This is just a rant about creativity. Interesting, because if I do it like this, I can just drop my train of thought without having to actually think about it. So, what is creativity? I've been dealing with this issue for months, and I'm still not fully sure how to interpret what creativity is.
One of the things I've noticed the most is that creativity is actually the absence of action. Creativity is an internal process that determines what is the most possible solution, or whatever that solution is. I think the misconception about creativity is that it has to do with knowledge; it's inherently defined by knowledge. But I think creativity has more to do with confidence than knowledge. The identity of a style is what we search for when we try to find creatives, but the identity of a style starts with how much confidence you have in yourself, your ideals, and the uniqueness that makes you yourself.
If we take for granted that the uniqueness that makes us ourselves is what drives our creativity, then we can imagine that the problems in actually making use of that creativity are whatever blockages we have to our consistency of self. This means that whatever we fear, whatever preconceptions we have about acceptance or normal solutions—if we let our brains be reined in by these preconceptions, those are limitations that we put around creativity.
Creativity exists between reality and chaos. The real creative lives in a constant state of anxiety, where reality just eats your life, and you need chaos just to feel a little bit of freedom. But whatever you take out from that chaos is not easy to transfer and describe into reality. So, the struggle is that we can sense the solution, we can see the solution, we can integrate into the reality of the process the best angle that we can have. The problem is that some or most of the time, because of those uncertainties we talked about before—the preconceptions—we cannot see how to convert that chaos or that solution that we can feel at the border of our mind into a creative solution.
It happens a lot to artists that they have something in their mind that they want to imagine or draw, and they cannot draw it. That limitation is the perception of the hand and the ability, and how much of that information you can actually translate into the movement of the hand, into the paper, or into whatever the canvas is. These limitations—these preconceptions—in this case will be many, many, many things. It can be the use or usage of the hand; it can be how used to the person is to actually do the task at hand. And even though there's a lot of processes in these limitations that have blocked us from finding amazing results, there's luck that we have when the limitations actually place in our favor—rules like gravity, rules like air-drying conditions—it gives us different results that we don't really have control over.
Then this created or creative moment starts to roll into a non-graded, non-biased form of interpretation, and that's what we normally call "The Zone." The Zone will be the non-filtered ability to transfer the information from the chaos to the reality. When we don't feel—that's where the Zone and creativity work the best. So for me, the Zone always exists. For me, the Zone is always there. What we do is that we don't trust in ourselves that we are actually tapping in and giving this output of the Zone. Sometimes the Zone will give you a drop; sometimes the Zone will give you an ocean of content, and it doesn't really mean that you can translate everything at the same time.
The solution that we find and what defines us in this creative process sometimes is not even easy to understand and to put into words. And even if you manage to put the little bit of madness that you managed to extract from the chaos, actually selling that madness requires consistency over time so that people understand that your creativity and your style are not just pure madness without sense, but it's a little bit of madness with a lot of genius. And this is what people struggle the most to understand.
The genius and the creativity link directly to your authenticity. And the more you can filter through your fears and filter through the actual walls that you have over the experience—the traumas, the movements—all the information that makes yourself self, it's what makes your style your style and your creativity your creativity. It's how much you can taper from the chaos, how confident you are in the chaos that you manage to interpret, and the fact that you actually put that content outside.
Having this taper, having these indicators, doesn't mean that we can see the solutions. We get massively frustrated. I, for example, get massively frustrated every time that I want to interpret a solution because I cannot feel it; I cannot think it. There's no words; this is just an abstract concept of an idea that you can feel around the borders of whatever your train of thought is, either abstract or visual. There's like a hazy halo around the borders of your cognitive expansion, and you cannot really taper into that. What the Zone is, is when you manage to move that amount of hazy information into an actual factual representation of an idea. This process is extremely complex, and there are times that you actually know how to do it but physically cannot—trying to interpret is the problem because you cannot achieve it. You can see it, and that's the most frustrating moment that we have as creatives.
And normally, that's the border of consistency—when you repeat the same action until there's a moment that the block that you have of connection with the chaos will get completely obliterated, and then the Zone will flow in and the results will happen. This process of frustration and tapering is what I understand now as procrastination. The procrastination process is a filtering process where we start adding more visuals or more references to our creative library to fill it in, finding something that may help you to taper and unlock whatever the chaos block that you currently have is.
By
MrJ
