Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Let’s Get Creative: Ref 2 Artistic Creativity Takes Courage, only?

Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse

I must confess that I am, or was up to now, completely ignorant concerning the concept of “creativity”. I had to bring myself up to speed about it, but once I commenced with an awfully “surface” research on the topic, I was instantly impressed by the fact that creativity should be superior or tremendously treasured as both the artist- and the non-artist factions are firstly in a frantic rivalry to define the concept and secondly are wrestling to death to claim sole possession thereof.

At the practical end of things (let us call this end the “Engineers”), I was met with a plethora of terms, processes, stages, components, characteristics, theories, etcetera up to a point where my tender artist mindset was totally confused, yes – virtually overstretched beyond restoration. At the opposite “Artists” end, definitions like artful, artistic, aesthetic, and gorgeous were in profusion. This academic glug-and-all by this time already started making me feel more than slightly lame in the brains department. Until I made few discoveries….

Firstly, what made it somewhat bearable was when I read that the cool-headed Engineers are dead certain that Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. This may be true for a small number of us hot-blooded Artists, but not for me – I must admit that I tend to produce while I think and then make improvements where and when I think necessary. Is my reverse artistic creativity even slightly analogous to reverse engineering?

Well, the second great finding that I made was also kind of comforting to me. I namely discovered that the academics are stating that there two main types of creativity, namely Deliberate and Spontaneous - you surely guessed that I like the last one better, so let us then please leave the first one to the Engineers. Each of the two types has “Cognitive” and “Emotional” divisions. Yes, and again I preferred the latter. I mean where do you get an emotional Engineer - crying because they created before thinking - for pete’s sake.

Thirdly, the professors then rambled on and tried their utmost best to explain to my worn-out left mind the different parts of the human brain and how they function - blah, blah, blah, big-words-times-ten – and then, eventually, they came to the phenomenal conclusion that Spontaneous and Emotional creativity (the ones I like better!) happens when a certain part of the brain is resting (yes, resting!). Furthermore, only at the end of their hard day’s work, the poor academic lads and ladies then realised that spontaneous and emotional creativity is mostly found in great artists such as musicians, painters, and writers etc. They even gave it a nice name and linked it to “epiphanies”, whatever that means, just hoping it does not refer to "lazy brains".

Fourthly, these guys even went to extreme ends to please me by declaring that there is no need to have specific knowledge for “spontaneous and emotional” creativity to happen, but that there should be a skill such as writing, musical or artistic. They concluded their "glorious assignment" by stating that “this type of creativity” can’t be obtained by working on it….

Well, let us then summarise it for ourselves: Artistic creativity equals 1) resting brains, 2) zero knowledge, 3) no work? Hallelujah. Amen.

Someone once said that everything outside of the world of art has concrete rules which may not be broken. Art on the other hand with its freedom to interpretation, only has loose rules which are broken often and freely in order to create higher calibre art.

In conclusion then: To be artistically creative par excellence, should we not give our brains a rest, take that courage and start breaking those loose art rules?


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