CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Sketch by r.r.lackney, Florence Baptistry, 1996

CURIOSITY

My father talked and planted a wonderful dream into me.

Andrew gave me “corner” assignments:

… I was to draw something that I see ... or a picture from my mind!

… “Draw anything !”, my dad would say.

Over the years these “drawing assignments” turned into lessons for learning:

… Mathematics, music, book reading, and essay writing and listening sessions of family stories.

… Then there were the places he visited as a young man, people he had met.

Stories so rich in detail they filled every "nook and corner" within my mind, burned images into my heart, awakened my spirit so that I was "transported" to new worlds beyond my own!

Even today I feel as though I am at the side of my father as he walked and smiled on the streets of Chicago, worked at the Studabaker plant in South Bend, or paddling an open row boat across the night waves of Lake Erie, "smuggling” Scotch whisky from Canada onto the North shore cities of Ohio.

These stories fueled my “imagination”, and come alive at the slightest encouragement.

I credit my father for giving me a “Creative Imagination” that would become my life long "counselor" to help me make A life of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.

A life fueled by an "Insatiable Curiosity" that leads me to live each day as if it was a Saturday were I feel I could live forever.

The “Secret”, my dad taught me, was to develop:

… an insatiable desire to know- an irresistible desire to know about everything we come into contact with no matter the subject, no matter how complicated, simplistic or esoteric it might at first seem in this we will continue to create our future ...

CREATIVE IMAGINATION: PRINCIPLES TO WORK BY

1 ::: Creative Imagination: it is not our faith that makes creativity- it is our belief in the “invisible and the invisible” that each child experiences. We are led by our “faith” * in our self, our mentor, or our God.

2 ::: Reality: We must keep our feet anchored in reality. An “exaggeration” in the teaching-workroom emerges as a disaster in the real world.

3::: Creative Work: We create something visible and real, out of something invisible and not real, our dreams and inspirations:a sketch scattered dots, lines strokes, and smudges becoming the vision of something that does not yet exist!

4 ::: Honesty and Integrity: Is central and a must and the continous search for truth.

5 ::: Building Things: Students are capable of transforming ordinary things, notions theories, ideas and activities into extraordinary events in light and through their beliefs that flow from deep within their faith.

6 ::: Teachers and Mentors: We are led to the canvas, to the music score, the stone quarry, and the construction site by our beliefs flowing from the tension within the great dualities: Science:Art, Life: Death, Light:Dark, and

... At the shoulders of a parent, teacher, and maybe a stranger who take the time to share their dreams with us and we can share our dreams with them.

Our Mentors help us to see over the horizons and look beyond ourselves.

7 ::: Personal Accomplishments: Learning to speak with your hands, triggered by an inner enegry, expressed through the eyes and mind the need to create ambiguous things, the clean aesthetic remains pathways to personal accomplishment.

8 ::: Sacred Doorways: Imagining yourself in situations … the invention of your own little world ... your Celestial Palace where anything can be all at once … where a work of art can be created that is so subjective so sectet that no one wll know what is the best color, form ,or sound.

Creativity is important within the school system maybe more than the great works of matematics, life sciences, literature, and the technical studies that cause us to the "right" answer and never be "wrong".

Creativity allows us to be wrong:

"We all grow out of "education: or we are educated out of it!"

Note: Michelangelo was also a child … think of him as 7 or 10 … and a teacher saying to him in the modern classroom: “ Put that pencil down and quit drawing things like that!”

r.r.lackney interview notes 1998. "Ideas Worth Spreading"

Society of Sacred Art and Architecture, Inc.

Web Site:http://archangelpublications.com/8IIdeasWorthy/85.html

CREATIVITY::: The 4 P's = Person +Process + Product + Place