Finding Your Creative - Moodstream

I read about an interesting creative tool posted by Conrad Lisco on thumbjockey.com today - called Moodstream, by Getty Images. Take a look and create your mood for music and images! This is a lot of fun, too!

Conrad says: Moodstream is an online tool that allows you to browse imagery and music based on keywords or moods. What you see and hear matches the particular mood and can be dialed up or down in a host of ways. Its a great way to find inspiration.

Getty Images has a customizable home page for you, too, where it aggregates latest tools, galleries, and ideas based on your selection of featured content on its site.

I've used an image from Smaller Indiana for this blog today.

Christmas Trees and Memories

I like to reflect back now and then on experiences I had with my Dad, Rodger Goodwin. He was born in 1911 and he lived for 90 years.

One of my favorite times to spend with my Dad was shopping for the Christmas tree and then decorating it. I know I am a lot like him - even as far as picking a tree based on the shape of the tree, the spacing of the branches, the pine needles and the size of the trunk.

We would visit the lots with all of the pine trees, and for the many years in Cleveland and then Lexington, Ky., I can remember how very cold it could be wandering around a snowy land of trees.

My Dad always wore his heavy leather mittens that could manage the cold and the snow, and then heave our tree into his station wagon. I can see him in his hat with fur trim and heavy winter coat, and his rubber galoshes.

We must have gone at night for our trees, because I recall how much I liked how the lots were circled with cords of large white bulbs - it always looked so magical.

Why so much fuss over the our trees over the years? We expressed our artistry many ways, and creating a beautiful tree was important! Putting the lights on to make sure there was plenty of color, and then placing the special ornaments just so was important. When it was all said and done we would just sit back and stare in a dreamy kind of way at the sparkle and take in the fragrance of the pine.

Outliers: Gladwell Weighs In

Greetings - I am interested in Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So I went to his website and he discusses it there - and since I have not read it yet I am providing some of his thoughts. I like to cover innnovation, creativity and ways that people approach life. In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Dictionary.com says an outlier
is a person who lives away from his place of work or an extreme deviation from the mean.

Here is what Gladwell says.

"I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

"I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations."

How Does an Iconoclast Think?

I like to cover stories about innovation on this blog, but I think this has interesting scientific merit so I am posting on WendSight, too.

From an Emory University press release we learn about a new book: Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Harvard Business Press, 2008) - Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, shows us how the world's most successful innovators think and what we can learn from them.

Berns is distinguished chair of neuroeconomics, professor of economics at Emory University, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University School of Medicine. He focuses his research on human motivation and decision-making through a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology.

"Iconoclasts are individuals who do things that others say can't be done," explains Berns. "An iconoclast defies the rules, but given the opportunity, can be an asset to any organization because of the skill to be creative and innovative despite adversity."

The book examines the stories of famous and not-so-famous iconoclasts to learn something about creative decision-making, innovation and creativity and the ability to control fear, and to look at the neuroscience behind those processes. Berns profiles people such as Walt Disney, the iconoclast of animation; Natalie Maines, an accidental iconoclast; and Martin Luther King, who conquered fear.

Berns says that many successful iconoclasts are made not born. For various reasons, they simply see things differently than other people do.

"Certainly there are people who are born this way, but what I have been able to learn about these individuals is that most successful iconoclasts are people who are skilled at handling failure and particularly at handling fear - fear of failure, fear of the unknown," says Berns. He also discovered a trait that ultimately distinguishes the people who are really successful is social intelligence.

"A person can have the greatest idea in the world - completely different and novel - but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter," says Berns.

Moon and the Sun

The moon is in the west; the sun is in the east; over the lake. Tennessee summer 2008.

The Light Flickers Through the Trees

Now and then I like to think about a special moment when everything feels so right. Everyone has this kind of moment - sometimes it lasts a few seconds, sometimes for a few minutes, or sometimes even a few hours.

When I was 28 in 1978 and moved to Tallahassee with John, he started graduate school in September and I was awaiting the start of school for me in January. I worked at night waiting tables, but my days were free. I really mean free, and daydreamy and kind.

