Creativity is supported by engaging with other creative people.
It is also more common than not for creative people to express themselves in more than one medium.
Visual artists write poetry or fiction, engage in photography or make jewelry. Actors paint, dancers make music, weavers create paper collage.
While one medium may be preferred or experienced as one’s true passion, the other creative expressions fuel the artist and support the primary medium through maintaining freshness, energy, perspective and interactions with others.
This “cross- training” strategy is highly individualistic. One type of creative expression may be more playful while another is more vocational. There are lots of ways to mix media, literally and figuratively.
How many different types of creative expression do you engage in? What have you noticed about how it impacts other parts of your life?
Cross training is a familiar concept in athletics, physical fitness and business. You may not hear the term applied as often to creativity. But cross training principles applied to creativity can have great results.
We know that the brain is stimulated by novel events and experiences. That’s why changes in simple routines can have the effect of waking up our brain and shaking loose habits of thinking and behaving. We also know that the aging brain is helped by learning new things and seniors are advised to take up new activities and indulge their curiosity.
Whether you are looking for more creativity in everyday problem solving or work tasks or dealing with a block in writing or painting, cross training can break things loose, offer new perspective and fresh energy and get your brain to make new connections----part of the core definition of creativity.
When I consult with school systems, there are talented people who have already tried lots of interventions by the time I enter the case. I am asked to look at a situation and come up with something new that these experienced folk can use. A new approach generally involves creating a fresh story about what is going on, which can open the door to different ways of thinking and acting in order to bring about change.
There are days when this effort on my part goes better than others. But I have noticed a pattern. I have noticed there are days when ideas flow so easily I find myself saying things I didn’t realize I knew or had ever recommended before. I make connections quickly, experience rapid flashes of insight and intuition. The story clicks into place, solutions present themselves and I am able to tell the story in a way that leads others to have ideas and make changes.
I first began to notice this difference in my thinking some years ago when I started painting. There is a difference in my work as consultant or therapist when I am regularly engaged in creative practice.
If you are a visual artist, sculptor, potter, dancer or work in any kind of nonverbal media, maybe you have noticed a particular effect. After painting for several hours, I often experience a sense of wordlessness, i.e. I am reluctant to speak, have trouble finding words, or putting thoughts into words. But after about ½ hour or so, words flow easily and in fact often seem more insightful than what I might have been thinking about the same subject before I painted.
As I began to write more in the last few years, I began to notice that not only was I more likely to write better when painting regularly, but also my painting is better when I am writing regularly. And I sense an inner tension building up when I don’t engage in some form of creative expression. I miss it and begin to feel malnourished, incomplete, spiritually out of touch. Sometimes viewing the art of others can fuel me, but as I have said before on this show, viewing art makes my fingers itchy to make something.
These connections between art making and thinking patterns were unexpected by me, but the more artists I talk with, the more I find that many fuel their process by doing a variety of art forms. There are qualities of attention, perceiving and experiencing our inner and outer worlds that are impacted through regular engagement in creative expression. Maybe we learn something about making a commitment to work through a challenge or finish something. Maybe we find a stillness inside, or an appreciation of small, ordinary things, a fondness for asymmetry. Maybe we find a wholeness in Nature, a connection with the Transcendent.
I am well aware that my creative practices have made me a better, more creative psychologist. It is not just a matter of keeping my brain active. I have developed stronger intuition, keener senses about what is going on in front of me or around me, sharper eyes for what is unsaid by others. My body offers awareness through my own posture and felt senses as well as the usual eyes and ears. And my mind can pull together disparate parts more easily, put the pieces of a story together in rapidly shifting arrangements until suddenly it all seems to fit. My intuition is honed by years of practice, but also by listening to myself as a writer and painter.
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FYI About Steve Jent, www.jentprints.com guest on March 24, 2010
A number of guests on Stargazing Stories make use of creative cross training to strengthen their primary art form. Our guest on this episode was composer, author and printmaker Steven Jent.
Steven graduated from Rice University with a BA in History, and also received an MS in Computer Science from Southern Methodist University. He started his career in software development in the early, innovative days of IBM, in a time when there were no personal computers anywhere. Always interested in music and songwriting, Steven left IBM in 1998 to pursue other creative activities.
He is the author of A Browser's Book of Texas History, A Browser’s Book of Texas Quotations, and a number of poems for children and adults. In 2001 he moved to Denton to study composition at the University of North Texas. He expanded his studies to include the visual arts, and found himself particularly drawn to printmaking. His website, jentprints.com, presents his series of prints of historic iron bridges that date from the early days of Denton County. Visitors to the can also listen to the songs and instrumental music he has written over the past 35 years.
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