Creativity, awaken your creativity, Giselle Art Studio

Creativity - Do you want to be Creative?

..... articles collected - written or re-viewed by Giselle

Do you want to be Creative?

Creativity, what is it, do you need it, do you have it, are you born with it, is it blocked, can you awaken it, how can you use it .... and if you think you don't have it.... can you learn it or re-awaken it?

Wow, lots of questions, lets see how we can come to terms with such an illusive term as creativity.

First of all, humans are by nature creative, not just in art, in everything, it's part of our make up, like thinking, that's what separates us from animals.

What is creativity anyhow?

In simple terms, it means to make something new. In a more complex form, we could say:

Creativity is a mental process, which can be conscious or sub-conscious, of generating new ideas, concepts or new connections of existing elements of ideas and concepts.

Creativity is widely recognised of being generated in the right hemisphere of our brain, in contrast to logical thinking which is a property coming from the left side of the brain.

The actualisation of creativity needs both hemispheres of the brain.

Therefore, anyone who believes that they have no creativity, simply has used their left side of the brain to dispute the function of their right side of the brain, which is a bit of a paradox.

What this means is, someone believing they have no creativity, they simply haven't used the process of creativity in a conscious manner.

Remember, " use it or lose it " ... that's it, some people may have lost it or didn't even know they had it.

We can recognise how important the normal thinking process of our left brain is to awaken our creativity.

We all know how strong a belief is, if you would like to be creative, be it for painting or music or marketing or building houses, or gardening, fashion .. anything, you first need to let go of the belief, that you are not creative.

Having got rid of that limiting belief, use your logic mind, to learn about the processes you will need to use your stimulate creative abilities.

Let's use art as an example. If you would like to draw or paint, you need to learn about drawing and painting first, which is a left brain function. Once you don't need to concentrate on your technique abilities, creativity being right sided, can flow more easy.

Now is crunch time, you would like to create a new painting. However your creative mind needs something to work with. The right side of the brain in combination with creativity has also the function of "the big picture" the overview of everything, and therefore can make subconscious association between one element and another.

We can use this principle by picking a few different themes and top that up with something we like to paint and combine that.

Your creative mind will come up with an overview which brings out an idea of how to combine those elements.

Now, you need to trust yourself, just paint that idea, don't question it.

Your logical mind may tell you, that is not good enough. Don't go by that, if you would like to re-awaken your creativity, just paint. You need to do that with a few paintings, simply to awaken those processes. And because now you use those processes, they will start working more effectively.

Please recognise, what we are discussing here is discussed with our logical mind, and this helps to convince our logical mind that we can be creative.

It's like you become aware that you can use your creativity, because you can switch it on with the help of your "understanding and sympathetic" left logical mind.

It's much harder with a skeptical mind. Skepticism can be positive as in protecting you, but can work against you by self-sabotaging many of your desired actions.

One of the biggest self-sabotaging action is "the fear of the unknown", and obviously, creativity brings out the unknown in you. Another fear and therefore blocking your creativity is the idea of, "I am not good enough".

Obviously once again, you wouldn't even know if you are good enough, if you haven't used your creative processes, and please ....

ask yourself the question; "not good enough for whom?".

And finally, to convince your left logical brain hemisphere a bit more ...
.. you are born with your right side of the brain and with a creative functionality, if that process stopped somewhere on the way, it was most likely at a certain age at school. Once you start questioning your own beautiful child like naive drawing and painting ability, you started to get blocked. Often tragically, teachers tell you that your art is not good enough, "that's not how it looks like".

Anyhow, the real question is not about creativity, the question is:

Do you want to be creative?

Not everyone wants too .. that's fine .. as long as we are all aware that we are creatures of habits, often bad ones, and we are conditioned by the society we live in.

Breaking out of the confinements of bad habits and conditioning, means making use of creativity.