Over the past fifteen weeks, we created art using prompt cards from the Oblique Strategies card deck.
Oblique Strategies is a unique deck of cards with prompts intended to break creative blocks and encourage lateral thinking. In the 1970s, artist Peter Schmidt and musician Brian Eno came up with a deck’s worth of imaginative lines that offered solutions to the blocks that they encountered in their daily, creative lives. This autumn and winter, we shared these thought-provoking tidbits in our newsletter and across our social media platforms as an invitation to explore artistic inspiration in them.
1.
Use an unacceptable colour
2.
Tidy up
3.
Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place
4.
Use filters
5.
What to increase? What to reduce?
6.
Look at the order in which you do things
7.
Once the search is in progress, something will be found
8.
Decorate, decorate
9.
Only a part, not the whole
10.
Slow preparation..Fast execution
11.
Go outside. Shut the door
12.
Turn it upside down
13.
Simple subtraction
14.
Work at a different speed
15.
Reverse
Big thanks to Maria Coryell-Martin and Nakaia Macomber-Millman for lending their artistic talent to these prompts and to Peter and Brian for coming up with such an interesting deck of cards—they really made us think!