This is a panoramic image of my studio that my wife created. She and I now have our studios to the point  where we feel the creative juices can flow freely. I have always been curious as to where other people create. I like the room dark, lit by lamps.

© Bonnie Van Voorst

Whether the atmosphere around me directly effects the quality of my music, I don’t know, but I do know that there was far less free flowing out of that room before we paid some attention to it. Other people have routines that they need to go through to unlock the creativity. Whatever your cup of tea or freshly sharpened pencil may be, please comment on how you create, and perhaps even link to pictures.

Children’s books author Antoinette Portis has recently written a delightfully creative pair of books entitled “Not a Stick,” and “Not a Box.” For me, these books, invoke a nostalgic look back to childhood where the simplest inanimate objects could be greater and more entertaining than latest Chinese-made poison toy; something that I think younger generations have lost growing up in western capitalist culture.Each page shows a illustration of the bunny either holding a stick or with a box on his head in a seemingly irrelevant pose. With the reader turns the page, they discover the imagination has turns the box into things like a burning building, a race car or a robot suit and the stick into a horse or in my favorite instance, a paint brush to paint Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.