{"id":24873,"date":"2022-01-07T03:00:30","date_gmt":"2022-01-07T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/?p=24873"},"modified":"2022-01-12T21:05:40","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T05:05:40","slug":"creativity-how-to-get-more-by-catharine-bramkamp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/07\/creativity-how-to-get-more-by-catharine-bramkamp\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity – How to Get More by Catharine Bramkamp"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Creativity<\/a>Let\u2019s welcome back monthly columnist Catharine Bramkamp<\/a> as she shares with us \u201cCreativity – How to Get More.\u201d Enjoy!<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all been reading feeds with the word creativity in the headline:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

How to be more Creative\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Interview for Creative Employees\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The Creative CEO.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems that creativity is the new, new thing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And like all new things<\/strong> – it has an old history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since the afternoon someone hummed a tune that didn\u2019t sound like the local bird calls, humans have questioned, studied and pursued creativity which led to more questions and varied answers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Creativity is thinking outside the cave.<\/span><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s science.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s progress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s tasting the meat accidentally dropped in the fire and finding it more palatal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But no matter how it\u2019s defined<\/strong>, creativity and the pursuit of inspiration is essential to the life of an artist.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what, exactly, is creativity?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Origins of Creativity\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

As it turns out, the definition depends on when creativity is defined.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Greek philosophers and poets believed that creativity was a gift from the gods.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the nine muses delivered the inspiration<\/strong>, and the poet memorized (later transcribed) his or her version of that inspiration. Creativity as a product of divine inspiration held sway for many millennium.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By the 1600\u2019s pure inspiration from the gods was edged out by science.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Natural philosophers wanted to know how the world worked<\/strong>, and the creative process was not exempt from their scrutiny.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Enlightenment\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

By the 1700s and the Enlightenment, philosophers concluded that creativity could be achieved by following a specific process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Charles Batteaux commented that imagination was merely the result of observed phenomena.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“The human mind cannot create, strictly speaking; all its products bear the stigmata of their model; even monsters invented by an imagination unhampered by laws can only be composed of parts taken from nature.”\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

So imagination was little more than working those three part flip boards<\/strong> – the legs of a lion, the middle of a turtle and the head of a phoenix – now you have a new beast, but you only worked from known images.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Concurrently, <\/span>Denis Diderot<\/span><\/a> (who created the first encyclopedia) felt that imagination was merely “<\/span>the memory of forms and contents. . . and creates nothing rather only combines, magnifies or diminishes.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Forget divine inspiration<\/strong>, like most Enlightenment ideals, creativity followed rules:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Since creation is defined as creating something out of nothing, and only God can create something out of nothing, then pure creativity is impossible for man to achieve.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Creation is a mystery<\/strong>, and mystery negates the whole POINT of the Enlightenment which was to never admit there were any mysteries left.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To that end, artists working during the late 18th century were all about rules, if you don\u2019t follow the rules of painting or writing a sonnet or composing a sonata: <\/span>no soup for you<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Except as<\/strong> <\/span>Houdar de la Motte<\/span><\/a> (d.1715) commented<\/strong>\u2013 rules are ultimately a <\/span>human invention<\/span><\/i>. and how much imagination and invention did it take to create these artistic rules?<\/span><\/p>\n

Things were ripe for change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Romanticism\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

By the mid-nineteenth century, the cold science of the Enlightenment was warmed up by the hot passion of the Romantic movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of science<\/strong>, artists embraced communing and expressing the mystical, painting the impossible, experiencing the divine and feelings of awe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there still remained a strong desire to figure out how it was done.<\/span><\/p>\n

Henri Poincare – (1854 – 1912) a mathematician by trade and propensity<\/strong>, proposed that creativity happened in four stages:<\/span><\/p>\n