Below are a range of quotations from OCA students describing their creative process and a short film about where good ideas come from. Engage with this material, reflecting on your own creative approach, and identify which statements you might agree with, and why.

Selected Quotes:

“I generally start with an idea and a plan. But the plan usually changes during the process.”

– Ros, OCA Textiles, Level 1

“Ideas pop up at unexpected times and I have started to jot them down. When I am not able to develop them visually I use words. I think I should combine the two – visual and verbal – as they lead to different things. Verbal is faster and so allows for a train of thought to flow more freely. Visual development takes hold of a first idea and develops that out of the processes involved.”

– Sibylle, OCA Drawing, Level 1

The process I tend to follow often does entail changes along the way, as Ros from the first quote says. However, I do find there is more room for exploration/experimentation in my process. I often limit myself and don’t take exploration of new mediums or concepts deviating from the original idea further than brainstorming or mind mapping. Going further I would like to focus on actually trying wildly different approaches even if I don’t end up using them in the final product.

Sybille, from the second quote, seems to have a similar brainstorming approach to my own. Words do help with making ideas flow and tend to be faster than drawing actual images to accompany the new ideas. I also like working with text, so words are important from the get-go.

‘Where Good ideas Come From’ is a short (4 mins) animated lecture by Steven Johnson, produced by RSA and illustrated by Cognitive Media, that asks where good ideas come from. Johnson explores this question from a scientific perspective, drawing on the idea that ideas or hunches need time to develop, and contact with other hunches to fully develop. For this to happen, social connections between scientists is important, so different ideas can come in contact with one another. As Johnson concludes, chance favours the connected mind.

“Chance favors the connected mind.” is an excellent summary of the video, and a good concept on its own. Connectivity on its own is indeed a great driver of creativity, and I think Mr. Heller is entirely right in that respect. Eureka moments happen most often when communicating them and allowing others to add to them either by mirroring or deliberately building on them. An idea is slow to build, and innovation is often a collection of little inconveniences that combined with a person’s skills, become something new or something better than before (e.g. the invention of the internet as in the video above). In art, innovation comes both from new technology and mediums (e.g. Trains, paint tubes and flat brushes of the Impressionists) and the merging of new philosophical and literary ideas with visual storytelling (e.g. the overlap of Romantic writers and artists). Sometimes innovation in art comes from revivifying old ideas and combining them with contemporary concepts (e.g. Neoclassicism, the Pre-Raphaelites). Most art movements were prompted by something other than art, therefore collaboration and multidisciplinary attitudes are indispensable to ideation and innovation.

Illustration is an inherently collaborative discipline. If one illustrates a book, article or any other script, there is inherent overlap of ideas from someone else’s mind. An illustrator can collaborate with almost any sort of thinker and create images for their ideas, hopefully expanding on them and clarifying the message. In the area of illustration, most of the collaboration happens between writer and artist, but combining other skills such as animation, 3D modeling, and more traditional painting mediums can be interesting.

“If I just do something, and keep doing it, something will happen.”

– Bryan Eccleshall (2013)

OCA drawing tutor Bryan Eccleshall set himself the challenge of undertaking a drawing a day for a year. Here are his reflections on the experience:

Daily sketchbook drawing is something I have always wanted to do, but not something I have really had the discipline to properly implement. The idea of a 365 project is taking that a step further and thinking of each piece as a real element of a project instead of a throwaway drawing. Every drawing becomes important, if not necessarily central. The idea feels both more and less doable because of that.

There is much less pressure when using a sketchbook because no one has to see it, but when creating a project, something to display, each drawing must be up to a certain standard. It’s pressure, but it’s also value. While creating work for oneself is important, it does lower the stakes and feels insubstantial. And who is motivated to make something insubstantial?

But to create building blocks for something big every single day, even if one cannot quite see the shape of the big thing, might just be something I can get behind. Especially in the context of Mr. Eccleshall’s ideas about substance over wow factor in the art world. I might have actually said “Yes! That’s it!” out loud when watching the video. While I can understand the thinking behind many modern art exhibitions, there is a veneer of superficiality that is impossible to shake and has always made me wary of the fine art world and exhibitions in general. I am an illustrator. “Bigness” and “wow factor” are not important to me. I would rather have someone enjoy my work in the privacy of their own home than in some cold and sterile artificially lit warehouse or uncomfortably quirky, moody hipster basement. That is not to say that exhibitions are all without substance. Some have the potential to be truly transformative and moving experiences. This approach to displaying art was simply never one I resonated with for myself.

While projects like Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” (a 24 hour film composed of clips of clocks gathered from other films) and Douglas Gordon’s collection and display of objects over time, and Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project are all contemplative and challenging examples of long projects, I think my own approach would be a little lighter. The goal would be to make a little book out of the drawings at the end of the year. I’ve thought of illustrating daily poems before, both because I wanted to do a similar daily project and because I want to expand my reading tastes. I often find I don’t have the patience for poetry, even though I do like it. Poetry can also provide a lot of variety in both subject matter and approaches. Though I would probably stick to watercolors and ink or digital painting as far as medium goes, but would play around with the typography and the text itself.

Michael Golec and Paul Rand’s Play Principle

In “Memory, Instinct, and Design: Beyond Paul Rand’s ‘Play Principle'”, Michel Golec explores the idea that play is at the center of creativity. He recollects the instinctual drawing technique of Mr. Paul Rand and how it impacted him when he had found himself in a position familiar to many creatives: before a blank piece of paper, completely lacking in ideas. The “Play Principle” works by making the project into a game. Games have rules, but the key is that the rules are there to be broken. The artist must become aware and adhere to a structure and then must deliberately choose which elements of that structure to bend or discard. That is where innovation lies.