The special moments came frequently then, and I think it was because I could live energetically and creatively and quietly in the very moment. Here is how many days went: I would get up early, pack a lunch, pack a blanket, pack Sasha [Sasha Isadora Dylan, my sable collie] and Camus [Autumn's Moonhaze Camus, my tri-color collie] and jump in my fantastic speed demon navy blue metallic VW Rabbit and drive to the Gulf with my windows open and my hair blowing back.

About an hour's drive from Tallahassee was Alligator Point, a funky beach area where you could throw down a blanket anytime. To reach this beach, you drove along quiet two-lane roads that were bordered by sandy turf and scruffy trees common to the Florida Panhandle. By driving early you could see the sun flickering through the skinny pines.

Once at the beach the sun was up higher and the sky was a flat powder blue with an occasional wisp of white. The sand was white with a few shells coming in near a sandbar. Sasha, Camus and I would walk along the water's edge, playing and soaking in the sun.

After a few hours I could feel the hot sun tanning by body and warming my skin - such a fantastic feeling. With the sun high in the sky, I would make my journey home to take a cool shower and cover myself in a soothing cocoa butter, and then put on a soft, clean cotton shirt and shorts and a pair of flip flops.

Why Mark Rothko?

I have always loved the work of Mark Rothko in his mature years when he found the style he is most famous for painting. I like the brooding even in the brighter colors, and this was true of his life as an artist. He says of this:

"I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!"

Thank you to the Jacques Hachuel Collection for the image.

Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade before the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.

He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

"only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." In a sense, the "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on your interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings.

"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative."

At age 66 Rothko was in poor health, and friends found him following his suicide. His interesting life from Russia to the U.S. is document on the wikipedia.

In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, Homage to Matisse, broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at a public auction at U.S. $22.5 million dollars.
In May 2007 Rothko's 1950 painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), broke this record again, selling at $72.8 million dollars at Sotheby's New York. The painting was sold by philanthropist David Rockefeller, who attended the auction.

A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, entitled The Artist's Reality, has been edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006.

Enso - Searching for the Center

From Wikipedia - what is enso?

Ensō is a Japanese word meaning "circle" and a concept strongly associated with Zen. Ensō is perhaps the most common subject of Japanese calligraphy, symbolizing enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void; it is also an "expression of the moment" and thus is often considered a form of expressionist art.

Zen Buddhists believe that the character of the artist is fully exposed in how he paints ensō, and that only one who is mentally and spiritually whole can paint a true ensō. Some artists will paint ensō daily, as a kind of spiritual diary.

Some artists paint ensō with an opening in the circle, while others complete the circle. For the former, the opening may symbolize various ideas, for example that the ensō is not separate, but is part of something greater, or that imperfection is an essential and inherent aspect of existence (see also the idea of Broken symmetry).

The ensō is also a sacred symbol in the Zen sect of Buddhism, and is often used by Zen masters as a form of signature in their religious artwork. See also Hitsuzendo for information about the Way of the Brush.

John and Sarah at the Marina in Palm Beach

Some Poetry - Poetcasts and Mobile for You

I was scouting for web sites that have "new poetry" and found this site called poets.org. What I especially found interesting is that the Academy of American Poets is very with it, thus you can get your poetry mobile.

It says, " Poems can be browsed by author, title, occasion, or form, and searched easily by keyword. Visitors can read a poem, anytime, anywhere—whether to fill a spare moment, woo a darling, toast a friend, find solace, or recite a few immortal lines—verse is now at your fingertips."

Plus you can get poetcast and listen to your favorite poets in a podcast. I would post favorite poems from this site, but they are copyrighted! Visit!

Next: looking for the poet songwriters like Springsteen, Duritz, Dylan, Morrison and ...

Thred.org - When to Appreciate Good Design

While looking for a photo online I came across this very cool web site, so I am sharing it with you!

The group is called Therapeutic Research + Design Lab and the web site has some very interesting stories about the topic and some great photos! Check it out!

