Filling Your Head with Creative Notions

Dispatchwork, by street artist Jan Vormann, who uses legos to repair and fill broken walls. Photo by milo 3oneseven, published on Flickr under creative common license CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Building Blocks of Creativity

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to one side of a Zoom improv theater skit that my husband was doing from his kitchen nook office. He played a tour guide taking a group through a museum and was describing a statue in the form of a pose being held by another player. He was waxing poetic about the elf statue in front of him and explaining how its magical properties had for decades inspired people to take photos with it – the original “elfie.” And then, in his best docent voice, he said, “Notice the attention to detail in the hands and how the artist sculpted the thumbs so that they are perpendicular to the base of the palm even though many people assume that elf thumbs move in parallel with their other fingers.” I perked up because I knew that this comment had been directly derived from one of my blog posts that he had recently read. That little nugget of information had been tucked away in his brain and was lying in wait, ready to be activated and combined with something new should the creative opportunity arise.

We can’t always pinpoint the source of creative bursts – ideas seem to just pop into our heads. But the brain can’t create something out of nothing, and all thought – even if it happens so fast or so deep in our subconscious that we can’t follow it – depends on what’s already in our brain and how it’s all connected. In this regard, super creative people are no different from others. But creative people do seem to have a leg up in terms of how their brains are organized: they tend to have richer and more densely connected cognitive networks than the average person.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, , 1490 - 1500. Grisaille, oil on oak panel. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

I visited Madrid’s Museo del Prado in January and was stunned by Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is full of hybrid creatures, fantastical architecture, and impossible plants. It’s difficult to fathom how a late 15th-century painter could have created something that would have been at home on a 1960s album cover. But as magical as his vision seems, Bosch’s genius had its roots firmly in his experience. The triptych depicts Bosch’s take on biblical stories and themes, drawing on imagery from fables, nature, and undoubtedly other life experiences. The cognitive building blocks were there in his head and the creative genius was in how they were put together and realized in oil paint on oak panels.

Although not everyone will reach the artistic heights of artists like Bosch, we can all work to further develop our creative powers. A big part of this is stockpiling the building blocks of the creative process. If you don’t have blocks, you cannot build. If you are working with the same old tired set of blocks, you are limiting yourself to variations on the same old themes.

Julia Cameron, the modern-day godmother of creativity, has written extensively about the need to build up and replenish what’s in our head. In her book, The Artist’s Way, she calls it, “filling the well.” Cameron writes:

“In order to create, we draw from our inner well. This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well-stocked trout pond. We’ve got big fish, fat fish, skinny fish–an abundance of artistic fish to fry. As artists, we must realize that we have to maintain this artistic ecosystem. If we don’t give some attention to upkeep, our well is apt to become depleted, stagnant, or blocked. . . We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them.”

The artist side of me likes the well imagery, but the cognitive scientist side of me does not. For one thing, ideas don’t get used up. On the contrary, imagery and patterns of thinking tend to get stronger the more we use them, which puts us in danger of getting in a rut. But regardless of what metaphor is used for the brain, it’s true that if we want to feed creativity, we need to enrich our brains with knowledge, concepts, and imagery.

Posing with a Nut, photo by hedera.baltica, published on Flickr under creative common license CC BY-SA 2.0.

Enrich Your Brain 1 - Go on an Artist Date

For many artists, enriching your brain is synonymous with the artist date, as described by Cameron. These are traditionally fun solo excursions that are a break from routine, during which you can collect images and inspiration to squirrel away in the hopes that they will nourish your creative process at some point in the future. They may not even be directly related to art. The idea here is the follow the strategy of the gray squirrel, who favors breadth over depth by collecting nuts and dispersing them far and wide so that at least some will be available and discoverable when winter hunger sets in.

