Philippa Stanton - Conscious Creativity Look. Connect. Create

look, connect, create

PHILIPPA STANTON

@5ftinf

Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand. Confucius

I was a single parent with a toddler, a mortgage and a cat. I had no money and no qualifications. The prospect of working all hours to pay for someone else to look after my son and still financially fall short led me to make a massive commitment to my creativity. It was all I had.

A very dear friend told me at the time that, because her family was comfortably off, she knew it had made them less creative. Her husband was incensed and argued that his job had not only facilitated but also supported each and every one of the familys creative pursuits, including his own! She turned to me as he stormed out and, with a twinkle, whispered, He knows Im right though. It was an enlightening moment which stuck with me, and was one of the reasons I felt I wanted to share my processes.

Ive written this book as a sort of guide or springboard towards developing your own creativity in a very conscious way, a way of utilizing all your senses and everything around you. There are no hard-and-fast rules, secrets or techniques to unlock your full creative potential, but there are definitely exercises that can help you to look at and see what surrounds you in a different, deeper and more meaningful way.

You may feel apprehensive about embracing a new creative route; perhaps at some point in your life a teacher or family member told you that you were no good at art or that youre just a maths and science person. Maybe you sat with the high achievers working extremely hard while the arty types listened to the radio in the art room. I was thwarted by academia at school and felt very average. I loved classical civilization and art, and somehow thought my enthusiasm for the subjects meant that I would achieve high grades. It didnt. However, during A Levels, I was one of those arty types listening to the radio and I was lucky enough to have a life-changing teacher who unlocked my eyes, validated my creativity and made me do things I didnt want to do, thus pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Some of you reading this will be innately creative, already armed with your own techniques and methods, hungry for new stimuli, new triggers and new ideas, but maybe you have just lost your mojo and feel a bit stuck. Some of you might have small children, limited time and energy, uninspiring jobs, no ideas and feel completely blocked. Regardless of where you have come from creatively, this book is intended to help you devise a personal structure for an ongoing creative practice with exercises youll be able to revisit time and time again.

A simple awareness of your personal traits good, bad, physical and emotional means that you will be able to utilize or shelve them so as to work to your best ability. Developing an awareness of creative triggers will mean gaining a deeper and clearer way of looking, seeing and sensing everything around you. Our senses dictate how we interact with the world, although we rarely take time to consciously give them any disciplined space. A trip to a gallery or restaurant can give them a moment of indulgence, but the simple key to any creative inspiration lies in consciously taking the time to accurately acknowledge what is around us.

Its also important to make a genuine commitment to working on your creativity, but at the same time it shouldnt be something that eats away at your enjoyment and turns days of doing nothing into guilty secrets. Structure and commitment are crucial to developing your work, which is why Ive used the first few chapters to try and help you define what sort of creative person you are as well as addressing universal obstacles.

Implementing your ideas is often much harder than just thinking about them: a lot of the time its about being brave, facing your own notion of failure and finding a pearl of inspiration in what at first may appear to be total chaos. Although minimalism is popular, in this book I want to actively encourage you to embrace the joys of abundance and mess. Mess always sounds negative a confused collection of unwanted clutter but mess can also have texture and meaning, and can form a wonderfully accessible, and cheap, creative palette. The amorphous contents of a drawer which have been secretly shaming you might in fact turn out to be a creative liberation.

Although you could be working through this book at any time of the year, I want to acknowledge beginnings, as many people will probably find themselves reading this with some sort of new resolve. Resolves always feel strong and positive at first, but that strength and drive often proves hard to maintain. However, in my opinion, its that simple commitment that is key to your growth, not necessarily a constant and unfailing energy. If you feel rubbish, be rubbish, if you feel excited, be excited, but dont put pressure on yourself to get it right or be good at it. Experiment just to see what happens and push yourself to do things that challenge you.

Im always taken by surprise at how unintentionally creative I start to become during a time of despondency. Feeling dreadful seems to unconsciously liberate me; I allow myself to let go of expectations, telling myself that its all pointless anyway, and I begin playing around with ideas: old ones, new ones, regurgitated ones. I start to find a sort of secret and very personal way through my darkness and then slowly come out the other side.

We all work in different ways and thats as it should be. Its completely fine if you want to paint using kitchen utensils, write using felt tips or collage a piece of music. The point is, it will always be up to you; you were the one born with the power to invent.

Creativity is about discovering your own ways of working, your own unique practice, and growing the confidence needed to accept that. Its not about learning how to create something like everyone else, its about learning how to acknowledge the true value of what you do.

Focusing and grounding your initial journey through investigation and instinct

B eing creative and curious is a fundamental part of being a human being we are all hard-wired to invent, explore and experiment however, before you throw yourself into a frenzy of creative activity, it will be useful first to determine the type of creative you are.

You may feel intimidated by creativity or you may feel that you have it in abundance. You might feel you need to work out how to access your creative potential or you may think that youre not creative at all. You might even feel that all this focus on creativity is a load of nonsense. Working out what type of creative person you are does not mean youre making a decision that is set in stone, but it is something that will help you focus your initial journey.