To Draw, to Cook, to Create?

Posted on January 3, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Four of my children are gathered around our dining room table this morning, coloring with pencils.  An art-loving college student–Elizabeth, who is on Winter break, is sitting with them.  She says,

In realism, you never draw the sun in your picture because if you did all your figures would need to be shadows.  So, if you want the lighting to seem real when you draw, pretend the sun is at your back.

They follow her instructions and draw pictures with no sun in sight.  Are my children being Creative?

My children are just learning the most basic techniques of art–by following directions.  They are far from changing the domain of Leonardo Da Vinci or Andy Warhol.

Last night, I really wanted to make broccoli soup. I opened my laptop and Googled “brocoli soup”.  Several recipes came up and I began to gather the ingredients for the one with the most butter and onions. But as I started chopping those onions my nine month old baby started to fuss– warning me, she had no patience to wait around for me to cook.

I love following recipes when I cook because I like to be surprised with new tastes.  I often get bored with my own combinations and want to try someone else’s.  Am I being Creative when I cook  someone else’s recipe?

Creativity is not a moment,  It is process that grows developmentally.  The first step in the creative process is imitation, but if you stop your creative development there,  you never create anything new and you slide into non-creativity.  My recipe-following could lead to Creation–if I put in thousands of hours and invest my life for Creativity in cuisine. But I’m not planning on that.  I cook because I love to eat, essentially for fun and pleasure only.

My husband can’t understand where the joy is in following a recipe.  He makes his own dish every time–he doesn’t even follow his own recipes.  He cooks on the fly.  Is he being Creative when he invents a never-before-tasted-exactly-this-way combination of flavors?

Although he is not imitating–few of the world’s grandest chefs would call on him to improve a gourmet dish.  My husband wants no access to that world. If he made the planet’s tastiest lasagna,  he’d get a kiss on the cheek from me and not much more.  He cooks for the same reasons I do.

My eleven-year-old daughter paints in her spare time.  She often takes her easel out to the front yard and paints some part of the landscape.  She isn’t following someone else’s instructions–she’s letting her inner eye and outer vision dictate what goes on the canvas.  Is she being Creative?

Actually, when she’s painting with no recipe, she has moved to a possible second stage in creative development–she’s re-creating what she sees.  She’s painting  the truth in forms present in the natural world outside our home.  If she does this for the next forty years,  her creative development will continue. But when she stops pushing herself to improve, she’ll begin sliding into non-creativity and remain a technician.

Creative development is long and has many stages.  Imitation is only the initial stage–the door to eventual Creation.  Recording is the second base stage–the doormat to Creation.  Of all the above examples,  my husband’s recipe-free cooking puts him farthest along on the Creative development path.  But he has light years to go to change the foodie’s domain,–so he’s also pretty green creatively.

Creativity is life and time-consuming.  It is much more than coloring in flow or cooking for fun.

Filed under: Art Concepts, Childhood, Defining Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Worked and Dined with Satre: Her Imaginary Husband

Posted on September 16, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Framed His Days with One Great Question.

Simone De Beauvoir

French Existentialist Philosopher, Writer

INTERVIEWER

Do you draw up a very precise plan when you write a novel?

DE BEAUVOIR

I haven’t, you know, written a novel in ten years, during which time I’ve been working on my memoirs. When I wrote The Mandarins, for example, I created characters and an atmosphere around a given theme, and little by little the plot took shape. But in general I start writing a novel long before working out the plot.

INTERVIEWER
People say that you have great self-discipline and that you never let a day go by without working. At what time do you start?

DE BEAUVOIR
I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back to work and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the afternoon. When you leave, I’ll read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most often it’s a pleasure to work.

INTERVIEWER
When do you see Sartre?

DE BEAUVOIR
Every evening and often at lunchtime. I generally work at his place in the afternoon.

INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t it bother you to go from one apartment to another?

DE BEAUVOIR
No. Since I don’t write scholarly books, I take all my papers with me and it works out very well.

