No More Secondhand Art

( 2 )

Overview

This book is about using art as an instrument of personal transformation, enabling us to move from an inherited to a chosen state of being. Peter London offers inspiration and fresh ideas to artists, art students, and art teachers—as well as to people who think they can't draw a straight line but want to explore the joys of creative expression. Inside every person, he believes, there is an original, creative self that has been covered over by secondhand ideas, borrowed beliefs, and conditioned behavior. By ...

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No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within

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Overview

This book is about using art as an instrument of personal transformation, enabling us to move from an inherited to a chosen state of being. Peter London offers inspiration and fresh ideas to artists, art students, and art teachers—as well as to people who think they can't draw a straight line but want to explore the joys of creative expression. Inside every person, he believes, there is an original, creative self that has been covered over by secondhand ideas, borrowed beliefs, and conditioned behavior. By freeing the capacity for visual expression—a natural human language possessed by everyone—we can awaken and release the full powers of that original self. Among the topics and exercises included are:

   •  How to increase the ability to visualize, fantasize, and dream
   •  Obstacles to the creative encounter and what to do about them
   •  Experimenting with art media as true mediators between imagination and expression
   •  Making masks to reveal the hidden self
   •  Painting with "forbidden" colors
   •  Arranging found objects as metaphors for one's life

This book is about using art as an instrument of personal transformation, enabling us to move from an inherited to a chosen state of being.

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What People Are Saying

From the Publisher
"A joy to read. In a style both conversational and precise, London questions the conventional attitudes that form a barrier to keep art outside most people's lives. London shows us that making images is as natural as speech, as dreams."—Yoga Journal

"Passionate and insightful . . . A must-read for all artists, art students, and art teachers. But anyone who wants to explore their own inner dimensions of creativity can learn and profit from it."—Intuition

"Peter London is grounded in his approach to the visual arts and he communicates it beautifully. He gives a fresh vision to creativity."—Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

"I am impressed—no, I am thrilled—by the courage and ripeness of his guidance toward creativity, how it can work, how it can be helped and hindered, how it can change everything."—M.C. Richards, author of Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

"His eloquent, at times poetic ruminations return the reader to some earlier state of grace that may have been damaged or neglected in the hurly-burly of teaching. London not only invites the reader on this journey to some unexplored recesses of the mind, but also provides very specific tasks to ease the passage of transition. Philosopher and artist though he may be, London's commitment as a teacher shines on every page."—Al Hurwitz, author of Gifted and Talented in Art and coauthor of Children and Their Art

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780877734826
  • Publisher: Shambhala Publications, Inc.
  • Publication date: 11/28/1989
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 208
  • Sales rank: 502,628
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 0.44 (d)

Meet the Author

Peter London—painter, author, art educator, and art therapist—has taught the approach presented in this and other books to thousands of students, ranging from teens to octogenarians, from "art phobics" to professional artists. Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and a 2002 Distinguished Fellow at the National Art Education Association, he lives in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

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Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews
  • Posted January 22, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Approaching Creativity From A Relaxed, Meditative, Thoughtful Place

    In Peter London's No More Secondhand Art: Awakening The Artist Within, he states, "We have learned to be embarrassed by our efforts. We have learned to feel so inept and disenfranchised from our own visual expressions that we simply cease doing it altogether." As a society, we have lost touch with our creative essence, a part of us that emerges from our most spiritual and pure existence. Our inner critic hisses at us as we try something new, some form of creative expression, and we shut down our inherent spiritual nature, a mechanism that allows us to bring magnificent creativity into the world while at the same time healing our souls.

    Critical to London's examination is the creative process as a journey. So often, we are wrapped up in the end product, in production and efficiency, and we forget to enjoy the journey along the way. London would argue that creativity and artistic expression are about the journey. What results as an end product is simply the culmination of the most important part of the experience. Through well-defined strategies, London encourages his readers to step outside of the normal way of viewing the world and to see things in a new light. Let the mind guide the hand, he advises, as you allow your visual imagination to guide you in artistic endeavors. Too often, we look too structurally or literally and try to reproduce exactly what we see. London suggests we relax and play, he says lighten up and lose yourself in the creative process.

    Fascinating is London's take on abstractionism versus realism. He explains, "I would have you consider the view that all art is abstract as much as all art is representational." Although we make look at a realistic piece of art and interpret it as exact imagery, it is, in fact, an abstract representation of how a particular image inspired and moved the artist. Also, he explains, abstract art can be representative of actual feelings, emotions, and objects. This section of the book is a good summation of the entire work: Think differently about artistic creativity, and you can produce unimaginable and beautiful works of art.

    The "creative encounters" London describes are actual exercises he has designed that exemplify the concepts in the first half of the book. His exercises may seem strange to artists taught through traditional methods and include everything from painting with your eyes closed to designing and using masks to exploring the yin and yang in art by imitating both male and female forces during the creative process.

    London prefers the term "media" to the use of the term "art supplies." "Media are those things that stand between imagination and expression, between the mind and the act, the hand and the canvas." By approaching art and creativity from a spiritual, meditative, and thoughtful realm, London believes what will ultimately result is the production of truly inspired original works of creative expression.

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    Posted February 15, 2010

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