I've always suspected that I was never very creative. Give me a white piece of paper and a pencil. It will soon become apparent that I will have no idea what I am doing and I will draw something stupid.
But I'm an art student. So how can that possibly be true. I'm even a good art student.
How can I be an art student and not be creative?
I am using creative in the sense that I think the general public uses it. That I can just make up something on the spot, out of nowhere, completely randomly and it will work.
Thankfully, I have come to the full realization that creativity in that sense simply does not exist.
It has changed how I view the word "inspired". That word is thrown around in art liberally. Things are simply the "inspiration" for a piece. Give whatever is the "inspiration" a nod and then turn your back and focus on how your hand has affected the work.
Art shouldn't be like a simile to it's "inspiration", it should be a metaphor. A drawing of a flower shouldn't be like a flower, it should be the flower. And I am not asking the impossible. A physical flower is already every flower that led up to it. Every cycle of seeds and growth that made it. The piece of art is part of that cycle. It may be a different type of progression, but it needs to be considered one and the same.
To return to the point of creativity. What may appear to be random and out of nowhere, actually needs to be just the opposite. Everything we make comes directly out of everything that is already there. I see most of what I make coming out of what I already have in my head. I don't have the ability to make things at random. Everything will always in some way relate back to what I already knew.
But this is not to make anyone despair. It doesn't mean by saying "we can't be creative" that we have lost the ability to make things that are original. It simply means that the decisions of what goes into our heads, and choosing what we take out, are of utmost importance.
Kyler
2 comments:
I have come to the full realization that creativity in that sense simply does not exist.
That is absolutely wrong. If I play a note on the piano, without any particular desire to get anywhere, that note can still lead me to great places. It just takes a lot of effort. I play the note over and over again until I see another note I can add to it, and then another, and another, until I'm playing something which stinks and I start over and over and over until I get to something that works. It's not glamorous, but it exists.
What is more accurate to say is that this aspect of creativity -which I call "utilizing tools"- is not all there is. There are three other kinds of inspiration, to be used together. I wrote long descriptions of them here.
The point I was attempting to make is that everything that is created must come out of what preceded it.
In the case of your piano example, the music is going to come about either by the design of the piano, by your preferences and musical experience, or by iteratively building upon the single note that you started with. In any case, what you make is directly related to what already exists.
I find your categorization of inspiration to be useful, but I think it makes it difficult to see the underlying truth about creation, that everything must come out of what preceded it.
All of your categories are simply variations on this theme.
Imitation - Obviously taking what came before.
Correction - Taking what you know to fix something that already existed
Utilizing Tools - Allowing the design of tools to suggest an initial state, and then using correction and imitation to iteratively create more.
Fulfilling Needs - Taking a problem which already exists and using your knowledge to find a solution.
If everything must come out of what preceded it, it seems logical that nothing could be original. But our goal is to be original as artists, that is the point.
A new perspective needs to be taken, that it isn't whether something is original or not. The new perspective is how original something is. How far off track can it take us. How big a step forward is it.
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