Week Twenty: Creativity

New ideas and methods are ways in which creativity can manifest itself. These could be in the form of a theory, an imagined scenario or even just be a new way of approaching a situation or problem. The impressionists were a group of artists who decided to paint in a way that was considered wrong, or lacking in skill: However generations down the line you can see their influence across the arts and this is due to their creativity in approaching how they viewed the world and transferred this onto canvas.

Whether it is an artist within a film company producing a concept for an environment, or a composer completing a symphony that has never been heard before, creativity can be channelled through many different media. If a company were having trouble marketing a product and an employee came up with a revolutionary strategy to advertise and sell their product in a new way, the employee would be considered incredibly creative.

So how is creativity hindered? Can it be gained? Some believe that within education that our creativity has been hindered through being told that there is a right and a wrong way to approach the arts. I find it interesting that if an artist such as Jackson Pollock were to produce work like he does now within the current school system, he would probably be told that it was wrong and that it did not show any skills that the National Curriculum would want to see.

Like many students, Pollock would have probably been told to do a still life painting of an apple for his 10 hour GCSE exam. Does that encourage creativity? Pollock shows expression and movement within his paintings using the materials on the canvas and the marks themselves actually show a story of how his body was moving when he created them, maybe even showing a little of how he was feeling on the page. Don’t you think that is what creativity is all about?

We should be exploring new ways of expressing ourselves. Despite this, the current generation are afraid of trying new things because they have been told that they can’t draw, or that their style of work is not going to get them the grades because they don’t show that they can paint the same old Georgia O’Keeffe flower that the rest of the class have all slaved over without a single new idea or experience. How many times have you heard somebody say “oh I can’t draw, wish I could be creative because I have so many ideas!”?

Having grown up with two parents who are both teachers, it is interesting to see that they also struggle greatly with the system at the moment. They delight in students producing individual work and showing a passion for it yet feel bogged down because they are constantly asked to produce paperwork stating their academic progress! I don’t believe that you can measure somebody’s creative process. I was shocked to learn that after my father stepped down from his full time job as an Art teacher that the man who replaced him instantly destroyed all of the resources my father had worked so hard to collect to inspire his students: items such as plants from all over the world, folders of artist references and bones from different animals that had worked well at feeding the students creativity. Just like the games industry artist Jolyn Webb said to us during a visit “we must constantly be feeding our minds, feeding our creativity with the world around us”.

So how is creativity used within the Games Industry? Within the games we play? Games are another creative field for the imaginations of people to be expressed, much like film or books or even music. In a games team they have an overall vision that they want to convey which is controlled usually by the art director. He will make sure that the ideas being generated are directed in the right way so that they don’t conflict with the rest of the game. The artists are allowed a certain boundary within which they are allowed to work to make something new which is controlled by the brief which they are given. Ideas will be refined by others later and the whole process is ideally there to make sure that a game is a collection of ideas from different people.