How You Can Be Creative – A Lesson from Pablo Picasso

I doubt that Picasso said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up," first because a little googling reveals no source for it (other than the usual spam sites), second because this is a popular post-1960s belief about children (the kind of thing Picasso's generation was unlikely to say, but that later generations would eagerly attribute to $arbitrary_great_artist), and third because from what little I know about Picasso's ego it seems unlikely that he would distribute the status of artist so equitably. So I think this quote should be put in the category of bullshit-till-proven-authentic.

It would be fitting if it were bullshit, since it motivates an argument that all anyone had to do in 1907 was decide to paint a few whores and they'd end up with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon.

What?

I mean, seriously, what?

The article seriously advances the following thesis: Creativity is basically easy; you just take something other people are already doing and make incremental changes; for instance, when Picasso painted Les demoiselles d'Avignon all he did was to paint a typical nude portrait except that he changed a few things. A prostitute instead of a standard Noble Classical Figure. A group of them instead of just one. ... Oh, yeah, and among those little incremental changes was inventing a completely new style of painting.

This is, to use the article's own term, complete bullshit. Deciding to take something and make a bunch of incremental changes is easy. Finding a bunch of incremental changes that (1) amount to something really new and (2) still manage to produce something good -- that's what's difficult.

What made Picasso famous for his creativity wasn't the fact that he made a bunch of incremental changes. It's that he spotted some things to change that other people hadn't thought of changing (e.g., you could say that the step from "show everything from a single perspective, or at least make it look as if you're doing so" to "use a variety of radically different perspectives to show objects from multiple viewpoints and produce a sense of fragmentation" is just a matter of Changing One Thing -- but who'd ever considered that as a Thing that could be Changed, before the cubists came along?) and that he was able to produce compelling paintings despite making those radical changes.

(I don't disagree with everything in the article. In particular, the idea that you shouldn't ever reinvent the wheel is just as ridiculous as the article says. But the alleged recipe for creativity is silly, and the alleged example of how it works is beyond preposterous.)

Excellent stuff, and I definitely believe that retaining some childhood wonder and immaturity is vital to happiness. If you mature and pretend to know everything, then where is the wonder and discovery in everyday life? How do you sustain happiness without belief that every day holds bright new colors and experiences?

I've never really looked at Picasso's art with any diligence or perseverance, but I have definitely been inspired by the picture in that post, to go download some of his cubist nudes and use them as screen backgrounds.

I'm sure Picasso would be happy to see people using him as an inspiration to creativity.

Maybe this is relevant: Beside my day-job I spend a lot of time making music. When some artist or label wants me to remix something, I'll always avoid listening to the original work - I'd just receive the samples and midi data, even better if the filenames won't give anything (like the song structure) away, and start working on my interpretation of those loose pieces that would later develope into my idea of which parts should be key, emphasized or not considered at all, which may differ a lot from what the original artist had in mind.

At least when it comes to audio production and being asked to alter or re-invent the work of someone else, the results will benefit if you don't have a very clear reference point but just a bunch loose jigsaw pieces, that don't have any right or wrong combination attached.

I thought this approach might be relevant to the topic as it seems like an extension of the idea the article describes: If you try to make something different, it's helpful not to know how it's done "right".

tl;dr: My theory is that creativity is - or at least is related to - the ability to express yourself. So you usually have _some_ creativity and you most likely can train it.

In my opinion and I spent a long time on this topic creativity is something completely different. The reason I spent so much time thinking about creativity is that I don't consider myself to be a very creative person. So I wondered what causes this lack. I considered a lot of things until I came to the conclusion that creativity is a form of expression, which means that creativity describe the ability to express "stuff". In most cases it's about emotions.

The outcome of creativity is usually considered to be art. Think about something you consider to defiantly be art, for example a book or music. What is it about or what makes it art? Yes I know, it's another term that can be very hard to describe, but one can deny that art is generally related to some kind of emotion or the absence of emotion. It's also why art often provokes.

So creativity _probably_ (it's all just a personal theory) means expressing yourself, so learning to express yourself means becoming more creative. It also means that as long you can in some way express yourself, especially your emotions you are creative, maybe not very creative, but you are.

I think this can also be backed by science. Humans, as (generally speaking) social species depend a lot on expressing themselves. They aren't like ants for example, with a relatively small scope of action. They are very individual and so it is important to understand emotions and express their own ones. If this isn't the case it's considered to be a sign of a mental illness. I guess that's also why people with mental illnesses receive a therapy where they do something creative (usually drawing) and why most artists are usually very emotional. Some of them also mention that their main reason for creating art is a psychologically.

Last, but not least their are hackers (the ones at the CCC and not necessarily intruders) who usually have a deep emotional commitment to the work they are doing. I think it's probably also related to geeks, who often play role playing games and when you think about science fiction stuff and things like Commander Data and Mr. Spock it's also a lot about emotions.

By the way, there is also emotional intelligence which might be related to this, but I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know a lot about this.

I'm sure that art can be broken into individual steps or elements but isn't something lost in that kind of formalization? I always thought art or any creative act for that matter was characterized by some sort of non-linear or intuitive leap?

It all comes down to putting your own variation on something that exists. Then once you put out many variations on that original item, then that original item is now your new creation.

Ex: Just listen to music from the same genre. Each artist has their own song but there are similar elements from each song of all artists in that genre.

I've strongly believed that formal education should involve "reinventing the wheel" with some knowledge before hand, but to push creativity, inspiration, and adaptation when further knowledge is gained. It's how I've taught myself so much, and I think it can work for a lot of kids/people.

Does anyone ever actually see an improvement in their creativity from a system like that?

I'd imagine that most people just get stuck in a loop, reaffirming that those are, in fact, the necessary elements.

"Without great solitude no serious work is possible." – Pablo Picasso

Looks like someone has successfully reinvented Zwicky's morphological box.

People who are creative don't need to read articles on "how to be creative" because that's pretty much the opposite of creativity. If you want to be creative dare to play, dare to be different and just get to work.