Golec likens playing to forgetting. One becomes creative when one chooses to forget learned things in favor of dipping into a more instinctual, child-like element of oneself.  He also mentions Freud’s work on dreams, which are an adult’s play, and how the mind “makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on a pattern of the past, a picture of the future.” According to Golec, artist does something similar to the dreaming mind when they combine the knowledge, instinct and the rules of the assignment to create something new.

Playing isn’t something that I have done a lot of in my work lately. I used to, especially when I first started out with using ink. I love playing with shape and texture, more than I ever have done with color. I haven’t really allowed myself to waste time on a project by investing hours into a direction I doubt holds much ground. While playing around can lead to interesting results, it doesn’t always lead to a project that fulfills the brief well. Exploring where the line is when it comes to experimentation on a project will be interesting. I’m sure it’s entirely possible to let loose in the initial stages and then chisel the work until the result is brief-friendly.

Hilma af Klint and Automatic Drawing

Hilma af Kilnt (1862–1944) was a Swedish artist who is now considered to be the first abstract artist. Her work was not well-known for a very long time, largely because of her own wishes. As far as she was concerned, the world was not ready for it. She was probably right, given what contemporary accounts of people who viewed her work say. Her paintings are heavy with geometry and spiritual/psychological symbolism. Her images are full of lively colors and what the modern eye considers entirely inoffensive compositions, at the time her work was entirely without precedent and therefore strange. She was a Spiritualist and engaged in the, at the time popular, practice of seances with a small group of ladies. One day, af Klint had something like a vision or visitation from a being who commissioned a series of works from her. She would produce about 1600 works throughout her lifetime, though not all were spiritual in nature. She would work by painting instinctively and had said that she was not painting things that came entirely from herself. She viewed the paintings as a message for humanity, which is why she requested that her work would not be exhibited for at least 20 years after her death.

Bob Cobbing and Concrete Poetry

Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a poet whose work was mainly in experimental concrete poetry. His work was both visual and auditory, but he is perhaps best known for his use of sound as artistic medium. He approached poetry not from a place of using the words to build meaning, but of building with sound to evoke emotion. The focus of his concrete poetry is on the exploration of how we produce sound and what meaning we can create with deconstructed words. Although he did publish his works in written form as well, he viewed poetry as a discipline closer to performance art, so most of what went into his poetry had an element of improvisation and audience participation. The performances are therefore, highly chaotic, but undeniably expressive.

The deliberate deconstruction of words in favor of sound and the act of making sound is of the same spirit as the play principle. In fact, these performances remind one of childhood, when words were new and playing around with their sounds, making nonsensical songs from them was a common pastime. One could say that it’s the sound of the chaos that comes with creativity.

Anni Albers and Material

Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a German weaver and printmaker who studied and taught at the Bauhaus school and later moved to the United States to teach at the Black Mountain College. She is best known for advocating for crafts and craftspeople in the art world because she believed “Like any craft it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art.” While she created many works which were solely meant to be useful, she believed that weaving and other crafts have just as much potential to be viewed as objects of beauty as painting or sculpture.

She also believed in a more intuitive way of designing. Although she did plan out her work, she was also known for listening to her materials and weaving in the way she believed her work wanted to be woven. It is a play principle in action again. Slightly before the quote above she also says: “The crafts, understood as conventions of treating material, introduce another factor: traditions of operation which embody set laws. This may be helpful in one direction, as a frame for work. But these rules may also evoke a challenge. They are revokable, for they are set by man. They may provoke us to test ourselves against them. But always they provide a discipline which balances the hubris of creative ecstasy.”

Albers was bound by certain rules of the game (weaving is especially constricted by warp and weft threads, a reason why she eventually gave it up on favor of printmaking), but within those rules she reserved the right to reject convention and engage in creativity.

Conclusion

Automatic Drawing and Concrete Poetry are both concepts functioning on the basis of the Play Principle, or something like it. Making art has always had an element of play in it, because it engages the imagination. The more one relies on conventions and principles the element of play becomes stifled, thus leaving creativity out of the creative process. Engaging with play consciously can help revive creativity and thus reinvigorate one’s art.

Bibliography

Albers, A., 1944. Work with material. College Art Journal, 3(2), pp.51-54.

Art History School (2021) The Visionary Genius Hilma af Klint: Explore the Spiritual World of the very first Abstract Artist. Jul 5. Available at: The Visionary Genius Hilma af Klint: Explore the Spiritual World of the very first Abstract Artist – YouTube (Accessed: March 10, 2023).

Carter, M., 2020. Crystalizing the Universe in Geometrical Figures: Diagrammatic Abstraction in the Creative Works of Hilma af Klint and CG Jung. Jung Journal, 14(3), pp.147-167.

Golec, M., 1995. Memory, instinct and design: beyond Paul Rand’s “Play Principle”. The education of a graphic designer, pp.103-107.

Mono Thyratron (2016) Bob Cobbing ▪ »Bill Jubobe« ▪ Sound & Visual Poetry. Jun 27. Available at: Bob Cobbing ▪ »Bill Jubobe« ▪ Sound & Visual Poetry – YouTube (Accessed: March 10, 2023).

New Britain Museum of American Art (2020) Anni Albers: Experiments. May 28. Available at: Anni Albers: Experiments – YouTube (Accessed: March 10, 2023).

Thomas, G., 2019. Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Vol. 79). Liverpool English Texts and St.