How to Use the Brain - Shake Up Your Habits

The month, The Atlantic has some very interesting articles that relate to the brain and the way we think and make decisions. I really enjoyed the cover story on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The author, Nicholas Carr, says, "I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

Visit the web site for more reading! The photo.

The Mind, Science and Buddhism

I like this op-ed piece by David Brooks from the NYT so pulled a few ideas and you can visit the web site to read it all! This general concept is central to the Tibetan Buddhist thinking of the Dalai Lama as he begins his science teachings with monks in the monastery located in India. The image is from designedonyou.com.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Dalai Lama on Time by Way of Ice Cube

Living in the U.S. is a non-stop sensory stimuli experience. How you manage it can give you some neural highs. You can meditate and reach this with no stimuli, but you can go all out in the opposite direction and soak it in. While looking on the Internet for some ideas about Time and Buddhism, I listened to Pandora.

I tuned into my Rap station and heard 50 Cent, Kanye West and Ice Cube. I love the feel of Rap, and I am interested in what it says from the real to the not-so-real. Ice Cube is back with "Smoke Some Weed"and Eminem is still putting out some very good music worth listening to.

Okay, back to Time and Buddhism. To be sure I am giving proper credit: The material on this page has been collected from the recent book, "Beyond Dogma: The Challenge of the Modern World", (c) 1996 North Atlantic Books, translated by Alison Anderson and Marianne Dresser from talks given during His Holiness's visit to France end 1993. Here.

"Q: What is the concept of time in Buddhism?
A: Regarding the Buddhist concept of time, our philosophy has adopted several positions. The Sautrantika school, also known as the "Holders of Discourse," affirms that all phenomena and events exist only in the present moment. For this school, past and future are nothing other than simple concepts, simple mental constructs. As for the Madhyamika-Prasangika school, the Consequence School of the Middle Way, it generally explains time in terms of relativity, as an abstract entity developed by the mind on the basis of an imputation, the continuity of an event or phenomenon. This philosophical view scribes, therefore, an abstract concept whose function is dependent on the continuum of phenomena. From this point on, to try to explain time as an autonomous entity, independent from an existing object, proves impossible. That time is a relative phenomenon and can claim no independent status is quite clear; I often give the example of external objects which can be easily conceived of in terms of the past or future, but of which the very present seems inconceivable. We can divide time into centuries, decades, years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. But as the second is also divisible into multiple parts, milliseconds for example, we can easily lose our grasp of the notion of present time!
As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being trans . formed into another present moment, whereas with external objects the present disappears in favour of notions of past and future. But further pursuit of this logic will lead to absurdity, because to situate past and future we need a frame of reference which, in this case, is the present, and we have just lost its trace in fractions of milliseconds."

"We strongly believe whatever we think of...."

I was writing for my discovery blog WendSight, but thought I would post one thought on Sky Badge since it has to do with innovation and that is one theme of this blog.

On the hunt for innovation, I bumped into this article from the Edmonton Journal. I like the quote below by the Xerox president of its Innovation Group.

"We strongly believe whatever we think of will work," said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of Xerox Innovation Group.

This is a very simple, but very cool statement!

Small Things from Parents Mean a Lot

Today I was looking at a magazine article about what leaders say about advice they had gotten. It made me think about my father, so I am sharing a story.

My best advice came from my father, Rodger Goodwin. He and my mother, Sue, owned a small business in Lexington, Ky., and during high school and college I spent some summer weeks in the business office.

I can recall how skillful my father was at presenting his ideas that could provide his clients with high-quality and artful ornamental metals for home and business needs. On occasion a client would visit the company on site and I would listen to my father talk with the visitor. I can remember thinking how bold he sounded as he convinced someone to go with the highest quality and if that was not what they wanted they would have to go elsewhere. He said he could only give them the best.

This was not just a sales pitch, he meant it. He was not just trying to get top dollar for his work, he wanted people to want the best and get the best. After a visitor would leave, totally convinced by the way, he would tell me what his thoughts were on how the person approached him, the conversation, and then the results. Essentially, he told me never to provide any work that was not the very best and be willing to give up business in order to be known for the highest quality work.

