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Inspiring reads for creatives

Posted on 25 May 2022

From the neuroscience of new ideas to kaleidoscopic visual sourcebooks, these reads are designed to refresh your perspective, bolster your creative courage and help spark something new.

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Colour Study, Squares with Concentric Circles. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München.

1. Affinities

Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic.

At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities invites the reader to revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.

2. How Art Can Change Your Life

Brimming with upbeat guidance, How Art Can Change Your Life by Susie Hodge is an accessible handbook that shows how anyone can use art to enlighten, uplift, and ease stress and anxieties.

3. Creative Demons and How to Slay Them

Drawing on inspirational anecdotes from art, philosophy, neuroscience, nature, music and contemporary culture, creativity expert Richard Holman provides you with your very own mental armoury to see you through every stage of the creative process in Creative Demons and How to Slay Them.

4. Make to Know

Lorne M. Buchman’s Make to Know offers a deep dive into the minds of the most imaginative people on the planet, laying bare the revelatory nature of the creative journey. It upends popular notions of innate artistic and visionary genius and probes instead the event of discovery that happens through the act of making.

5. Hegarty on Creativity

In Hegarty on Creativity, John Hegarty, one of the world’s most famous advertising professionals, offers fifty brilliant and provocative insights into creativity and the creative process.