Cultivating and expressing creativity

[Sandalwood Peak]

As I reevaluate and try course correct as I move along, I'm reminded of a major problem I have that's been shelved for too long. I struggle with creativity in most of its forms. Even if I "feel" creative I don't seem to possess the biological tools to start expressing it mechanically, like that state where you intuitively start to mold something in real life resembling your desire.

As an example, if you tell me to draw something my mind goes blank and I just default to bottom of the barrel ideas like draw some trees and mountains. Sometimes I'll have creative sparks, but if I try to put them to paper [as an example] my mind goes blank and it becomes a negative reinforcement loop, like learned helplessness, where my lack of skills, demotivates me further.

You can say such thing are all skills that need to be mechanically practiced, but I don't think imitation and following rules is creativity. I'm reminded of the blandness of Hitler's paintings critique. Is it possible to nurture the ability to be creative in your head and to somehow strengthen that mind-body link so you can start to express it?

 

[Iakobos]

Nah you just have to accept that you're gonna suck for many iterations and practice your craft of choice. Unless you're a savant it's only after mastering the fundamentals through repetition that you can actually begin to self-express.

RE: imitation or 'rules', IMO when you think about stories, honestly every story worth telling has been told in some form over humans' millennia of existence. Attempts to be actually novel, the fixation of modern art, lead only into postmodernism absurdism etc.

 

[bubs]

Creativity is genetic and it’s on a spectrum as well. Some people have vast high level creativity in many things (music, art, ideas, writing, engineering/building etc), some people have it in some aspects and not others while some people just have very low creativity in nearly everything. It’s not something to force, just embrace the reality that everyone has differences. With a lot of practice, you can become better at art or playing a musical instrument, but that is improving on mastering a skill and very different than the concept of becoming more creative. I’m a believer that creativity is a genetic gift.

 

[Sandalwood Peak]

Would be interesting to hear someone who considers themselves creative in a particular domain and how they came to the point they are at now.

 

[PurpleUrkel]

Would be interesting to hear someone who considers themselves creative in a particular domain and how they came to the point they are at now.

Others consider me to be a great exterior and interior designer (no homo). I no doubt have a genetic predisposition for this skill but I also believe my childhood environment contributed. I came from a chaotic household where my step father beat me down both physically and emotionally. The way I coped as a child and adolescent was to be constantly moving the furniture and wall art around in my room searching for the perfect arrangement of order, cleanliness, and stability. I did this so often that my step father often teased me with homosexual slurs. The rest of our house was a pig sty, and at 10 years old I had the cleanest room in the house.

I'm also musically and visually creative (photography, graphic design, and filmmaking) but these did not come naturally, it took me 10,000 hours of practice to become competent.

However, I do think being a surfer has helped with my visual and musical creativity as you learn a lot about rhythm and design when spending lots of time in the ocean chasing and learning to navigate waves.

 

[Sandalwood Peak]

Others consider me to be a great exterior and interior designer (no homo). I no doubt have a genetic predisposition for this skill but I also believe my childhood environment contributed. I came from a chaotic household where my step father beat me down both physically and emotionally. The way I coped as a child and adolescent was to be constantly moving the furniture and wall art around in my room searching for the perfect arrangement of order, cleanliness, and stability. I did this so often that my step father often teased me with homosexual slurs. The rest of our house was a pig sty, and at 10 years old I had the cleanest room in the house.

I'm also musically and visually creative (photography, graphic design, and filmmaking) but these did not come naturally, it took me 10,000 hours of practice to become competent.

However, I do think being a surfer has helped with my visual and musical creativity as you learn a lot about rhythm and design when spending lots of time in the ocean chasing and learning to navigate waves.

Do you see some of your talents as extensive cataloging and experimentation that culminates as creativity in the end? Sort of like extensive reading and deep interest in a language that makes you have a richer, more poetic verbal and written prose.

When arranging furniture are you arranging it in an emotional way, where you're trying to elicit comfort or coziness from the environment or is it more pragmatic where you trying to create a general geometric and color based harmony?

As far as music, how was the transition from doing cover work to originals? Is your music formulaic or you're trying to recreate a sound from within?

 

[Iakobos]

People definitely have different gifts in terms of the creative process. I have thousands upon thousands of hours in photography, editing, documentary production, writing and music. What I've learned about myself is that when it comes to conceiving ideas, I'm not the star of the show. I can and have come up with creative concepts that I brought to fruition but I've also worked closely with people who are FONTS of ideas and I will never compare to them in that department.