Picking Flowers, Collecting Trash

I was a daydreamer drifter when I was about six years old, and that may not have been a good thing.

Back in 1956 in Cleveland Heights children could walk the mile alone to school through the neighborhood and I would explore on the way home. Every yard was a mystery and every house was to be investigated. That was at least 50 houses by estimate now. I bet I knew every stone and brick, every crevice over that year.

Another interest I had was gardens, and the flowers in them were apparently for sharing because I would bring one or two home everyday throughout the springtime to my mother, Sue. She probably was trying her best to curtail that behavior, but I finally won her over one day with a big bunch of tuplips from our side yard by the driveway.

The best outdoor activity at the time, in my six-year-old estimation, was trash day. This was not garbage day, but once a week people put clearance from basements and attics on their lawns for pickup. In order to get a head start on the crew coming by truck, I left the house somewhere around 6 a.m. in the dark to pick through the treasures. I came home with assortments of things I would put in my upstairs glassed-in porch that was my personal space for thinking and working. Sue, and my dad Rodger, really wanted me to stop going out of the house before they were awake, but I just could not see the logic in that - how would I get these special items if I did not get outside before the trash collectors!

Life as a child was an adventure always and it still makes me happy to this day to take simple steps to observe the wonderful world around me and all of its mysteries.

Innovation = Dollars?

To continue on the creativity vs innovation theme I found this web site that says: "Think more creatively ~ innovate more profitably!"

So the web site, called Jenni, says it can help you and your company get your arms around this: "Idea management is a structured innovation process for capturing ideas from across a large group of people - such as your employees - and evaluating those ideas in order to identify the most promising. Jenni is a combination of software (which runs on the web) and human support that provides idea management through ideas campaigns.
An Ideas campaign is a structured process we have developed for idea management. Moreover, we believe it is the most effective, most sustainable and most motivational approach to idea management available. That's why we developed it and have used it as a model for Jenni idea management.

Honestly, the thought of having this kind of bureaucracy imposed around my idea generation makes me not want to do it in an environment this structured where someone is going to put it through hoops for profit. The question for me still remains - how do you define creativity vs innovation - because I do not want making money be related to whether something is innovative or not.

Innovation - Think Strategically

I was looking around at what people are saying about innovation and I saw this - it fits with what the corporate space should think about - from Fast Company:

Many companies that muffle innovation make some very simple mistakes:

1) Innovation (or new business development or corporate venturing or whatever you call it) is a flavor-of-the-month sort of thing. There's no consistent advocate; the process moves in fits and starts, and just as you are actually learning something, an urgent crisis causes the program to be shut down.

2) Launching a major new business is seen to be the only legitimate goal of innovation. Sure, that's great, but my colleagues and I have learned that the real benefit of innovation is often to keep your company on top in fast-moving core markets. Other benefits include patentable ideas, development of innovative people, spin-offs with economic value, and valuable learning that can lead to a success the next time around.

3) The role middle managers play in the innovation process is ignored. These folks and their networks are often the first to hit the chopping block in a corporate downsizing, but without them, innovation comes to a crashing halt.

4) Conventional disciplines -- financial benefits, career rewards, performance reviews, promotions -- are applied to uncertain new businesses. Our thesis in a forthcoming book is that established companies have most of what they need to innovate and grow, except for the right disciplines.

The Future of Creativity and Innovation

I am interested in creativity and innovation and where the two intersect. So I plan to cover this topic for a while. First I looked at a definition of creativity and Wikipedia, of course, provided a good start.

Wikipedia says, in part, "Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Okay, now to the section on innovation that compares the two, "It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context. In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process."

With opportunities to be innovative in today's world, it is interesting to note that companies are careful to define ownership of innovations by employed staff - so that the creator of an innovative idea within that environment really does not own this idea or concept, no matter how original it may be. Unless these companies begin to provide equity into these ideas, more and more innovators will work freelance and the fabric of the creative and innovative team environment will decline.

