When I first took up Zentangle(R) in early 2013, I dawdled in it. I'd do a few tiles, then set everything aside for days or weeks, and then come back to it. After taking the Zentangle teacher training and also reading Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, it became clear to me that in order to develop my Zentangle skills and to be able to answer my students' questions about Zentangle that I needed to make it a practice.
By a practice I mean an activity that I delve into deeply, that I do daily. I would like to have a specific time set aside each day for this practice, but, even though I'm retired, I admit that I haven't yet created that specific practice time.
The other thing I learned from Twyla Tharp's book is that all the geniuses of their particular art studied other geniuses. Mozart studied the work of the other composers that preceded him. Twyla Tharp studied the work of other masters of the dance such as George Balanchine.
So I have taken on my own in-depth study of the work of the Zentangle founders, Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, deconstructing their Zentangles where tangles merge into one another or wrap around each other or where there seem to be no strings. They have many years of experience in Zentangle and I'm a relative beginner but I think there are ways that my Zentangle art can benefit from this study.
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