Wednesday 4 February 2015

What is Creativity? (edited and updated)




The question, "What is creativity?" or "How do you define creativity" could be answered in so many ways as the answers from our creative collective show below:

The creation of something that is deemed to be significant and valuable in some way and rouses some form of human emotion...Daniel

The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc. originality, progressiveness, or imagination; the need for creativity in modern industry; creativity in the performing arts (get the irony?)...Daniel 

Very personal, but I'll try to answer...Creativity is a personal gift (or perhaps both a blessing and a curse) that allows some people to express themselves in a variety of artistic outputs which, in some way, can reach out to and be appreciated by the observer at a conscious and subliminal level... Giuseppe

For me, creativity is very simple. It is the creation of a work, be it a drawing, Lego, a logo, writing, even a house, without the following of instruction or rather, someone else's instruction...Children are unbelievably creative, doesn't make them any good at it...Simon

Creativity, the infinite freedom of creation...Kerry

The manifestation of a thought into a process of conscious descriptive action that can then be interpreted either consciously or unconsciously by any living being even if the only living being to be effected is the originator of the thought!...Gregory (one of our latest creatives, a profile will be published soon)

Sting, or George Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE, in an NPR TED Radio hour interview, answered it like this, "It is the ability to take a risk. Um, to actually put yourself on the line, to risk ridicule, being pilloried and criticised or whatever."



All our creatives are faced everyday with a blank page, canvas or screen. And yet to make that jump from something blank to something more definite or, to quote Daniel, to make something significant that rouses some form of emotion, they have to take a risk, as Stings says. They have to make that initial mark on the paper or screen. 

It is that initial movement, that first step, the first mark on the paper. That is part of the risk. I guess that the second part of the risk is that we share our creation of creativity to an audience, a partner or the world and then we await the reviews?

How do you define creativity?






2 comments:

  1. Creativity, and I would say all art in general, is an effort to overcome suffering and arrive to beauty.

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    1. It could be, I think it is one question that has as many answers as there are examples of creativity.

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