NYC: An Amazing Web of Movement

I love NYC and am interested in how it changes from an anthropology perspective. Here is an interested story: a Wired reporter covered the increase in ridership on the NYC subway and Long Island Railway. Alexander Lew says:

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced this week that both the subway and the Long Island Railroad had a significant increase in riders. The subway carried 1.56 billion people in 2007, an increase of 4.2% over 2006's ridership, maintaining the New York Subway's spot in the top three busiest subways in the world. Tokyo's subway system carries about 2.65 billion passengers each year and Moscow estimates 2.47 billion rides are taken on its metro per year. Long Island Railroad saw a 4.9% increase in riders but also had a record monthly on-time performance with 96.5% trains arriving on time in January 2008 (on time is defined as within six minutes of the schedule). Both the LIRR and the subway haven't seen this number of riders in decades. One major issue that the New York subway will face in the coming years is its capacity. The MTA's Rider Report Card showed that many passengers (especially on numbered lines, which use narrower and shorter trains than lettered lines) would like to have "adequate room to board during rush hour." The MTA reported that many of the lines cannot add anymore trains. Expanding platforms has been considered. One project that will relieve traffic off the Lexington Lines, which carry 1.3 million daily passengers, is the Second Avenue Subway (opens 2014). The initial segment from 96th Street to 63rd Avenue (where the trains will connect to the Q Broadway Express) will cost $3.83 billion. But in the mean time, the MTA encourages people to use the lettered lines.

Virtual Worlds - What Can We Expect?

Looking ahead at the world order - much is in flux, and this coverage of a virtual world is beyond the understanding of many who are not tech afficionados. I am interested in how those who understand social media vs those who do not will make a divide in coming years. Even the Obama campaign is working crowds in Second Life!

More Evidence Of Why Virtual World Economies Are Risky - from TechDirt

We've already discussed the inherent dangers of basing a business model on the economics of virtual worlds. While there definitely is quite a bit of trade in virtual goods (often for lots of money), it's mostly based on ideas of artificial scarcity on goods that are effectively infinite. To drive that point home, Josh sent in an interesting story about a lawsuit between two founders of one such virtual world, where part of the complaint was that one of the guys effectively handed over the company to a third guy -- who planned to make money by selling the game world's currency, noting that once he controlled the company, he could just create an "infinite" amount of money in "a few minutes" and sell it at "below market" prices. While this suggests the folks in question had little sense of how basic economics works, it also highlights a pretty serious risk in these virtual worlds. At the same time that we're seeing Ben Bernanke struggling with managing the monetary policy of the US economy, for virtual worlds where there really is no scarcity at all, the temptation to simply flood the market without recognizing the consequences is just too great.

Paul Klee: Inspiration, Favorite Artist

My favorite artist is Paul Klee. One day I would like to visit this museum:

The Zentrum Paul Klee is a museum dedicated to the artist Paul Klee, located in Bern, Switzerland. It features about 40 percent of Paul Klee’s entire pictorial oeuvre.
Livia Klee-Meyer, Paul Klee's daughter-in-law, donated her inheritance of almost 690 works to the city and canton of Bern in summer 1997. Additional works and documents donated and loaned by the family and the Paul-Klee-Foundation and a further 200 loans from private collections contributed to creating a very large collection of works by the artist. The decision to build the museum in the Schöngrün site on the eastern outskirts of the city was made in 1998, and renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano was contracted the same year. A preliminary project was elaborated in 2000. The building was completed in 2005. It takes the form of three undulations blending into the landscape.

Throughout his career, Paul Klee used colour in a variety of unique and diverse means, in a relationship that has progressed and evolved in a variety of ways. For an artist that loved so much of the natural world, it seems rather odd that Klee originally despised color, believing that it was in itself, little more than a decoration to a work.[citation needed]. Eventually, Klee would learn to manipulate color with great skill, coming to teach lessons on colour mixing and color theory to students at the Bauhaus. This progression in itself is of great interest because his views on colour would ultimately allow him to write about it from a unique viewpoint among his contemporaries.

A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter. He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period.

Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1917-18; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.