Art & Fear
The book "Art & Fear" is a short but poignant book on some of the inner challenges artists face every day. I found the PDF online and have reposted it here. Consider buying a copy for yourself from the link in the quote below
These are questions that matter, questions that recur at each stage of artistic development - and they are the source for this volume of wonderfully incisive commentary." "Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reason it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way." "This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing Free Will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.
This is Your Brain On Jazz
I find this fascinating and am reposting it here in case the article disappears one day.
A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.
On Sacred Geometry
There is no such thing as Sacred Geometry. There are, perhaps, more and less pleasing ratios. There are forms that repeat through space because they are the paths of least resistance for the elements that build on those forms. The "golden mean" or Fibonacci spiral is one of the most common, I think.
Such ratios form aesthetically pleasing ways of creating compositions. Breaking visual spaces into thirds or fifths can accomplish something that breaking them into twos cannot.