There is a moment every three year old wakes up from, every adult forgets. It is the moment before they know what something is supposed to look like, a purple sun with eight legs, and it is not that they are ignorant of astronomy, only that nobody has pointed out to them what they are supposed to know. That moment of discovery, of freedom from rules and the expectations of others, is what both learning and art are made of.
Somewhere along the way we barter it away for competence; the task of a creative life, and perhaps of education itself, is to find new ways to have both.
On Learning
We like to think of "learning" and "creativity" as separate entities, one a tidy set of rooms in which the other plays tag, but this is a lie. All learning is creative, and all creativity is the kind of reconstruction that comes from knowing what you are talking about. In Picasso’s famously quoted line that every child is an artist, he captures not only a truism but a certain sadness that surrounds the word. We are all creative in the same way that we are all born with eyesight; we lose it somewhere in the process of understanding what we are supposed to see.
A student who studies music theory does not stop hearing the music in their heads, only learning how to talk about it. A student who studies grammar does not lose their native tongue, only adding to it. The best educators recognize this, as they understand that creativity requires a tolerance for wrongness in public, which needs to be earned in private.
Learning is, in a lot of ways, just a room in which creativity grows.
On Creativity
Georgia O’Keeffe once described her earliest forays into painting by saying that color and shape let her say the things that she couldn’t write down. This captures what art does in a way that nothing else really can; an artist does not explain what they feel, they enact it, and this enactment is something that everyone is capable of. A great painting or song is not something that makes you understand grief, but rather makes you feel particular about it. One cannot read a Rothko the same way one might read a page of poetry; instead of getting the message, you get the ache in your chest, the sense of something being terribly, beautifully wrong.
This is why art is so important in places where we are trying to be creative, but it is also a kind of exercise for any space that wants to teach people to think in new ways. When a student draws, or when they slowly make a bad first draft a little bit better, they are practicing the same skills that go into making a hypothesis, a computer algorithm, a parenting plan. A child’s first attempts at painting might end up being better in all ways than their later ones, but the skill required to do so is the same discipline of constant, small revisions.
Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about painting his dreams, but we have all had the experience of trying to do the same thing, only to fail somewhere in the process. It is a strange thing, the way our imaginations seem so tied to what we can physically do; most of the time, the ability to imagine something makes us capable of wanting it. What makes Van Gogh’s description particularly poignant, however, is the way it captures this sense of a distance between the imagined world and our own. We are not often very good at finishing what we start, and perhaps nowhere is this more important than in the act of creation.
Creativity is not a flash, it is a practice. If anything, it requires even more commitment than most skills. Its particular challenge is the way that the ability to execute something perfectly must be balanced with the willingness to try at all.
What Moves Me
If I have to think of a particular source of pleasure in thinking about art and creativity, it is the ability to see the process of creation in the finished product. I think most people feel something similar when they see evidence that something beautiful and meaningful was made with, rather than simply out of, its materials. I find myself moved by the way that most artists and writers will put part of themselves into their work, the way that effort shows through even when they are trying not to be boring. As I think about creativity, I like to be reminded that most things that people create that matter to people are not perfect the first time, the second, or perhaps even the fifth or twentieth time. A creative person’s ability to show up and try again is something that moves me in a particular way, as is the honesty it often takes to admit that in the process.
I think a lot about how creativity is one of those things that most people can have access to, no matter what their circumstances. This means that there is a kind of democratic quality to it, as a child’s drawings or songs are just as creative, though perhaps less refined, than those of an adult. The choreographer Twyla Tharp famously described art as a way to get away without having to leave at all, and creativity is that place that all people, in all walks of life, can go to in their heads to change the way that they see the world. I think also about how a lot of the things that come out of this headspace are things that people need in their lives but do not realize it, or do not have access to at a given moment. The creativity of people who are stuck in a system that does not serve them is something I think about a lot, and it is one of those places where I am constantly surprised by the generosity of the human spirit.
Maya Angelou, when writing about creative practice, once said that one could not spend too much time in this particular well, as the more you used it, the more it would give. This is something of an inversion of the common saying about there being enough in the well to last you until you get to the other side, and it reflects, I think, a particular creativity mindset. It is not only that the more you create, the more you have to say, but also that the more you create, the more creativity will return to you in other venues. In this way, creativity is like many of the other resources we are constantly told to be careful about. You cannot really use it up, and so the right question to ask is rarely, "do I have enough creativity today?"
Building a Creative Future
If creativity is something that we do more of, rather than something we use up, then a future that is creative is about building the spaces and habits in which that kind of work can thrive. It is a matter of teaching people to value practice over proficiency, and being honest not only with our students but with ourselves about the fact that we need to learn to be creative. It is a matter of building in time for the first attempts at things, for learning to be patient with the process of learning. It is also a matter of broadening the concept of things that need doing in the first place, because art is not the only kind of work that requires vision.
It is important to remember that when a future is built by creative minds, it is the kind of world where everything is made in new ways. This is not just things that we recognize as art, but also the kinds of engineering, the sciences, the caregiving, and the entrepreneurial spirit that goes into making things work. Creativity is the connective tissue between disciplines that are all about asking what if, rather than what is.
The physicist Ashoke Sen has written about the process by which most scientific discoveries happen, and he has a particular thought about what it means to be able to get there. When a scientist is faced with a particularly intimidating problem, he thinks it is important to have something of an irrational belief that they might be able to solve it, something that propels them past the point where the work makes sense. The final conclusion, Sen argues, must always be rational, but before that there has to be something that takes us out of our heads. It is, he says, a kind of faith that carries you to the moment when the science can save you, and this is not much different from other kinds of creativity.
Einstein is famously quoted as saying that creativity is intelligence having fun, but that is a sentiment that captures what many of us feel about art and education. Intelligence in this view is something that is wasted on rote memorization, but intelligence combined with imagination is something that can build a future. The children who draw the sun purple and with eight legs are not wrong, and our job is to help them recognize that, but we might also want to encourage them to keep drawing it that way for as long as they can. After all, that is the promise that lies at the heart of the phrase creative minds, creative future — one where we learn to paint what we want most to see.