting
As an artist and art career consultant, goal setting is my constant friend, and challenger. Goal-setting often includes resistance. A normal and expected note in the cyclical rhythm of the creative process, we are challenged to move through varying degrees of resistance in order to take action. Resistance is not trying to stop us, though […]
Creativity Explored: The Benefits of Repetition
When the nature of creativity is explored, the importance of repetition is revealed. Working as a creative career consultant, I have learned over the years that repetition helps us to discover our personal rhythms and know them more intimately. This knowledge saves time, maximizes our energy and creativity. Repetition lubricates creativity, expands capacity, and helps […]
Creative Process: How Night Dreams Help
Dreams can help point the way in the process of creating art. Consider this example: Susan is dining in an airport café. A loud speaker suddenly blasts a warning that a harsh military regime is due to arrive momentarily. Frantic, Susan jumps up and begins to bury her food under the dirt floor, determined to […]
Creative Process: Recharge and Renew
No matter how we approach New Year’s Eve, with dazzling exuberance, quiet reserve or indifference, it’s hard to evade the sense that another cycle of life has ended. We navigate the portal to a new year, catching our collective breath. Sometimes the passage seems clogged with the air of uncertainty. Whether radical or mild, endings […]
Creative Voice of the Collective
Today is Martin Luther King Day. What hardest of hearts could resist the voice of justice calling down the corridors of conscience in the satin tremolo of our American Dr. Martin Luther King? My indelible moment was underneath the Lincoln memorial with my now-deceased parents, my sister-in-law and eldest brother. It was a thin crowd […]
The Nature of Creative Process
The creative process is a kind of mechanism that underlies no less than all of creation, and its expressions may be for good or ill. This short essay places a focus on its positive connection to the arts, and to spirituality. Creativity is often misunderstood to be an act of the ego or intellect. In […]
The Creative Genius of Thomas Jefferson
The 4th of July seems more resonant every year, as we celebrate the creative accomplishments of our founding fathers and mothers, to whom Americans owe so much. Never before had a small band of oppressed people broken the shackles of so vast an empire as Great Britain to give birth to their own, new country. […]
Shadow River: An Essay on Freedom
In the eloquent book, “The Unconquerable World,” author Jonathan Schell traces the grim and brutal history of warfare. A core notion of the book is that war has become unwinnable in the settling of disputes. Due to the evolution of nuclear weapons and the mutual annihilation inherent in their use, the reliance of politics on […]
Creative Process and Tempering the Inner Critic
As an art coach and expert in the creative process, I have discovered that the creative voice is infinitely more powerful than the critical voice. This statement is often hard for artists and other professionals involved in the creative process to absorb, especially if their Inner critic has been in the lead, either consciously or […]
Carl Jung and Gateways Themes
The Gateways artist coaching method employs universal themes identified by creativity psychology, and revealed in the work of Carl Gustav Jung. Universal themes highlight the connection between creativity and spirituality. They mirror an artist’s inner and outer challenges and point the way toward overcoming them. Grounded in the core ideas of Carl Jung…
Creating and Fear
September 11, 2008 We meet various shades of fear upon entering unfamiliar territory. That’s no less true in the creative process. At its best, fear will act as a friend, jumpstarting dreams to create beneficial reality. But it has other manifestations, too. Fear can distort reality in harmful ways, or even stop us in […]
Do you need content? You may use these essays at your website, or in your newsletter. The only requirement is inclusion of the following plus active links:
*Essay by Barbara Bowen of GatewaysCoaching.com - the definitive source for artists and creative careers in transition. Contact Barbara to empower your creative process and for help with your career goals. She would love to hear from you.*
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