However what I can do is work with those people and help them sift through which ideas are quality and which are not. I have a gift for constructing narratives and audiovisual moments out of raw materials, as well as editing, fine-tuning and curating material into its strongest form. I became skilled at this through consuming vast amounts of media, studying it, and making my own media, often redoing a single point of editing dozens or hundreds of times through trial and error until it becomes as effective as it can possibly be. I find this to be a form of creative expression albeit it's different in nature than coming up with some story out of the aether or somewhere deep in one's own consciousness. It's also a point of contrast between individualistic creativity and collaborative creativity, I have always leaned towards collaboration myself.

Of course making an investigative documentary is a very different pursuit from making a fictional narrative film. Just like discovering a striking or meaningful sight and photographing it, is a very different pursuit than making a painting without a reference. Personally I don't view one as a lesser form of expression than the other but they take different skillsets and dispositions.

I also think that the actions of establishing a life for oneself, building a family, a career or a business, are creative actions themselves and this isn't often touched on outside of rearing a child being an obvious participation in creation with God. I don't think the principle of creativity is strictly limited to artistic pursuits.

 

[PurpleUrkel]

Do you see some of your talents as extensive cataloging and experimentation that culminates as creativity in the end?

Yes, I think that is an apt description. For me it was years of noodling with no real objective or end point in mind. I was simply bored and could find no better use of my time. Learning music and rearranging physical items in a space so that they appear feng shui just seemed interesting and almost "fun." Then one day after years of woodshedding alone in a room you wake up and notice you've actually arrived somewhere when someone says, "I love your living room," or "That song you played the other night around the campfire really stuck with me, I know it's not finished yet, but I think you're onto something with that one."

When arranging furniture are you arranging it in an emotional way, where you're trying to elicit comfort or coziness from the environment or is it more pragmatic where you trying to create a general geometric and color based harmony?

Unlike the music creating, the interior design thing isn't so emotional, like you said above, it is more visual and geometric and color related. I'll literally move a chair back and forth over one square inch dozens of times to "get it right"... And then I'll become dissatisfied with the chair itself and swap it out for a "better" chair

As far as music, how was the transition from doing cover work to originals?

In the beginning it was all about covers. That's how I learned. Now it's all about originals. I can just sit down anywhere anytime now and start writing a song (doesn't mean it's a good song though). But I don't do this because it is a time sink and I have bills to pay. The major reason I'm fighting so hard for money right now is so I can semi-retire and buy myself the time necessary to create free of distractions and outside pressures (i.e. money).

Is your music formulaic or you're trying to recreate a sound from within?

Definitely a sound from within. If I'm feeling something (almost to the point of tears) when I'm working on a song then almost always that song resonates with an audience when playing live. But then again, it must be formulaic too as people are always coming up to me on the street (I only play street music now as I don't enjoy playing in venues where you have an audience "trapped"and they can't walk away if they don't enjoy what you're doing), and saying that I remind them of this or that musician.

 

[GrecoRoman]

I agree with others there is a spectrum to inherent talent with creativity. I always considered myself on the retarded end of the creative spectrum, until I got a part time job that was creating videos that had to be engaging to educate others on dry boring material. I approached the task like learning anything else, I educated myself on the basics of the craft and made lots and lots of videos. Did everything myself. From the script, to the visuals, to the editing.

Believe me for someone who has no knack for creativity, I’ve been complimented by many many people on my videos and how engaging they were.

So my advice would be to pick a craft or hobby of choice and sit down for an hour a day. Maybe you are writing a story, or drawing, put in the time and don’t force it. Some days I’d run out of steam with my videos and just put it aside for a few days.

 

[GoodShepherd]

Others consider me to be a great exterior and interior designer (no homo). I no doubt have a genetic predisposition for this skill but I also believe my childhood environment contributed. I came from a chaotic household where my step father beat me down both physically and emotionally. The way I coped as a child and adolescent was to be constantly moving the furniture and wall art around in my room searching for the perfect arrangement of order, cleanliness, and stability. I did this so often that my step father often teased me with homosexual slurs. The rest of our house was a pig sty, and at 10 years old I had the cleanest room in the house.

I'm also musically and visually creative (photography, graphic design, and filmmaking) but these did not come naturally, it took me 10,000 hours of practice to become competent.

However, I do think being a surfer has helped with my visual and musical creativity as you learn a lot about rhythm and design when spending lots of time in the ocean chasing and learning to navigate waves.

