Benefits with Company

The Art (and Science) of Creativity

How does creativity work? How do you become creative? Can failure be productive? How is this important to the creative process? The creative process is cloaked in mystery, not just to the audience but also, in many cases, even to the creator.

Creativity isn't only restricted to making traditional art, like a painting. In everyday life, creativity is also used in the workplace and leisure time. Whether someone is playing a video game or sport, solving a complex logistical problem, or trying out a recipe, creativity is at work. Artists and other creative professionals across various disciplines have diverse thoughts on what creativity means to them, how it can be encouraged and what they find as inspiration.

Maria Popova is the editor of the website Brain Pickings. "Creativity is simply our ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head—memories, ideas, knowledge, inspiration—into incredible new things." What is her advice on fostering your own creativity? "Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminately curious."¹

Director and playwright Mary Zimmerman feels that imagination is the building block of creativity. "I'm absolutely of the opinion that… just being left on your own [as a child] to make up a world is absolutely a key ingredient in creativity."²

Pat Courtney Gold is a basket weaver for the Wasco Nation of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon, and her craft is influenced by nature and the world around her.³

Game designer Colleen Macklin feels that games, just like art, give people an opportunity to try things differently and to see things in new ways.⁴ "Games and works of art share the same inherent power to reframe one's way of thinking. The arts—and by extension, the creative process—and games also have something else in common: the need for constraints." She says that the presence of rules and limitations "force one to problem-solve and oftentimes come up with unusual solutions."

Games also teach another important aspect of creativity: failure. "You actually are learning by failing. You turn the game on, and you mess up... over and over again until you understand the rules of that system and until you get better."⁴

David Harrington, founder of the Kronos Quartet, feels that "Kronos' collaborations are equally about musical and human connections. Each collaboration presents unique challenges, sometimes requiring Kronos and its creative partners to bridge significant communication gaps." An equally important lesson in creativity that Harrington carries with him is the importance of living a vivid, engaged life. "I try to read several newspapers every day, keep my ears open and stay alert," he describes. "You can learn a lot by walking down the street and just listening to people, watching children, watching very old people. There are so many lessons to learn, and life is very, very short. You want to use your time to its best advantage."⁵

Visual artist Kerry James Marshall feels creativity comes from repetition: "It's in the doing and doing again."⁶

Actor, writer and director Cheryl Lynn Bruce says that "performance needs collaborators. In performance, most performers don't feel they're doing much without an audience, and that audience is the important ingredient."⁶

Harvard University professor Dr. David Edwards speculates that scientists and artists are more alike than different. What do they have in common? Creativity. According to Edwards, creativity is a combination of both artistic and analytic thinking, what he calls "artscience." He feels that the scientific process is applied even in creative processes. In the best collaborations, the distinction between "art" and "science" disappears, and the creator is free to develop an idea without having to label it one way or the other.⁷

References

All of the above excerpts were quoted or paraphrased from the following:

1. U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). (2010). Cartography for the land of ideas: Talking creativity with Maria Popova. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 3–5, 19). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
2. Green, A.W. (2010). Child's play: Making new worlds with director Mary Zimmerman. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 6–7, 16–17). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
3. Stark, L. (2010). Traditionally innovative: Pat Courtney Gold reflects contemporary Wasco life in baskets. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 8–9, 20–21). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
4. Beete, P. (2010). Holding a mirror to the world: The art of playing games. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 10–11, 18). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
5. Gallant, M. (2010). Creativity in collaboration: The Kronos Quartet breaking artistic boundaries. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 13–15). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
6. Gallant, M. (2010). No one can see like I see: A conversation with Kerry James Marshall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 22–24). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov
7. Beete, P. (2010). Fertile ground: David Edwards and the intersection between art and science. In The art (and science) of creativity (pp. 25–27). NEA Arts Magazine, Number 3. Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from https://www.arts.gov