Who are you? (Are we getting closer yet?)

How do you know what to call things? How do you learn what things are?
How do you figure out who you are? Why do you like what you like?
As one of these guys below said, "Know thyself."

You started leaning about yourself by asking yourself some questions we posed on the blog. Some of you went deep and some of you stayed pretty surface. Deep is where the creative stuff lives. But is is important to think about how you are influenced by your culture. And what is culture?




The symbols of expression that individuals, groups and societies use to make sense of everyday life and to articulate values. 

SO I guess the question is - what do you value?
How do you express what you value?

What artistic medium do you value most right now?
Music? Poetry? Visual? Sculpture? Multimedia? Movies? TV?

You are a complicated cultural person. Let's see it.

Dig a little deeper into things that have moved you.  

For your first Artist's Date:

Make a list of one hundred things that make you happy and make some art about it. It will be both a visual and aural. It will be two minutes.

An iMovie, a poem along with a collage, a dance along with a slide show and original music or a mash up.  


Be prepared to show it and talk about it for Monday, September 15. 

This assignment will be graded in class, out loud by myself and Renee just like American Idol. 

You have to prove that your work deserves the grade you want, the grade you expect. 

Welcome to Creating Without Pants

If you are reading this you are already making the first small steps to become a more creative person.

What does that even mean? You ask.

Well, creativity means that you tap into all the recesses of your mind to come up with ideas to solve problems. The problems don't have to be complex like world peace. (Can't we all just get along?) And simple problems don't mean easy answers. The questions and the answers we are exploring will most often reside in art.

What does it mean to create without pants? I believe that you can be creative any time, any where and you don't even have to be dressed to do it.  It also means that you should be thinking creatively all the time. It becomes like muscle memory; you can't help yourself.

Me,  Dr. Crowley and Renee, your FYS guru, will help to guide you though this world at SU and give you some other tools to help guide you through the world-at-large. And don't worry, you will be teaching us, too. For to be a student you must also learn to be a teacher. (I'll be giving you philosophical stuff like that a lot this semester.)

We will be posting the syllabus, assignments, comments, links and lots of other cool things here so bookmark this page. We will also be sending you our Twitter and Facebook pages.  First let me show you the books for this class.

These books can be found cheaply on Amazon. Feel free to get them used if you like but be aware that someone may have written in this book.  If that does not bother you that is fine but for me it would drive me CRAZY. I have provided the links to the books below. 

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

The Thinking Life by P.M. Forni

Take the time to look over these books before class begins. It is important that you get to know these books BEFORE you come to class on Monday, August 25.
Come prepared to jump right in
 and s t r e t c h yourself.