by Steve Fenton

The most terrifying thing in the world for any creative person is the “blank page.” For a writer, that “page,” in the typewriter, on the legal pad, or on the computer screen, is quite literal. For the painter, it is, perhaps, empty duck on stretchers, a tabla rosa for ideas, concepts, and executions. For the craft artist it is that piece of raw material--clay, glass, wood, metal, fiber - that must be addressed and worked to within an inch of its life (for the material does absorb life, after all, from the artist), and become something that talks to us, sings to us, stays with us.

The creative spark that lights the fire - the muse that visits and stays - and turns emptiness into something more is a sometime thing. Not just welcome, its arrival is cherished. And a relief. Everything possible is done to keep the muse happy and content, cajoling it to stay for just another page, another brush stroke, another cut, another turn. Sometimes it does.

And sometimes it doesn't.

Creativity is a fickle lover. It flirts. It satisfies. It hides unobtrusively in the shadows. It leaves in a huff. Only to return, or not, and for no apparent reason. The road of the arts is strewn with the detritus of one-hit wonders, whose creativity burst on our consciousness and then vaporized just as quickly.

It is measured by flawless execution, but minus the genius that sets its creator apart. As the art critic Robert Hughes reveals, “You see what lies beyond your grasp. You see what great art implacably shows you: what you can't do.”
Oh, if you could only package creativity and sell it in giant-economy-size bottles, to be portioned out when the muse is off visiting elsewhere.

From where does creativity spring?
A good question, indeed. As long as humanity has been “creating,” social scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and historians have all taken their whack at trying to explain how, why, where, when, and to whom creativity works. To hit the home run by reducing it all to a “process” that's easily identifiable and just as easily managed. There are more than half a hundred definitions just in the psychological literature. And not one of them can be considered definitive.

Many who aren't creative, but aspire to be, believe it can be taught, in a “take this course and improve your memory in just six weeks!” kind of way. Those who are creative know it doesn't work that way. Creativity can't be ordered up, like a cheeseburger and fries to go.

Which doesn't mean that someone is doomed to be forever dull and boring. The point is, while you can't simply be taught creativity, you can be taught how to be receptive to the creative spark. To be motivated, inspired, and enthusiastic. And to apply it to a body of knowledge.

Our minds tend to recognize patterns, or solutions, without being consciously aware of them--or even doing it. If we act on them, we're “thinking inside the box” which in today's jargon is definitely uncreative. The key is being unconventional, going beyond the expected. Einstein put it this way: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

In the end, to paraphrase Shakespeare, some are born creative, some achieve creativity, and some have creativity thrust upon them.

17,000 years and counting.
Perhaps the earliest examples of creativity may be found in the caves in and around the Pyrennes: The famous wall paintings at Lascaux and Altamira. Although they date back to around 15,000BC, the Oxford English Dictionary records that the word “created” is positively modern by those standards, having appeared around 1393 from the Latin, crescere, “to grow.”

“Creativity” itself is an even more current conceit, coined in 1875, when it was used to refer to poetic imagination. Ever since, theories of creativity have been in abundance.

The earliest thinking on the subject probably came from Plato, who had something of a love-hate relationship with artists and what they did. In the dialogue Ion, the title character, a performer of poetry in ancient Greece, and the philosopher Socrates discuss the source of creativity. The conclusion: Poetic inspiration is a kind of magnetism. Taken to its logical end, anyone attracted into this field is also magnetically charged with inspiration.

Yet, in The Republic, when Plato asks, “Will we say, of a painter, that he makes something?” he replies, “Certainly not, he merely imitates.” Indeed, the Greeks had no word for creativity. The word poiein, “to make,” sufficed, and even then to only one art form, poetry.

In Rome, the great poet Horace suggested that not only his ilk, but painters, too, were free to use their imagination in whatever way they wished. Renaissance artists went further. Raphael affirmed that he shaped a painting according to his ideas; Leonardo Da Vinci stated that he employed “shapes that do not exist in nature"; Michelangelo argued that the artist realizes his vision rather than imitating nature; and the Venetian art theoretician, Paolo Pino insisted painting is "inventing what is not.”

