Contents

How this Book  Evolved    
Trees of Life    
Gardens and Galleries    
Enclosed Paradises - Dissolving Boundaries  
Mindscapes    
Simple Symbols    
Leaves and Lungs    
Walk or Fly?    
Down-to-Earth Inspiration    
Grounds of Understanding    
Ideas as Images    
Being Human Catalysts    
Space    
Building Space    
Communal Space    
Spatial Games    
Staged Effects    
Borrowed Vistas    
Envisaging Reality    
Magic and Miracles    
Life Paths    
Clouds    
Light and Energy    
New Horizons?    
Food for Thought: What’s Real for You?

We play with natural imagery in our every day lives to express thoughts and feelings.

As we become increasingly aware of how we ‘see’ the earth, we become more self-conscious about the whole creative process, and how to use it.

CREATIVITY: Nature and Us reflects on the evolving relationship between the arts, the environment and the individual.

Ideas ‘take shape’. This creative process is illustrated in related art forms including theatre, poetry, painting, sculpture, garden design and earth art.

The author’s own artworks, exhibited internationally, and inspired by nature add peaceful optimism.

Bo interlinks different landscape experiments worldwide.

Her images illustrate how we are moving from ego-centric to eco-centric creators.

Listen to a recent radio interview where Bo talks about this book.

Ebook and Paperback

Creativity: Nature and Us is now available through Amazon as a full colour paperback or ebook. Buy your copy using the following links:

Creativity: Nature and Us - Paperback - Creativity: Nature and Us - Ebook

Environmental Awareness

Nature inspires us. Symbols we use in everyday life can provide clues to more esoteric or metaphysical levels of reality. We play with images to link our ordinary and cosmic selves. Everyone’s ideas and emotions can contribute to a shared energy field. Paradise pictures illustrate universal themes in a contemplative book linking many factors from food to stars. Earth art demonstrates how spatial progressions can help to dissolve mental barriers. Roads of Life reflect how internal challenges can be expressed as external adventures. And invisible elements - such as electromagnetic energy and love – can miraculously transform our material existence on this living planet.

What does nature mean to you?

Civilisations can be judged by their reactions to our natural environment.

Our earth provides solid and invisible support; food and ideas.

We adapt classic themes like the tree of life. We have family trees formseed thoughts.

What is your favourite scenery? Where would you go on holiday?

What we love about cool, snowy mountains or exotic, tropical islands helps us to pinpoint personal ideals.

How we ‘see’ the earth reflects our core beliefs, keys to future actions.

How do urbanites connect with nature? We construct public and private arenas to reflect our different degrees of involvement with wild nature:

Parks provide crossover points between personal and public spaces. With increased urbanisation any green corner becomes precious. Lack of time, energy and funds restrict us and makes guerrilla gardeners extra welcome. We need somewhere safe for small children to play, people to recuperate, relax, exercise, socialise, see trees, hear birds, smell flowers, watch insects, and experience nature’s seasonal changes.

Exterior landscapes are often inspired by inner realms – ideal worlds, dreamscapes, invented heavens. If you visualise your mindscapes you can sometimes solve problems at root level, transforming pains and negativities to positives, like gardeners transforming wastelands into practical edens. Blocks can be imaginatively transformed into bridges, clouds can be drenched in light, all for free, within the mind’s eye.

Many healers use transformational, meditative landscapes. They evoke peaceful images such as transparent fountains and vast, sunny fields of flowers to begin to ease people into a state of grace.

We adapt our outer environment to express our inner feelings:

Young children’s drawings of their homes often show a house with a chimney even if they are living in a flat. They can produce stereotyped, symbolic dwellings, often adding a low green line for earth and a high blue line for sky. They sandwich their view of reality between earth and sky. If happy, they personalise their picture with a huge round, smiley sun.

When they include figures, vital characters such as the artists themselves are often enlarged out of all proportion. Contented children tend to place themselves in the centre of a page, canvas, web design or any symbolic space.

How could you explain invisible energy? A French painter was paid to paint electricity.

Dufy evokes the gods of Greek legend to suggest creative continuity. He portrays a modern subject. He depicts the spirit of electricity, an energy goddess for our times. The Greeks’ absorption in energy interchanges and philosophical curiosity about intangibles make them our intellectual precursors. Their mythical deities are combined in Dufy’s composite creation. It mixes scientists and musicians. Why? Dufy decided to make invisible electricity seem ‘real,’ and so fashioned a poetic metaphor to capture its essence. He doesn’t depict a pop up toaster or a massive power station, but a more intangible delight – music – the traditional ‘food of love’.

How could you translate science into art? Charles Jencks the American architect worked with his talented wife Maggie to transform quantum physics into visual art forms in their Garden of Cosmic Speculation.

Jencks makes us think. Playing with wave forms he reinforces the fact that waves are not just earthly forces. Waves move throughout the universe, a composite sea of waves, composed of endless fluctuations. Did waves exist prior to matter?

Can you play with words to anchor abstract ideas? We use down-to-earth imagery to stabilise many mysteries. Traditionally cultivating fields for food makes them safe, reassuringly tried and tested symbols. What better tag to put on unknown universes than Deep Field Space?

Field imagery can be used to ground abstract thoughts or explain theoretical principles. Physicists, for example, searching for the meaning of life throughout the universe sought a ‘Unified Field Theory’. Fields can be used to explain all existence, whether in microcosm or in macrocosm. Thus martial artists teach their practitioners to become aware of their own inner core of psychic or spiritual energy. And they tellingly describe this source of personal power as their ‘inner field’.

Everything is energy. Everything interacts. Each mind is a power house of creative energy, feeding into the bigger picture. Every individual produces ideas and feelings, blue-prints for the future. Everyone is an earth artist.