Episode 8: Grief, Healing, and the Artist’s Life with Anne Myers Cleary
08/24/23 • 24 min
Anne Myers Cleary is a visual artist, as well as a writer and musician, based in Indianapolis. Anne majored in art at Kenyon College, and studied vocal performance and opera at Longy School of Music in Boston and the Jacob's School of Music at Indiana University. Her work has been featured as part of the Encore Sotheby’s Visiting Artist Series, The Harrison Center for the Arts, Kuaba Gallery, the Carmel Clay Library, and the St. Margaret’s Guild Decorator’s Showhouse.
Anne shares in her Artist’s Statement: I believe in the importance of imagination, make believe, magic, and mystery, and the truths that are revealed therein. My work is an emotional response to the natural world. I'm interested in the complex and varied emotionality of places and the meaning we attach to them. How we feel in them, or gazing at them, removed. They are reflections of our inner psychological and emotional spaces. I am a traveler, capturing these sacred spaces as they are revealed to me in an attempt to understand human existence and its relationship to the natural world.
We discuss how Anne discovered her own unique creative rhythms and routines, as well as her connection to the place she grew up, and how that sense of place figures into her work. We also explore her creative and meaning-making process in connection with a recent series of paintings in oil and spray paint that explore grief and healing, paradoxically expressed through bold, colorful abstract landscapes.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Creative development and video production by Shuja Uddin and Devon Foster at Tishna Films. Artwork by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like our conversations in Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician, Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker, and Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Charlotte Gullick.
Episode-specific hyperlinks:
Anne’s website: annelouiseart.com
Anne’s Instagram
Anne’s work on Saatchi
Artist Francis Bacon
Saybrook University Creativity Studies Program
Show / permanent hyperlinks:
Anne Myers Cleary is a visual artist, as well as a writer and musician, based in Indianapolis. Anne majored in art at Kenyon College, and studied vocal performance and opera at Longy School of Music in Boston and the Jacob's School of Music at Indiana University. Her work has been featured as part of the Encore Sotheby’s Visiting Artist Series, The Harrison Center for the Arts, Kuaba Gallery, the Carmel Clay Library, and the St. Margaret’s Guild Decorator’s Showhouse.
Anne shares in her Artist’s Statement: I believe in the importance of imagination, make believe, magic, and mystery, and the truths that are revealed therein. My work is an emotional response to the natural world. I'm interested in the complex and varied emotionality of places and the meaning we attach to them. How we feel in them, or gazing at them, removed. They are reflections of our inner psychological and emotional spaces. I am a traveler, capturing these sacred spaces as they are revealed to me in an attempt to understand human existence and its relationship to the natural world.
We discuss how Anne discovered her own unique creative rhythms and routines, as well as her connection to the place she grew up, and how that sense of place figures into her work. We also explore her creative and meaning-making process in connection with a recent series of paintings in oil and spray paint that explore grief and healing, paradoxically expressed through bold, colorful abstract landscapes.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Creative development and video production by Shuja Uddin and Devon Foster at Tishna Films. Artwork by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like our conversations in Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician, Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker, and Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Charlotte Gullick.
Episode-specific hyperlinks:
Anne’s website: annelouiseart.com
Anne’s Instagram
Anne’s work on Saatchi
Artist Francis Bacon
Saybrook University Creativity Studies Program
Show / permanent hyperlinks:
Previous Episode
Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Syncreate Co-Founder Charlotte Gullick
One of our primary areas of focus at Syncreate involves honoring the power of collaboration and community in the creative process. So I’m thrilled to bring you my conversation with Charlotte Gullick, my Syncreate Co-Founder. Charlotte is an author, novelist, memoirist, and educator. Her first novel, By Way of Water, was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as the Grand Prize winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program. Her nonfiction has appeared in a number of prestigious literary journals, including The Rumpus, The Best of Brevity, The Los Angeles Review, and Hippocampus.
Charlotte and Melinda first met in Austin when we were both teaching at Austin Community College. We founded Syncreate several years later, in 2013, to provide creativity coaching, consulting, workshops and retreats, and we co-wrote a book on the creative process called Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities, which came out in 2021 and won a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation.
We recently traveled to Ashland, Oregon for the 2023 Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University, where we presented ideas for our next book on creativity and community. We recorded this podcast episode together in Ashland, and the conversation gave us an opportunity to reflect on our work together helping to empower creativity over the last 10 years.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Creative development and video production by Shuja Uddin and Devon Foster at Tishna Films. Artwork by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like our conversation in Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician, Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker.
Episode-specific hyperlinks:
Charlotte’s Website: www.charlottegullick.com
Charlotte’s Novel: By Way of Water
Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University
Show / permanent hyperlinks:
Next Episode
Episode 9: Music and Psychology - "The Pocket" Experience with Dr. Jeff Mims
Dr. Jeff Mims is a psychologist, creativity expert, musician, and researcher. His work focuses on the relationships between music, health and well-being. He holds a doctorate in humanistic psychology with a specialization in creativity studies, as well as a master's in rehabilitation counseling, and a bachelor's in film and cinema studies. Currently he’s the operations lead at the Music and Expressive Arts Center of Oklahoma. For his doctoral research, Jeff focused on the musical experience of “the pocket.” This term comes out of the jazz world, when a group of musicians performing together come into a collective flow state.
Dr. Mims and Dr. Rothouse were in the same PhD program at Saybrook University, focusing on creativity, but he started the program right after she finished. So we knew of each other, and we were connected on LinkedIn, but we only recently finally got to meet in person at a creativity conference in Oregon. Through our conversations at the conference, we both recognized an opportunity to collaborate, so I’m excited to bring you our conversation today about the pocket experience and the healing power of music.
Once you’ve heard the episode, my creativity challenge is to think about your own experience of flow states, either individually or with others, in your creative or professional work. When do they happen? What does a flow state look and feel like for you personally? What’s possible from that place? How can you facilitate such flow states for yourself and others? Pay attention to your own energetic flows and see if you can create the conditions for them to happen more intentionally, because that’s where the creative magic happens!
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Creative development and video production by Shuja Uddin and Devon Foster at Tishna Films. Artwork by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like our conversations in Episode 3: Creative Polymathy with Musician, Photographer, and Podcaster Michael Walker, Episode 5: Creative Global Citizenship with Filmmaker and Screenwriter Shuja Uddin, and Episode 7: The Syncreate Story with Charlotte Gullick.
Episode-specific hyperlinks:
The Music and Expressive Arts Center of Oklahoma on LinkedIn
Saybrook University Creativity, Innovation & Leadership Ph.D. Program
Show / permanent hyperlinks:
The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity - Episode 8: Grief, Healing, and the Artist’s Life with Anne Myers Cleary
Transcript
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We view creativity broadly, and one of our primary goals is to demystify the creative process while expanding the boundaries of what it means to be creative. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life.
My guest today is Anne Myers Cleary. She's a visual artist as well as a writer and
If you like this episode you’ll love
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