A bio from Modernbook Gallery describes how artist Maggie Taylor works:

“Using 19th century tin-types, photographs, and images, she scanned them on a flatbed scanner. She then combines them with some other images that she photographed, acquired, or other objects that she scanned. These images are then composed, combined, and colorized by using the Adobe Photoshop program. In a typical image composed by Taylor, there can be as many as 40-60+ layers.

“Taylor received her BA degree in philosophy from Yale University and her MFA degree in photography from the University of Florida.  In 1996 and 2001 she received State of Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowships.  In 2004 she won the Santa Fe Center for Photography’s Project Competition.  She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, photographer Jerry Uelsmann.”

The post title comes from Maggie Taylor – an interview by Steve Anchell, in which she says: “Making images for me is a way of life. I can’t imagine not doing it . . . I guess in terms of what motivates me, the best answer would be, if I don’t make images I’m unhappy.”

It’s a word that has a wide range of associations, including some pretty negative or dismissive ones.

Many people connect “psychic” with storefront charlatans and stage performers. The Wikipedia page defines a psychic, also called a sensitive, as a person “who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses.”

But the page also notes a 1988 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded there is “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.”

I don’t have any particular psychic ability, but am fascinated by it, and appreciate the more sympathetic depictions in movies such as “Hereafter” directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Cécile De France and Matt Damon as a professional psychic.

In our interview, Judith Orloff, MD noted she had intuitive capacities at an early age, but her family did not encourage her to develop her psychic abilities. She is now integrating these talents with traditional medicine, and is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, and also has a private practice and leads workshops on intuitive ability and healing.

One of the enduring ideas about creative expression is that it comes from sparks of inspiration out of our unconscious, breaking through to awareness.

A related idea is that creative “geniuses” like Mozart freely “channel” finished or almost finished notable work, that mere mortals like the rest of us can’t possibly hope to do.

But New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks has pointed out, “His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.”

From my post Grit and perseverance mean more than talent and high aptitude.

[Brooks is also quoted in my earlier post Practice, Practice, Practice.]

Artists themselves may promote myths.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (photo; 1772–1834) is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He claimed in a preface to the latter, that the poem came to him in a dream during a nap, and he simply wrote down the entire finished work.

We all have hidden or shadow aspects of our minds, and actors and other artists may have a greater appreciation for the unconscious, and more actively make use of those depths.

An NPR interview reported that actress Lili Taylor (photo) “is particularly influenced by the work of Carl Jung. A founding father of modern psychology, Jung developed the theory of the collective unconscious, and proposed the existence of archetypal patterns that help shape personality.

“Taylor says she sometimes finds it helpful to think in terms of Jungian archetypes when she begins working on a part: ‘It’s another way of helping getting in there, because I have a whole wealth of literature to turn to if I have come up with the trickster, the villain or the great mother or the nag or whatever.’”

Many authors and coaches declare that we can benefit from using our gut reactions, hunches, instincts – that using material we get in addition to the usual senses and rational thought can guide our personal development and enhance creativity.

The photo is writer, producer, director Guillermo del Toro and a creature from his acclaimed movie “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

He has commented on a couple of different aspects of intuition and its presence in our lives:

“When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.”

He also spoke about people having two levels of thought: “One is conscious and the other unconscious or subconscious…

Many talented and accomplished actors consider intuition an important part of developing their creativity and power as an artist.

Director Jane Campion commented about Abbie Cornish, one of the lead actors in her movie “Bright Star”: “She has to be very true to her instincts, she doesn’t know how to betray them; it would be a little death to do so.

“She is weirdly strong, gracious, intuitive and bold and fabulously stubborn at times.”

Many of his other movies are fact-based stories such as The Queen and Frost/Nixon, but screenwriter Peter Morgan says he wrote Hereafter quickly for himself, “without mapping it out too much or being too schematic,” and “left it in a drawer.” But six months or so later, a close friend died and he looked at the script again and decided to send it to his agent.

Steven Spielberg read it and suggested a number of changes, which Morgan says he was “thrilled with.”

But in a later meeting, Morgan said Spielberg thought the changes “he had given me had harmed the script and I said, ‘No, it was good,’ and he said, ‘No, no, it isn’t good, and I damaged your work, and I don’t want to touch it again, and I want to go back to the original script that you sent me, and I want to give it to my friend Clint Eastwood.’