In the April Omni Magazine there is a good article on creativity. I highly recommend it. But I can’t resist writing about it also. To begin with, a very reassuring statement appears at the head of the article, “No correlation between measured IQ and creativity exists. Intuition, more than rational thought, appears to be vital to the creative thinking process.”I don’t know what my IQ is — it’s probably so low that I purposely forgot it. Hopefully yours is high, but if not — take heart. According to Candice Pert of the National Institute of Mental Health, creativity comes from the spiritual realm, the collective consciousness. And the mind is in a different realm than the molecules of the brain. The brain is a receiver, not a source. Pretty heady stuff, eh?
Colin Martindale, University of Maine psychologist, thinks the creative state of mind has a broad, unfocused sort of attention. But in focusing your attention, you essentially defeat creative efforts. This is interesting because in animation the mind has to be focused on a great many things. That is why I think the concept of a left and right mode of the brain is helpful. (Though this article points out it may more likely be the front and back modes.) If while creating, in terms of drawing and animation, one can be aware of the possibility of calling on one or the other mode, or a percentage blend of the two, both needs can be fulfilled. For instance, in our classroom situation, we try to deal with the need to call upon our knowledge of anatomy and other necessary details (left brain activity), while at the same time attempting to resolve the elements before us into a coherent whole, a meaningful gesture (right brain activity). The article points out that one of the attributes of the creative person is Mental Mobility. This allows us to observe the model, while at the same time adjusting what we see to better tell the story we have attributed to it. Another trait is the willingness to take risks. It requires a certain amount of risk taking to part from the model to better caricature the gesture. To just sit and copy the model is playing it safe — not taking risks. The article says creative people are not so responsive to stimuli as other personality types. So it should be easier for the creative person not to be held down by the stimuli of the model’s presence, but use the information in an innovative way, and take risks. “Along with risk taking, comes the acceptance of failure as part of the creative quest, and the ability to learn from such failure.” No one knows better than we ourselves how many bad drawings we’ve made, but they just make us more determined to succeed — we use them as stepping stones in our “creative quest.” Perkins of Harvard says “Contrary to popular image, the creative person is not a self-absorbed loner.” He can put aside his ego and seek advice from trusted colleagues. Important, though, to the whole kit and caboodle, is the fact that “… the driving force behind creative effort is inner motivation.”
Lest you are harboring the idea that creativity can only be associated with such things as hit songs, award-winning novels, painting masterpieces, and mind-boggling inventions, let me suggest that any activity you undertake each moment of your life can be creative. Every drawing you make has whatever portion of creativity you choose to instill in it. Every time you resist copying the model and instead draw or caricature the “story,” you have distilled from the pose, you are creating. You are strengthening your ability to create.
I have only skimmed the surface of the article, so if you have an opportunity, read it. You will probably find things in it that will mean more to you than those I have picked out. Here’s one last “mind blower.” We may sometimes feel like such a small part of the whole picture, but this suggestion of University of California’s Frank Barron may help put it into perspective: “Creativity is a unique force in the universe.” So in light of this, may the force be with you.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” Well, that may or may not be true, depending on your philosophical bend, but according to Webster (I think it’s Webster — my dictionary has lost its cover long ago), the act of creating (creativity) is the “presentation of a new conception in an artistic embodiment.” That is what you do when you draw your conception of a subject, be it from a model or from your imagination. It would be pretty hard for you to invent a new gesture, but there are infinite ways you might bring into being an exciting, spine-tingling version of the ones you do draw. Remember the quote from the Omni Magazine article: “The driving force behind creative effort is inner motivation.” Well, whatever dictionary I have says that motive means “that within the individual, rather than without…”
So motivation is your own unique, inner thing that prompts you to draw something the way you do (or want to). I say, want to, because a lot of times you see a gesture in your mind but it doesn’t come out that way on paper. That’s the hang-up we’re working on — how to short-circuit that impulse to copy the model. How to form a “story” in our minds and draw that story the way we see it.
Here is a drawing from last week’s class. The student’s drawing has some nice touches in it, but it just doesn’t say “guy leaning back, with hands clasped at knees.” The motivation for making the drawing should have been to describe that action in the artist’s own unique way, but certainly in a creatively convincing way. In my sketch I tried to let the viewer feel the lean back, the pull of the arms and the ensuing sensation of balance.
