artdiary.net

In these GoGo get-it-done times, we don’t often match the words ADULT and PLAY. Get past the gooey, touchy feel­ing that you get when a hired facil­i­ta­tor walks into the room wear­ing a crazy hat and starts throw­ing squishy toys at every­one.  As you will see in the arti­cles below, mak­ing play a part of your life might make the dif­fer­ence between you being the go-along-get-along per­son or the leader-of-the-pack per­son.  Play is an energy that is a key part of the Art Diary.

Joe Robin­son, author of the recent book “Don’t Miss Your Life” talks about meet­ings he had while writ­ing this arti­cle: “Play isn’t a char­ac­ter defect; it’s the builder of char­ac­ter, devel­op­ing per­sis­tence, com­pe­tence, mas­tery and social skills that take us beyond per­ceived lim­i­ta­tions. It was there in the faces and con­fi­dence of stunt-kite fliers, salsa dancers and bad­minton enthu­si­asts I met along the road to my new book on the power of par­tic­i­pant expe­ri­ence.”

Dylan Kendall founder of City LA: pLAy Smart, a children’s museum in Los Ange­les, con­nects play to aes­thet­ics.  She says in her arti­cle, “inter­wo­ven into art-based aes­thetic expe­ri­ences is the chance to play. And I believe play is a key com­po­nent of human devel­op­ment — one with lim­it­less pow­ers to influ­ence and affect us.

The pur­pose of art diary is to put you on a path to unlock­ing the pow­er­ful play­ful qual­ity of art.  By play­ful I am sug­gest­ing that art is non lin­ear, non nar­ra­tive and can be expe­ri­enced in toto or bro­ken apart and reassem­bled into a mean­ing­ful rev­e­la­tion or just a pleas­ant mem­ory – one you can call on when you would love a break in your busy work day.

In order to get to the point where you can just be with art try tak­ing the sim­ple steps that the art diary sug­gests.  For me, and those that have tried it, they have received “AHA’s” from the first expe­ri­ence.  Let’s say you have done 2–3 art diaries and you now see that there are mul­ti­ple mean­ings to mod­ern art, and you accept that your expe­ri­ence is the most impor­tant expe­ri­ence.  Just like writ­ing down the steps of a com­pli­cated pro­ce­dure or notes for a pre­sen­ta­tion to make sure you get your head in order, pic­ture the sug­gested steps of the art diary as a scaf­fold, built to take you around to another side of the art expe­ri­ence.  Once you have a new com­fort level look­ing at art that your expe­ri­ence is what mat­ters, the scaf­fold­ing can be dis­man­tled, or not – it is your call.

Do an art diary right now.  Go play!