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Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (TarcherPerigee, 2016).
Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.
The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of- conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors.
A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.
Francis, Philip S. When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind (Oxford University Press, 2017).
The stories gathered in these pages lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and rework deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. This book grounds its narrative in the accounts of 82 Evangelicals who underwent a sea-change of religious identity through the intervention of the arts. "There never would have been an undoing of my conservative Evangelical worldview" confides one young man, "without my encounter with the transcendent work of Mark Rothko on that rainy afternoon in London's Tate Modern." "The characters in The Brothers Karamazov began to feel like family to me," reports another individual, "and the doubts of Ivan Karamazov slowly saturated my soul." As their stories unfold, the subjects of the study describe the arts as sources of, by turns, "defamiliarization," "comfort in uncertainty," "a stand-in for faith" and a "surrogate transcendence." Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and field notes, Philip Salim Francis explores the complex interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West, and offers an important new resource for on-going debates about the role of the arts in education and social life.
King, Juliet L. Art Therapy, Trauma, and Neuroscience. (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016,
Art Therapy, Trauma, and Neuroscience combines theory, research, and practice with traumatized populations in a neuroscience framework. Recognizing the importance of understanding both art therapy and trauma studies as brain-based interventions, some of the most renowned figures in art therapy and trauma use translational and integrative neuroscience to provide theoretical and applied techniques. Therapists will come away from this book with tools for a refined understanding of brain-based interventions in a dynamic yet accessible format.
Magsamen, Susan and Ivy Ross. Your Brain on Art (Random House, 2023).
Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind.
In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.
We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. Doctors have even been prescribing museum visits to address loneliness, dementia, and many other physical and mental health concerns.
Your Brain on Art is a portal into this new understanding about how the arts and aesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities, and mend an aching planet. Featuring conversations with artists such as David Byrne, Renée Fleming, and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, Your Brain On Art is an authoritative guide to neuroaesthetics. The book weaves a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives.
Miller, Christopher John. The Spiritual Artist (Independently Published, 2020).
Many people try to describe their experience when “in the zone” or “in the flow” during the creative process. Some claim that a Greater Power or Divine Guidance assisted them. But, what is this state of consciousness, and how do we replicate it? In search of answers, writer and painter Christopher J. Miller took the suggestion of one of his art mentors to watch and chronicle his creative process.
Join him on his journey home as he outlines his approach and rediscovers his connection to Oneness while creating his art. Miller confirms that our first task as humans is to create, whether painting, raising children, starting a new business, making dinner, or writing a novel. This book is for everyone, for we are all creators.
He references the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, Twyla Tharp, Deepak Chopra, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Don Miguel Ruiz Jr., Mark Nepo, Dr. Petra Weldes, Rabbi Shipiro, Ester Hicks, Elizabeth Gilbert, Katie Byron, Malcom Gladwell, Ann Bogart, Joel Goldsmith, Terry Martin, Julia Cameron, Eric Butterworth and many more thought leaders.
Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being (Penguin Press, 2023).
A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment. ~Anne Lamott
From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us.
I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be. ~Rick Rubin
Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn’t, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone’s life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.
The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime’s work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments—and lifetimes—of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
Riley, Shirley. Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents (Jessica Kingsley, 1999).
Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents offers practical and imaginative solutions to the multifaceted challenges that clinicians face when treating young people. The author fuses the contemporary theories of clinical treatment with the creative processes of art therapy to arrive at a synthesis which yields successful outcomes when working with adolescents. Clinicians of allied disciplines, particularly art therapists, will find practical suggestions for using imagery to enrich their relationships with teenaged clients. The process of using art-making therapeutically, and the challenges of applying creativity in the current mental health world, are explored.
Shirley Riley reviews current theories on adolescent development and therapy, and emphasizes the primary importance of relying on the youths' own narrative in the context of their social and economic backgrounds. She has found this approach preferential to following pre-designed assessment directives as a primary function of art therapy. Family, group and individual treatment are examined, as is the adolescent's response to short- and long-term treatment in residential and therapeutic school settings. The book is firmly rooted in Riley's clinical experience of working with this age group, and her proven ability to combine contemporary theories of adolescent treatment with inventive and effective art expressions.