In the 18th century, the French philosopher and writer on aesthetics Charles Batteux was not alone when he declared unequivocally:

It's everywhere, it's everywhere.
In the end, is it all a game of chance? Simply being in the right place at the right time? Sometimes it may be just that. Making a serendipitous choice that leads you in one direction rather than another. It can be the unexpected detour to the road less taken. Maybe it's journeying from Point A to Point B by always taking left turns.

Or you could be mining for gold (literally or figuratively) in the same vein day after day, except this day your axe strikes the wall at a slightly different angle and eureka! rock breaks off and a wall of glitter appears in front of you.

Whatever happens, however you get there, the true creative person always leaves him or herself open to these kinds of chance encounters with people, things, or ideas that can influence a decision and inform a result.

The photographer Ansel Adams tells of driving home to Santa Fe late one afternoon after a clearing storm. Passing a small, primitive graveyard, he saw the light and dark of the clearing storm's sky had created an overwhelming tableau.

He pulled off the road, and set up his camera and tripod on the car's roof. He put the film plate in, and realized he had left his light meter in the car. The light was changing rapidly; if he went down for the meter, the light--and the image - would have been gone. With time for only one shot, he set an f/stop and shutter speed, and took the picture. Seconds later, the light changed; the moment passed. The photograph was Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, arguably his most famous image.

Now, some would say his guess of the perfect exposure was luck. But not Adams. His response echoed that of Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

To be sure, there are bursts of creativity, exhausting and bordering on the manic. Georg Frederich Handel completed Messiah, his majestic oratorio masterpiece in only three weeks, making it, perhaps, the greatest feat in the history of musical composition.

Handel later said, “Whether I was in the body or out of my body when I wrote it I know not.” But it's equally important to remember it was not his sole contribution to the musical catalogue. Other substantial works took more conventional lengths of time, which only confirms the capriciousness (and wonder) of creativity.

For some, artistic creativity manifests itself in a second career. Billie Ruth Sudduth is a basketmaker living in the mountains of North Carolina. In 1997 she was named a North Carolina Living Treasure, the state's highest honor for creative excellence in the field of crafts.

Her story is unique, but not uncommon. She had spent her “first life” dealing with testing, measurements, and statistics. It was then that she came across the 13th century mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci, who discovered common proportions in spirals throughout nature, whether in seashells like the nautilus, flower petals, pine cones, or seed heads.

Drawn to the perfect proportions of Fibonacci numbers the baskets she started creating baskets possessing a rhythmic, naturally flowing design, and released the creativity that had been present all along.

What makes her story not all that unusual. Craft artists, like all creative people, typically draw on a data base of latent experiences, a “mind dump,” no matter how varied or seemingly insignificant they might be, to be drawn on at some later date. Billie Ruth is currently incorporating chaos theory and fractals into her weaving.

Bottom line: Serendipity happens. Grand ideas blossom. The stars align in some kind of harmonic convergence. Proof again that we need to be awake to hear opportunity knocking, recognize it for what it is, and to not only cope with the change that creativity brings, but make the most of its vicissitudes.

Memories are made of this.
It's easy to think of recollections as just distant memories of our childhood. And no doubt those events have affected who we are, and how we act today. Whether we liked school, grew up to love opera because of the 78s our grandmother played on a Victrola, or got into a fight with the bully in the playground, these no doubt play a formative role in our behavior. Stories of generations past conjure up images of going through old photo albums and hearing tales of relatives who immigrated to America, or what they did when they “were your age.”

We see it in craft, like the quilt stitched by an aunt, or the hobby horse our father carved. But for capturing the memories that all of us hold dear, in a most extraordinary fashion, it would be hard to imagine any craft artists who can compete with Roberta and David Williamson.