After meeting you in person and spending a few days with you I agree that you have artistic and creative talents and yes in a very masculine way, its very unfortunate that in our crazy clown world modern times that people associate artists as being feminin or homo, we need to change this, Iv also met other artists while being in America, painters and photographers who dispaly their work in galleries and they too are very masculine men who have very right wing views, are Christians and who also owns guns and like to hunt, do manual labor etc, yet they are very good artists. Classical American painter Bradley Burris used to be a member of the proud boys as another example, yet he is a very good painter.

I look at some of the artists from the past and they too were masculine and many were Christian too, they werent gay, our liberal media only shows us the gay artists, Luis Camoes was Portugals greatest poet, if you look at his portrait he is in knights armour and missing an eye because yeah sometimes he got drunk in bars and got into bar fights, spent time in jail, sailed ships and fought in wars etc, yet he wrote poetry, he lost his eye while fighting againt the Muslim Moores.

 

[GoodShepherd]

As I reevaluate and try course correct as I move along, I'm reminded of a major problem I have that's been shelved for too long. I struggle with creativity in most of its forms. Even if I "feel" creative I don't seem to possess the biological tools to start expressing it mechanically, like that state where you intuitively start to mold something in real life resembling your desire.

As an example, if you tell me to draw something my mind goes blank and I just default to bottom of the barrel ideas like draw some trees and mountains. Sometimes I'll have creative sparks, but if I try to put them to paper [as an example] my mind goes blank and it becomes a negative reinforcement loop, like learned helplessness, where my lack of skills, demotivates me further.

You can say such thing are all skills that need to be mechanically practiced, but I don't think imitation and following rules is creativity. I'm reminded of the blandness of Hitler's paintings critique. Is it possible to nurture the ability to be creative in your head and to somehow strengthen that mind-body link so you can start to express it?

There are many different kinds of ways of being creative and expressing your creativity, I agree with the other comments on here that it will also involve lots of time and practice to start to perfect your craft, it sounds like you might not know what your artistic creative talent is yet, I once knew a very good painter who only started painting in his 60's, he was very good his oil paint artwork looked like photos, he couldnt paint out of his head though and needed a visual to copy and he was a very slow painter and took up to a year to complete a single painting and was very much a perfectionist in his style and used instruments like a compos to produce a perfect circle or a ruler to get a straight line etc he couldnt do it free hand like other artists. His work was mostly as a hobby and never displayed in galleries and he is dead now, yet his paintings were better than most of the stuff Iv seen in art galleries

 

[Zep]

As I reevaluate and try course correct as I move along, I'm reminded of a major problem I have that's been shelved for too long. I struggle with creativity in most of its forms. Even if I "feel" creative I don't seem to possess the biological tools to start expressing it mechanically, like that state where you intuitively start to mold something in real life resembling your desire.

As an example, if you tell me to draw something my mind goes blank and I just default to bottom of the barrel ideas like draw some trees and mountains. Sometimes I'll have creative sparks, but if I try to put them to paper [as an example] my mind goes blank and it becomes a negative reinforcement loop, like learned helplessness, where my lack of skills, demotivates me further.

You can say such thing are all skills that need to be mechanically practiced, but I don't think imitation and following rules is creativity. I'm reminded of the blandness of Hitler's paintings critique. Is it possible to nurture the ability to be creative in your head and to somehow strengthen that mind-body link so you can start to express it?

The answer to your last question is definitely, yes!

Look, your post is ... creative. You learned words and their meanings, then organized them in a way to communicate a Feeling of frustration. That takes skill that you may not appreciate.

About possessing the biological tools to express something mechanically, haha, nothing is for free, that takes hard work and discipline. I was given the gift of music via my mother and grandmother, both classical music piano teachers. I have a natural ability with sound, tones, and their inherent meaning, but as for the physical mechanics of mastering an instrument to communicate ideas, that's grunt work, plain and simple.

Since you have a problem breaking through some internal barrier, my advice to you at this point would be to Stop Making Sense. Your ego is getting in the way. Try bypassing it by breaking its normal patterns with words for example. Be silly, random, and most of all, try to ignore the inner critic who will undoubtedly judge you. Get drunk if you have to.

Of the top of my head,

Sandalwood associations: Incense, footware, tree trunks, sand ....

Sand and Sun,
trunks and fun,
trees and bees,
for the broken, none.

Incense burned
the atrium
trees survived
and a trunk of rum!

Let your mind make disparate associations then try to glue them together by telling a little story, or making a rhyme.