Creativity is the Illumination of our Being

I truly believe creativity is innate in all of us.

Albert Einstein once said ‘creativity is intelligence having fun.’

True creativity is mercurial and waiving. It’s what allows the best minds to transmute problems into solutions and see things not for that which they are but for what they can be.

It’s unlimited in scope; to quote Maya Angelou “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

I believe a lot of academic institutions try to curtail this within us. Shape it into a form which detracts from its natural playful tendency detracting it into something more highfalutin and theoretically exasperating. Institutions don’t know how to teach people to remain open to the infinite wonder of reality and only want conformity and something I used to think of as 'hoop jumping' for the sake of numbers; which feeds through to some Government office and spews it all out onto an Excel sheet which is somehow representative of a Students development and intelligence. I believe at its very core they see it as something quite dangerous in what the absolute freedom it represents within the mind of the individual. Or maybe this is just my experience.

Once I got to 16 I realized I loved Art. I lived and breathed it. In my childhood I used to make comic strips which to this day make me laugh. It started in childhood with paintings cutting up bits of felt to make vivid collages of different scenes. I used to come home from Secondary School and make stop motion videos on the VHS camcorder with Star Wars Figurines. I loved Art so much by College I’d spend my breaks and even stayed in the Art studio well into the evenings until we were asked to leave. Something strange happened in other lessons which resulted in my English Literature teacher taking an overwhelming dislike to me. I was a quiet, friendly, well-mannered student but he just didn’t like me. To the extent he started coming into Art and would stand behind me and make sounds like ‘what on earth?!’ with a puzzled expression etched into the contours of his face. College ended for me on parents evening with myself parked between my parents as we sat down in front of said English teacher for him to roll out the words “In all honesty I don’t understand why you’re allowing him to apply for University, it’s a waste of time, he won’t go on to anything great.”

This would go on to have an effect on my psyche for some time.

It affected the foundation of my being to the extent I had 3 interviews at University. The first was for Art in Brighton. The significance of this amounted to an incredibly pretentious female Art tutor with a clipped accent looking through my portfolio disdainfully to tell me “I don’t think you’ll fit in here,” to the extent the male tutor sitting next to her looked a little taken back and remarked she was being a little harsh. I left with my tail between my legs, crushed. My dad asked how it went as I came out for me to reply “let’s just go home.” It was a 5 hour journey which hurt. My second interview was for Media and the university had been given a huge grant and was kitted out with Apple Macs and top of the range cameras and fancy editing suites. I’d aced Media and got an A without even trying. By this point my ego had found what was easiest, which I’d later find out didn’t bring the happiness or fulfill my self-worth with what I was looking for- my purpose even. My third and final interview was for Art at a different University where the professor of Art interviewed me personally and told me I was incredibly creative and not to be dazzled by the fancy media equipment from the prior interview and told me he could help me unravel my creativity.

I went with Media. For 3 miserable years. For some reason I attracted the most negative experiences of my life in that time. I was bullied for 3 years straight when really I should’ve left at the end of the 1st year. Prom ended with the guy who’d taken a dislike to me with his hand around my throat telling me he wanted to kill me. When in all honesty the choices I’d made felt like I’d killed a part of my self.

I lost my friends from back home which I had to reconcile when I finally moved back home. Which I’d go on to lose again years later, when I made the decision to quit working full time and focus on my Art again at the end of my 20’s.

I came out into the working world and started out in TV. I don’t even watch TV. Occasional shows, but I’ve never liked TV. In University I’d told myself I wanted to be a director as I’d taken to film. I remember walking out onto the set of The Jeremy Kyle Show bewildered by the energy of it all and something in me likened it to what it must’ve felt for Gladiators walking out into Roman Coliseums. The riling up of the crowd and egotism of the presenters simply annoyed me, making a living off what? At the best of times demoralizing their guests to make ‘good’ TV.

Hurt people hurt people.

I know this sounds quite negative but this blossoms into what I believe unbridled creativity represents when an individual holds onto the idea of it so strongly nothing can take it from them no matter how dark or loud or negative it may all seem to get.

I eventually fathomed a way out and found myself working for an Arts organisation in Manchester which I loved. I worked everywhere. Box Office. Front of House. Gallery Supervisor. Gallery Invigilator and the Bookshop. Something happened in the long shifts I’d do as a Gallery Invigilator. We were given a pen and some paper to tally the visitors and could read a book at most. Sometimes I’d work 10/12 hour shifts. Being surrounded by all the different types of Art broke down something in me to reveal something I’d long forgotten and I started drawing on the tally sheets. My imagination fired back up and ideas kept coming to me and I couldn’t keep up as I frantically scribbled everything down. I believe this point marked a resurgence within my own being and rekindled a flame I’d allowed to be snuffed out and buried somewhere deep, deep, down.

This is what I believe creativity represents in all human beings. It explains why Art is used as a therapy tool in helping people suffering from mental illness and trauma. It explains why as children we find it so easy to get lost in ruminations of colorful abstractions born from a world not yet entirely honed or developed but in their own right are perfect works of Art for what they are. Why else would we paint/make or create in the first instance at this point in our lives?

I believe creativity holds a light within our own core individuality which makes up the foundation of our self-worth which feeds into internal happiness and intellectual intrepidity and some people have that taken from them at some point in their lives and try to blow it out of others who they see possess this.

Now I cut canvas and make my own frames for my paintings where I blow up sketches onto them and create colourful more realised works from simple ideas cut from my own imagination.

I wanted to explain the whole story as I’ve grown to entirely love what my experience did to my creativity. I don’t think my illustration work would’ve come out as intricate as it does if I’d had it all plain sailing. It was a response to the simplicity of seeing abstract single marks occupying huge walls in Gallery spaces as people stood around it trying to assemble some meaning out of the essay accompanying it on the wall it shared. My work is the opposite. My work as an Artist is to explore themes felt through the expression of the human journey told through the surreal scope of archetypal worlds; used to bring forth intuitive imaginings which operate somewhere just outside of our immediate reality in an attempt to fathom the idea of the natural world and our place within that. The intensity and mundanity of ‘reality’ only increased the capacity of my own imagination.

As I started out I believe the innate tendency that each of us holds a natural capacity within us and my work stands as a reminder for those voices whose light has been diminished in however such a fashion as they’ve navigated through their own journeys, whatever age, wherever they are on their path.

To quote Judith Rodin “Close observation of children at play suggests that they find out about the world in the same way as scientists find out about new phenomena and test new ideas… during this exploration, all the senses are used to observe and draw conclusions about objects and events through simple, if crude, scientific investigations.”

Even Plato was quoted as saying “The most effective kind of childhood is that a child should play amongst lovely things.”

And lastly “Play is the highest expression of human development for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul.” – Friedrich Frobel

When you address the idea that creativity represents infinite play it becomes strange when you’re told things like ‘you won’t fit in’ to an establishment who’s surely very goal is to foster this untangling of freedom within the creative capacity of one’s soul and future development. Not quash them or dampen their spirits in the pursuit of the idea of intelligence.

This is my message. If we can foster this space. Put people back in touch with the love that resides within our souls and allow ourselves to truly know what we’re capable of and how it feels to filter our own experience through our creative pursuits then we might find a huge shift in the way we hold space for each other as me move into a future which has increasingly moved us away from these pursuits in the eyes of education and statistics and numbers which are only quantifying the automaton and death of natural pursuits ingrained in us.