Process of Creativity

The Process of Creativity

(The following is taken from Duane and Sarah Preble's ARTFORMS, 5th edition. Footnotes and endnotes are omitted for ease of reading for this class.)

Erich Fromm said, Creativity is an Attitude. We all have the potential to be creative, yet most of us were not encouraged to develop our creativity. We can do so by becoming willing to explore new relationships and insights.

The source of all art, science and technology --- in fact, all of human civilizations --- is creative imagination, or creative thinking. As scientist Albert Einstein declared, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

What do we mean by this ability we call creativity? Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote:

In talking about creativity, let us first consider its two possible meanings: Creativity in the sense of creating something new, something which can be seen or heard by others, such as a painting, a sculpture, a symphony, a poem, a novel, etc., or creativity as an attitude, which is the condition of any creation in the former sense but which can exist even though nothing new is created in the world of thingsÐ'...

What is creativity? The best general answer I can give is that creativity is the ability to see (or to be aware) and to respond.

Creativity is as fundamental to experiencing and appreciating a work of art as it is to making one. Insightful seeing is itself a creative act; it requires open receptivity --- putting aside habitual modes of thought.

Studies of creativity have described traits of people who have maintained or rediscovered the creative attitude. These include the abilities to:

 wonder and be curious

 be open to new experience

 see the familiar from an unfamiliar point of view

 take advantage of accidental events

 make one thing out of another by shifting its function

 generalize from particulars in order to see broad applications

 synthesize, integrate and find order in disorder

 be in touch with unconscious sources, yet be intensely conscious

 know oneself, have the courage to be oneself in the face of opposition

 be willing to take risks

 be persistent: to work for long periods ---- perhaps years ---- in pursuit of a goal

The creative process of ten begins when on is inspired by an idea or faced with a problem. It can start with something as simple as "fooling around." There are as many ways to create as there are creative people, but creative processes generally have certain sequential characteristics in common:

1. Preparation - Framing or formulating the question(s) may be the most important step; information is gathered and open-minded exploration takes place.

2. Incubation Ð'- All the preparatory work is set aside and you take time off to relax and to let intuitive insights come forward.

3. Illumination Ð'- Sometimes referred to as the aha! Experience, it occurs when a sudden hunch or insight leads to a valuable final result.

4. Verification or revision Ð'- You test your solution, and others respond by confirming or denying your success; revision may lead you to begin the steps again. Artists as well as scientists often find that their results lead them to start over with a related project.

Imaginative