INTERVIEWER
Do you plunge in immediately?

DE BEAUVOIR
It depends to some extent on what I’m writing. If the work is going well, I spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the thread I have to read what I’ve done.

INTERVIEWER
Do your writer friends have the same habits as you?

DE BEAUVOIR
No, it’s quite a personal matter. Genet, for example, works quite differently. He puts in about twelve hours a day for six months when he’s working on something and when he has finished he can let six months go by without doing anything. As I said, I work every day except for two or three months of vacation when I travel and generally don’t work at all. I read very little during the year, and when I go away I take a big valise full of books, books that I don’t have time to read. But if the trip lasts a month or six weeks, I do feel uncomfortable, particularly if I’m between two books. I get bored if I don’t work.

(Thank you to The Paris Review and Mason Currey)

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Framed His Days With One Great Question

Posted on September 14, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Busy Mother Hired Allomother of Good Spirit.

Benjamin Franklin

Inventor, Writer, Statesman, Founder of The United States of America

Benjamin Franklin, called “The First American” by historian H.W. Brands lived by his schedules.  He kept daily schedules, weekly and monthly schedules.  His autobiography, a most inspiring read, is the first self-help book published, ever.  Below is the daily schedule included in his Autobiography.

Filed under: Creativity by Habits, Creativity: Historical Perspective | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Painting To Find Beauty & Meaning

Posted on September 13, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My last post: Predictable Life with Scrabble.

Le Corbusier

Swiss Architect & Designer, Writer, Pioneer of Modern Architecture

Le Corbusier’s working hours were implacably regular. During my four years at the atelier, he worked at the rue de Sévres from two in the afternoon to around seven. The hour of 2:00 P.M., I soon learned, was holy. If you were a minute late you risked a reprimand. At first Corbu arrived either by subway (a convenient, direct metro line connected his Michel-Ange- Molitor station with the atelier’s Sévres-Babylone) or by taxi. Later on he started driving his old pistachio-green Simca Fiat convertible. In his last years it would be the taxi again. The process of returning home revealed quite a lot about Le Corbusier’s character. If the work went well, if he enjoyed his own sketching and was sure of what he intended to do, then he forgot about the hour and might be home late for dinner. But if things did not go too well, if he felt uncertain of his ideas and unhappy with his drawings, then Corbu became jittery. He would fumble with his wristwatch – a small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw – and finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon the project and me — and us — in a predicament.

During these early August days, I learned quite a bit about Le Corbusier’s daily routine. His schedule was rigidly organized. I remember how touched I was by his Boy Scout earnestness: at 6 A.M., gymnastics and . . . painting, a kind of fine-arts calisthenics; at 8 A.M., breakfast. Then Le Corbusier entered into probably the most creative part of his day. He worked on the architectural and urbanistic sketches to be transmitted to us in the afternoon. Outlines of his written work would also be formulated then, along with some larger parts of the writings. Spiritually nourished by the preceding hours of physical and visual gymnastics, the hours of painting, he would use the main morning time for his most inspired conceptualization. A marvelous phenomenon indeed, this creative routine, implemented with his native Swiss regularity, harnessing and channeling what is most elusive. Corbu himself acknowledged the importance of this regimen. “If the generations come”, he wrote, “attach any importance to my work as an architect, it is to these unknown labors that one as to attribute its deeper meaning.” It is wrong to assume, I believe, as [others] have suggested, that Le Corbusier was devoting this time to the conceptualization of shapes to be applied directly in his architecture; rather, it was for him a period of concentration during which his imagination, catalyzed by the activity of painting, could probe most deeply into his subconscious.

(Thank you to the Arch Society and Mason Currey)

Filed under: Art Concepts, Creativity by Habits, Creativity: Historical Perspective, Design Thinking | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Predictable Life with Scrabble

Posted on September 12, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Schedule Queen & Mother of Four.