This husband-and-wife team works together in small-town Berea, Ohio, population around 19,000, assembling necklaces, brooches, and other jewelry that takes us back to a kindler, gentler aesthetic. Here Victorian-era illustrations of birds, butterflies, and portraits set in silver, gold, and bronze become contemporary cameos that would look just as comfortable being worn a century ago.

What makes their work so real (not just faux “authentic” or merely “nostalgic”) is that they don't just take symbols of our collective past. Rather, a little of their own lives go into every one of their pieces. Family and friends are vital to the Williamsons, and their histories are reflected in the combinations of found objects and ephemera, much of which has been passed down in their own families.

Not surprisingly the memories they invoke have struck a responsive chord among collectors. They remind us of own families, perhaps a long-forgotten moment, in these talismans. And there are few things that give Roberta and David such inordinate pleasure as to hear their customers' stories. They are, as Roberta has said, the details, “those special things we remember about our parents, our families, and our friends that we carry with us - safe and secure until that moment the memory comes alive.”

But what of memories we can't explain, that manifest themselves in odd ways? How do we comprehend a prodigy who can play the piano with no training, with nobody else in the family having any musical sense? Or the artist with a “natural” talent, who's had no exposure at all to the arts?

For the novelist John Maxim, in his science fiction classic, Time Out of Mind, there's a simple explanation:

Memory, in Maxim's mind, is part of our brain's hard wiring, much like a computer's quartz crystal that reverberates and resonates with memories stoked by genetic materials.

This theory of genetic memory, proposed as far back as Hippocrates and Aristotle, came to be associated with the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Later, even Charles Darwin developed his own complimentary theory, pangenesis. As a theory it was generally discredited by the central dogma of molecular biology: That the DNA of a cell alone determines its fate, followed by the subsequent discovery of the human genome.

But yet. . .you still have to wonder when you see Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man, and are, in equal parts, puzzled and amazed over how someone with no formal training or access to the principles and theorems of mathematics can compute virtually endless prime numbers in their heads.

As Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School recently wrote:

The soul of a tree.
The genius of George Nakashima, the iconic furniture maker and woodworker, resided in his ability to almost divine the soul of a tree. He could literally pick up any piece of wood and at a glance know what the end product would be, by letting the wood speak to him, and by listening carefully when it did.

This followed in the tradition of the Haida Indians (and others) in the Pacific Northwest, who believe that trees, as all natural things, have spirits, and when a carver selects a specific one, it's done with the full knowledge that the spirit has been waiting for that moment to be transformed into something else, like a cabin or canoe, a table or totem pole.

These objects manifest the unseen, and remind the craft artist of the interrelationship of all living things. As a tribal elder remarked, “Even in the most prosaic aspects of our lives we call to life the forces that shape our existence and acknowledge the spirit world in everything we do.”

Nakashima, in his own way agreed, saying, “A tree is perhaps our most intimate contact with nature. Each tree, each part of each tree, has its own particular destiny, its own special yearning to be fulfilled.”

For many civilizations and societies, craft items are ceremonial objects, with the masks, costumes, jewelry, and other gear just some of the items that capture, relate, and perpetuate their myths and legends. The many Native American tribes each have their own stories that inform their art.

And they are not alone in this category. The Southwest U.S. is witness to a rich Hispanic culture where even its version of Catholicism is tinged with superstition, such as Día de los Muertos, their Day of the Dead (Anglo culture's All Saints Day, the holy day that follows Halloween).

On these days, observant families create altars in their homes to welcome their dead back into their homes, enticing them with offerings of flowers and food, and memorabilia of the departed. Objects, from jewelry to breads and cakes, use the skull and skeleton in a pleasant way, recognizing the cycle of life and death that is human existence.

The memories that are passed down in these and all cultures in this nation of immigrants serve a purpose beyond just celebrating a past that is worth remembering. Objects are repositories of cultures; to understand their messages we need only open our eyes to them. Those that result from craft artists dedicated to keeping their stories alive do so for a broader audience.

Bruce Bernstein, the assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, talks about this phenomenon for Native Americans, but it is equally valid for objects of all our cultures: