Creative Process

Chris Cotter has an affinity for old things. His home in historic Ellicott City, built in the 1850s, has a castle-like tower overlooking the town, and the office for his advertising and marketing firm was built as a mill in 1822. But when it comes to the age-old creative process of brainstorming to come up with advertising ideas for clients, he looks to technology for help. Cotter Integrated, Cotter's Ellicott City firm, has created a Web-based program designed to automate and streamline the advertising process for the company and its clients.

Shawn Michaels, the man widely recognized as the greatest WWE superstar that ever lived, is thoroughly enjoying his life outside the ring. His new television endeavor, Shawn Michaels' MacMillan River Adventures, is a success, with the Outdoor Channel offering the program a multi-year deal. Michaels and company are currently filming more episodes. Michaels recently entered a sponsorship agreement with Deuce Brand to be the face of and creative force behind the "Showstopper" watch, an HBK-themed wrist piece.

The music world is governed by all sorts of rules - structure, tempo and dynamic markings, to name a few. What happens when you throw them all out and leave everything up to the performer's whim? You get something on the order of High Zero, that's what. High Zero, billed as a Festival of Improvised Experimental Music, returns to Baltimore a year after its remarkably successful premiere, which saw dozens turned away from sold-out performances. More than 30 improvisers from this country, Canada, Italy and Holland will descend on the city for four days of spontaneous music-making, starting Thursday.

Natasha Brown-Wainwright, 41, still calls it The Twitter. She doesn't upload photos to Facebook without her 16-year-old daughter's help. Her grasp of the Web is fuzzy. But last summer, she decided to get a clue and join the latest, buzziest social media bandwagon around, Kickstarter, a site that connects entrepreneurs with small-scale donors. Her brittle business, barely making a profit after four years, needed a lift, even if it came from a source she still found baffling. "I think people in their 40s are beginning to realize their future is on the Internet, on Twitter, on Kickstarter," she says.

Shawn Michaels, the man widely recognized as the greatest WWE superstar that ever lived, is thoroughly enjoying his life outside the ring. His new television endeavor, Shawn Michaels' MacMillan River Adventures, is a success, with the Outdoor Channel offering the program a multi-year deal. Michaels and company are currently filming more episodes. Michaels recently entered a sponsorship agreement with Deuce Brand to be the face of and creative force behind the "Showstopper" watch, an HBK-themed wrist piece.

This weekend, The Sun is launching a few changes to help improve how consistently and efficiently we deliver your Sunday newspaper. You will continue to receive part of the Sunday Sun early -- the Travel section, TV Week and some ad circulars (from grocers and other retailers). This package will be delivered by Saturday morning. On Sunday mornings, you will receive the balance of your Sunday Sun, including the Real Estate sections, the Ideas section, Parade magazine and the rest of your ad circulars.

The sheep started out as a cow, say creative collaborators Tina Carroll and Joel Gaydos. "We knew we wanted to do a critter with a human face," says Carroll, describing one of the pieces she and Gaydos created for Farmality, their current show at School 33 Art Center. But after the usual "bouncing back and forth" that is part of their creative process, she says, she realized, "This might be a sheep." The sculptures in Farmality reflect Carroll and Gaydos' interest in mixing media and ideas in humorous and provocative ways.

A very personal story of adoption is used to address issues o origin, choice and destiny in an installation at the Maryland Institute. The joint exhibition also documents the building of an unusual wind-activated boat that is being painstakingly constructed and welded out of scrap metalin harbor at Sparrows PointThe exhibition clearly has no commercial intent. Both works were produced while art instructors Ann Fessler and Art Benson were on sabbatical from the Institute. Rather than inviting a relatively passive exercise in aesthetics, the show instead challenges gallery-goers to conceptually participate in the creative process.

A quick history of the sordid world of Olympic mascots: 1992: Cobi (a dog, or so we are told) was created by Spanish artist Javier Mariscal. He said he was under the influence of non-performance-enhancing substances during the creative process. "I was very stoned," he said. 1996: Izzy (short for Whatizit), a freakazoid created by the yahoos in Atlanta. Apparently, they had a few creative hours to kill after their Olympic transportation bus got lost. 1998: Sukki, Nokki, Lekki and Tsukki - mascots for the Nagano Games - looked suspiciously similar to Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny, those deviants from South Park.