Vladimir Nabokov

Russian American Writer

After waking up between six and seven in the morning, I write till ten-thirty, generally at a lectern which faces a bright corner of the room instead of the bright audiences of my professorial days. The first half- hour of relaxation is breakfast with my wife around eight-thirty, and the creaming of our mail.  One kind of letter that goes into the wastepaper basket at once, with its enclosed stamped envelope and my picture, is the one from the person who tells me he has a large collection of autographs (Somerset Maugham, Abu Abdul, Karen Korona, Charles Dogson Jr., etc.) and would like to add my name, which he misspells.  Around eleven, I soak for 20 minutes in a hot bath, with a sponge on my head and a wordsman’s worry in it, encroaching, alas, upon the nirvana.  A stroll with my wife along the lake is followed by a frugal lunch and a two-hour nap, after which I resume my work until dinner at seven.  An American friend gave us a Scrabble set in Cyrillic alphabet, manufactured in Newtown, Conn.; so we play skrebl for an hour or two after dinner.  Then I read in bed—periodicals or one of the novels that proud publishers optimistically send us.  Between eleven and midnight begins my usual fight with insomnia.  Such are my habits in the cold season.  Summers I spend in the stumbling pursuit of lepidoptera on flowery slopes and mountain screes; and, of course, after my daily hike of fifteen miles or more, I sleep even worse than in winter.  My last resort in this business of relaxation is the composing of chess problems.  The recent publication of two of them (in the Sunday Times and The Evening News of London) gave me more pleasure, I think, than the printing of my first poems half a century ago in St. Petersburg.

(Thanks to The New York Times and Mason Currey)

Filed under: Creativity by Habits, Creativity: Historical Perspective, Focus | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Same Routine for 52 Years & No Teaching Job

Posted on September 12, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Not Interested in Food or Sleep.


John Updike

American Novelist

You’ve said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?

Since I’ve gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So I work three or four hours in the morning, and it’s not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There’s a lot of junk in your life. There’s a letter. And most people have junk in their lives but I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There’s a danger if you don’t move it along steadily that you’re going to forget what it’s about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I’ve been maintaining this schedule off and on — well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in ’57. It’s a long time to be doing one thing. I don’t know how to retire. I don’t know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It’s still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I’ve operated.

We’ve spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There’s a lot to be said for having a routine you can’t run away from.

Right. It saves you from giving up.

(Thank you to the Academy of Achievement and Mason Currey)

Filed under: Creativity by Habits, Creativity: Historical Perspective | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Not Interested in Food or Sleep

Posted on September 12, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m writing about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current.


Rita Levi-Montalcini

Nobel Laureate Neurologist, Discovered Human Growth Factor, Italian Senator, Humanist

If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini’s routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.

I might allow myself a bowl of soup or an orange in the evening, but that’s about it, she says. “I’m not really interested in food, or sleep.

The secret, she says, is work: she still goes to her laboratory every morning to supervise an all-female team developing her Nobel prize-winning research on brain cells, and in the afternoon she goes across town to her foundation in another part of Rome raising funds to help African women to study.

She remains a passionate advocate of the rights of women, and still remembers the thrill as a small girl of seeing women in uniforms driving trams in the First World War when the men were at the front.

I have never been ill, and I don’t see the impairment of my hearing and sight as a handicap, she says. She wears a hearing aid, and peers at you closely when you talk to her, but tells you – convincingly – my brain functions better today than it did was I was 20.

(Thanks to Richard Owens of The Sunday Times)

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Brain Care, Creativity by Habits | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Creativity’s Terrain, Part 3: Don’t Protect From Terror, Love Through It

Posted on August 19, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Minimizing Learned Helplessness.

Highly Creative people store intense humanity in pockets, like rich dirt sifted by earthworms stores oxygen.  Fear is part of the human experience, and so it must be crossed.  Protection from it does not serve Creation, but deprives it.

