The Casual Alchemist

     EMAIL

rustic@warwick.net

Another Description of 

The Casual Alchemist

A Project from 

Daniel Mack

Creative Aging 

as a practice of Casual Alchemy

October  10 and November 13

1-hour introductions to 

The Casual Alchemist 

in the theme of "CREATIVE AGING" 

at AWPL Library in Warwick, NY

August  26-30      Workshop

The Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY

Befriending the Creative Unconscious

based on this work, The Casual Alchemist

July 14      Open Studio

Wonder-Wander-Warwick

June and July

Workshops with local teens

Daniel Mack's Studio (0:33)

Intro to Casual Alchemy (6:00)

Exploring Puddles (1:14)

More Puddles (2:40)

Shadows (0:16)

The Shoreline

The Casual Alchemist   

Making as a spiritual and political activity in times of transition,  inviting people to discover, renew, adjust  their own inherent creative capacities through stories, pictures, inspirations and practices.  

It encourages distraction and interruption. It features the transient and the casual as primary influences, not impediments, to the process. 

Contact with unconscious intelligence (creativity) must not be immediately commodified into art or consumption. It is basically a spiritual experience.   

Making is an important, accessible, non-verbal, casual, personal portal for  people in transition, people seeking  regenerative activities for themselves, their family and the community.  This book is larger than personal creativity.

There are three major sections, allowing for different learning styles:

1. Daniel Mack's essays over 25 Years This is the trail of events and discoveries Mack himself  has made about the consequences of being with Things: teaching how to make them, collecting, buying, making, selling and gifting them. 

2. A PlayBook for getting right into DOING IT .

3. The Grimoire  .. a grimoire is the recipe or note book of a particular Alchemist-Magician-Witch. 

This is an image-driven tour of Mack's personal and public responses, reactions and evolution into a Casual Alchemist over 30 years.  It is his blueprint  to perhaps look through as you are making your own.

It is a record of the influences and inspirations that helped form Mack's work. It lists other artists, poets, makers he admires and offers a collection of stories and poems he has found helpful. It lays out interesting projects in workshops, schools, rural villages and urban and suburban communities. It's his alchemy-in-service. 

He offers a section of Resources... where to find the stuff of Casual Alchemy, from porcupine quills and pottery shards to handmade watercolor papers and more.   

Daniel Mack??

Daniel Mack is an artist, writer and teacher. His first book (of seven), Making Rustic Furniture (1991) sold over 100,000 copies,  because of its common language, inviting style and timing. This current project, which began in 1997,  presents several ways of accessing the creative unconscious.  The reader is invited to actively compose the experience appropriate to mood and concern and the pressing distractions of the day.

Your Influences?
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman and his protege, Thomas Moore

Naomi Remen  on the differences between helping, fixing or serving.

Lewis Hyde’s two books, The Gift and The Trickster Makes the World,  

The Casual Alchemist is rooted in a Piaget approach to teaching/learning; it is about guided discovery, not lessons and exercises. 

There are indeed lots of books on crafts, making, spirituality and "transformation" filling shelves.

The Casual Alchemist is in a smaller subset of such books which starts from the experience of making... and presents it in the tradition of Alchemy and Surrealism.

But probably the most distinctive feature is the tone or style.  It is NOT set up in a hierarchical fashion.  It is not a Way to learn and master.  It tries not to let "teaching" get in the way of learning. 

The Casual Alchemist tries to revive the notion of "Ordinary Magic"... that sensibility and need  all humans have to effect and  influence the world around them..  The root of the word witch is the German weik, which means to curve or bend.  That's the drive of humans to keep ordering, bending, curving the disorder and chaos they experience.  Making is a central form of that.

The Casual Alchemist is not a self-help psychology book, nor a collection of poetic meditations.

The Casual Alchemist is a Hand-Book for Adjusting and Re-Creating  lives in transition and distress.