Creativity

I know writers, poets, artists, crafters, photographers, content makers, actors, musicians and performers. It’s not just a list I can brag about but more a celebration of the creative and imaginative people I know. Some are friends and some I’m related to. But it is such a privilege to watch them work and make the stuff of their particular art form. I also love to talk about where the ideas come from and then how they bring them to life. Because they do come to life. People listen to the music, view the artwork, read the words, wear the creation and marvel at the wonder of it all.

Albert Einstein said, ‘creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no-one else has ever thought.’ To create something is a marvelous alchemy of idea and form. We could all see the same beautiful sunrise and everyone of us have a different response. The novelist might see it as the moment the protagonist is reborn after a challenge, a photographer might catch the liminal space between first light and dawn, an artist the shadows between night and day, the graphic designer a colour for an image.

At the heart of the creative life are a couple of superpowers. One; the ability to see things differently and connect disparate ideas. Two; the courage to craft something for the world to see. Creators explore, immerse, toil, make, wreck, obsess, reject, formulate, construct and eventually reveal. And that last one is the test of their nerve. They are saying here is a thing I’ve put much of my time and myself into and I ‘give’ it to you so you can be entertained, infuriated, amazed, healed, filled with joy or bored senseless. We who create have no control over your response, we have simply released it into your world. Whether you love it, feel it, believe it or crush it with your brutality is not within our control. Hence the latter superpower.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been able to enjoy watching some wonderfully creative people do their thing. The local creative community has presented two Literary and Art Salons where an artist and a writer presented their creations. The artist talked about the meaning of the work, the material used and other anecdotal relevancies that brought the idea to the canvas. The writer’s job was to find something within the piece to write about. The extraordinary thing about the process was the fact that the written work did not live solely in the artwork it emerged from the experiences of the writers’ engagement with it. A landscape became a love story, a wave the reminiscence of war, a teacup a response to grief, a snake an emersion in the mystical elements of reptilian transformation, magpies a rhyming rhythmic narrative about football (apparently some team is called the magpies!!) A little horror here, some romance there, whimsy and woe all woven into more than a dozen stories and poems.

The magic was in the revelation of what each creator saw. The idea became something wonderfully unique and spoke of how the art stimulated and percolated senses, sound, characters, colour and action. The artwork and the written words took the listeners on the journey with them.

Even more marvelously is how we do this thing called creativity. Creativity is not some whimsical, time filler. It is a full brain workout. It’s not just the prefrontal cortex making decisions, it’s the temporal lobes processing sound and language and the parietal lobes that help us visualise. The limbic system kicks to help sort out the emotions. And then it’s the time, the will and determination to bring the thing to fruition. It is not passive.

Creativity is a dynamic pursuit that has immense power to make us better communicators, global thinkers, problem solvers, inclusive understanding human beings. It is no soft option. I’d go so far as to say it was an essential human activity. Because to be creative doesn’t mean you have to make art or write the great Australian novel, it means to enrich your day with curiosity and wonder. To be innovative and observant of all that is around us will change how we interact, forge ideas and move forward.

I hope for the sake of the human brain and perhaps humanity itself we take heed of the value of creativity. I hope for you that you take time to stare at a painting, listen to a poem, write a few words, invent a recipe, knit a jumper, take a photograph, draw an image or at the very least…be kind to those who do.

You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.

                                                                         George Bernard Shaw