Behind a chemist’s shop in a town in Spain, five friends sat around a table laughing and drinking new wine. Christmas Day 1884.

A 3-year-old boy watched the other men from the protected post of his father’s arms. The earth began to shake.

The party broke suddenly,  jars and shelves crashing all around. Men, women, young and old spilled into the streets of Malaga running from shelter. Screaming, yelling, desperate for open space. The man with the boy, little Pablo, ran home instead to hurry his pregnant wife out of their crumbling apartment.  Of this moment, years later, Pablo said,

My mother was wearing a kerchief around her head:  I had never seen her like that before.  My father took his cloak from its hanger, flung it over his shoulders, snatched me up and wrapped me in its folds until only my head was peeping out.

The little family soon found new shelter in a friend’s home, not far away. Six aftershocks kept them fearful and awake that night.  And three days later, the woman gave birth prematurely to baby Dolores, the second of the Picasso children.

Psychologist Alice Miller said,

Picasso’s sister was born three days after the earthquake; possibly labor was induced by the fright his mother experienced. So in the space of three days the three-year-old Picasso had to cope with the shock of an earthquake and the birth of his first sister in a highly unusual situation and in strange surroundings.

Picasso’s parents could not protect him, or themselves, from terror.

But the way through fear is love and Picasso’s parents loved him with no reserve.  He used highly volatile emotions like tools, because someone loved him through the chaos.

Without love, fear instead becomes a catalyst for the lowest of human actions. This happens to Rodion, the main character of Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment. Rodion, with cognitive energy to burn but no love, longs for power rather than Creation. In the novel’s climax, he murders a weak old woman with an axe to prove he has no fear.  What saves Rodon from destruction in the end, is love.

When fears overwhelm you need, at least, a hand to squeeze. Fear crossed on a bridge of human love leads to Creation.  And, Creation has the power to extinguish fear.

Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Creativity: Historical Perspective | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 7: Creativity as Experimentation in the Enlightenment

Posted on August 4, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Cultural Suppression of Creativity.

Sitting under an apple tree, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. A falling apple answered for him all questions regarding the mechanics of the Universe.  So goes the legend you read in 6th grade Science.

Yes, Newton did formulate the Universal Law of Gravitation and an apple tree may have helped fine-tune his ideas about gravitational pull and power.  But, Newton’s influence directs Western Science farther and wider than gravity itself, including ideas regarding Creativity.

Newton sought to separate natural philosophy from objective observation-based science. The Scientific Method, generally divorced from pre-conceived spiritual or magical interpretations, led  to the dichotomy between science and religion.

Enlightenment ideas of High Creativity ignored the inspiration portion of Creation, because it could not be explained via the Scientific Method.  Creativity, defined by long hours and experimentation, think Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, had little to do with magic or the unexplained.

Still, some Creators had sparkle enough to cause suspicion that a final, workable definition of Creativity had not yet arrived.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, Ideas, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 6: Creativity can be Supressed by Culture

Posted on August 2, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers.

China’s High Creativity first peaked while Europe wallowed in bloody Dark Age wars and then again during Europe’s bubonic plagued Middle Ages.

But Creativity in art, music, writing, medicine and global exploration came to a halt in China just as Europe emerged weak, but hungry-for-life, for the Renaissance.

Economist Diego Cumin says a region’s creativity and technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today, across the globe, with the exception of China.

The great halt of Creation in China, as real as its Great Wall, could have been limited to just decades. But China’s  future Creative potential keep declining. Chinese culture grew more rigid and more impenetrable. Eventually extreme cultural convergence took hold to the exclusion of the individual growth. Trade with other nations closed and stagnation set in.

Creativity is not a Lone-Ranger process.  Creativity is fostered or suppressed by cultural milieus and economic opportunities.

Individuals today are breaking free from the culture of conformity in China, but the cultural redirection towards openness will be slow.  Creative output in China is still tiny relative to the size of its population.



Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Uncategorized, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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