What if they started making albums in a different way? What if the record company came to you, the buyer, and asked what songs you wanted from an artist?Well, it's happened.QVC, the West Chester, Pa.-based television shopping channel, is currently marketing a two-CD collection of love songs recorded by '70s pop icon Kenny Rogers that originated just that way. In August, QVC asked viewers to send a postcard naming their three favorite romantic songs. Almost 10,000 people responded.The result is Mr. Rogers' "Vote for Love," the first release by the QVC recording label onQ Music.

What happens in a jazz musician's brain during an improv session? Where does all that creativity come from? That's what Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon with a passion for music, wanted to find out. Limb's medical specialty as an otolaryngologist is restoring deaf people's hearing with the use of cochlear implants, electronic devices that translate sounds for people with damaged ears. But in his research, Limb studies the effects of jazz on the brain. In a study published this year in the Public Library of Science ONE, Limb reported results of an experiment in which he had professional jazz pianists improvise riffs as an MRI machine scanned their brain waves.

At her in-home studio in Catonsville, jewelry artist Barbara Giles creates deceptively simple pieces of stone-and-metal, which she sells online (barbaragiles jewelry.com) and from elegant small display cases in local boutiques, such as Art and Artisan on Main Street in Ellicott City. They are beautiful pieces meant to be worn -- smoothly polished cut opal; softly colored sea glass connected with sterling silver; magnificent jade petals in pinks and oranges; amazing lasso necklaces of crocheted sterling silver perfect for twisting, tucking and tying.

This weekend, The Sun is launching a few changes to help improve how consistently and efficiently we deliver your Sunday newspaper. You will continue to receive part of the Sunday Sun early -- the Travel section, TV Week and some ad circulars (from grocers and other retailers). This package will be delivered by Saturday morning. On Sunday mornings, you will receive the balance of your Sunday Sun, including the Real Estate sections, the Ideas section, Parade magazine and the rest of your ad circulars.

A quick history of the sordid world of Olympic mascots: 1992: Cobi (a dog, or so we are told) was created by Spanish artist Javier Mariscal. He said he was under the influence of non-performance-enhancing substances during the creative process. "I was very stoned," he said. 1996: Izzy (short for Whatizit), a freakazoid created by the yahoos in Atlanta. Apparently, they had a few creative hours to kill after their Olympic transportation bus got lost. 1998: Sukki, Nokki, Lekki and Tsukki - mascots for the Nagano Games - looked suspiciously similar to Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny, those deviants from South Park.

The sheep started out as a cow, say creative collaborators Tina Carroll and Joel Gaydos. "We knew we wanted to do a critter with a human face," says Carroll, describing one of the pieces she and Gaydos created for Farmality, their current show at School 33 Art Center. But after the usual "bouncing back and forth" that is part of their creative process, she says, she realized, "This might be a sheep." The sculptures in Farmality reflect Carroll and Gaydos' interest in mixing media and ideas in humorous and provocative ways.

Early Monday morning, before other visitors arrive, artist Jo Smail introduces her students to the striking, often mysterious, results of artistic collaboration. They have gathered in the gallery at Evergreen House, another stop on Smail's own artistic journey. Her work is part of Conversations, a show which gathers the fruit of dozens of creative alliances between past and present faculty members of the Maryland Institute College of Art and artists outside that community. Some paintings grew from an exchange between a teacher and student, or between artists who are related to one another.

This year marks the centennial of the beginning of significant Korean immigration to the United States, an event that is being celebrated this month by an intriguing show of contemporary Korean art at Gallery International The show, Pass.Ages.Now, curated by Towson-based sculptor Barbara Han, presents five Korean artists whose work reflects a consciousness of both the rich heritage of traditional Korean art and the transformations wrought by rapid urbanization and industrialization on the peninsula and its people over last 100 years.

Jeff Order leaps and bounds between the keyboards and the computer in his studio. His latest New Age music album, "Keepers of the Light,"is in the works, and the Columbia resident exudes energy with animated conversation and hands in perpetual motion.Order, 30, has composed music since he began piano lessons at age 4. All three children in his family studied music early, a practice their parents were convinced would help them in school. At 6, Order's parents enrolled him in the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he began to learn music theory.

The versatility of one medium will be on display, beginning Saturday, at the School 33 Art Center. Declaring Space: Recent Drawings by Baltimore Artists, part of the city's annual Artscape celebration, is a group show that features disparate drawing styles, techniques and subject matter. Each artist's body of work is different, from gestural figure compositions to sketches of graphic forms, but all of the pieces give the viewer a glimpse into the creative processes behind the drawing.