The red squirrel has a different strategy. She favors depth over breadth, stockpiling her nuts in a single large cache where they will be easy to find when needed. The artist date that follows this strategy is a more targeted exploration of your interests or things that are analogous to your interests. My artistic body of work, for example, deals with interactions between people and their environments and the continual construction of self in the face of a shifting world. In support of this work, I have delved into several topics including an exploration of how buildings change over time in response to changes in both environment and human desires (Stewart Brand’s, How Buildings Learn, is an interesting read). My work is not about buildings, but the ideas and imagery I have collected by pursuing this analogy have enriched my work in subtle ways.

Girl blowing question marks, street art by an unknown artist. Photo by Matthew Paul Argall, published on Flickr under creative common license CC BY 2.0.

Enrich Your Brain 2 - Cultivate Curiosity

Artist dates are great, but why limit yourself to the occasional collection of creative tidbits? A more general way to open yourself up to new ideas is by cultivating curiosity. After all, most great discoveries and imaginative leaps – from the lightbulb to Cubism – have been the result of curiosity and exploration. Curious people ask why, how, what if, why not? And in doing so, they fill their heads with a rich collection of interconnected ideas and imagery with which they can create something new.

Many artists I know are innately and widely curious people, but not all. Artists, like everyone else, can tend to focus on the limited interests and ways of working that they already know, forgetting that there’s a whole big world out there full of inspiring things.
Anyone can cultivate an attitude of curiosity with a little bit of effort. Explore and notice things outside your area of interest, comfort zone, or usual crowd. Ask why things are the way they are, how something is made, what people are thinking. Follow the thread, go down the occasional rabbit hole, and engage. Along the way, you might have to work to quiet the part of your brain that wants to tune out the uncomfortable, the contradictory, and the things that don’t seem immediately relevant.

Gathering inspiration from a wander through the Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid. Photo by Anne Kearney, 2020.

Enrich Your Brain 3 - Get Help from Your Environment

There’s another powerful way of enriching the brain that I wasn’t consciously aware of until the Covid-19 quarantine here in Barcelona threw my regular routines out the window. Sometimes, new imagery and ideas are found naturally and effortlessly in the act of everyday living, much like the “found objects” from which many assemblage pieces are created. We can increase our chances of coming across interesting things if we set up our lives and routines to encourage their discovery.

Walking is my preferred form of locomotion. I walk in nature and urban areas. I walk for recreation, mental restoration, and just to get where I need to go. Along the way, I take photos of interesting patterns and textures that I stumble across. I seek out street art and stop to take it in. I window shop. I pop into interesting stores. In setting up my life like this, I routinely expose myself to interesting images and ideas. I expand my subconscious vocabulary and make connections that I wouldn’t otherwise make as these experiences trigger thoughts in my brain.

After about a month of quarantine, my creativity was at a low and my art practice was suffering. Part of the problem was pure mental fatigue, which I started to address through some restorative activities. But another source of my creative ebb was simply lack of new experiences. Cut off from normal interaction with new ideas and imagery out in the physical world, I was feeling uninspired. When I finally realized what was happening, I devised a week of artist dates to help put me back on track (you can read about these on my Instagram account). And now that we are once again able to be out and about in “La Nueva Normalidad,” my creative juices are flowing more freely.

Illustration of neurons by Benedict Campbell, published by Penn State on Flickr under creative common license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Help Your Brain Help You

Brains are miraculous. They work hard to make sense of incoming information, store what they determine is important, and build a vast network of interconnected concepts and images that can be used to think, plan, and create. This network can be traveled consciously to solve problems, figure things out, and imagine something new. It can also work unconsciously, in the background, providing us with intuition and creative insights that seem to come out of the blue.

Most of the brain’s development and work happens automatically, without any effort on our part. But if we care about adding richness to our thoughts, breaking out of stale patterns of thinking, and ultimately fostering creativity, there are ways to help the brain along. One way is to expose ourselves to new things, be present, and ask questions.

I’m going to take my own advice and spend tomorrow being intentionally curious. Who knows where that will lead?

How do you feed your brain’s creative engine?