280. Creative Structure

Creativity brings together imagination, memory, and intelligence into a substantive form. The created object — the artwork — communicates by its very nature. Its form allows something to be seen in it, something that is new or previously unnoticed. This might be nothing more than a simple insight but with a value significant enough that it can alter the perspective of the audience.

Providing such insight regularly is far from easy. The artist has to develop a practice of repeatedly engaging with the materials of both self and world. Some of these materials will be virtual entities like words or images, and some of them will be physical entities like paints or instruments. Through this process of engagement, the artist expresses part of their own being. They transfer an internal object into the world using the materials they have chosen as their medium. How this transference can be accomplished is what the artist learns through their practice.

Every artist develops a unique practice. Some artists spend weeks or months on studies, exploring materials and techniques before finally committing to a single great work. Others spend their time repeatedly creating similar works, in the hope that they will eventually manifest the aesthetic value they can already intuit.

Effective practice almost always requires structure. Structure might seem contrary to creativity, as the former demands a degree of discipline and rigidity, while the latter is focused on imaginative possibility. But the artist can benefit from boundaries. Uninhibited imagination easily bounces from one idea to the next without ever creating anything at all. Creativity requires action — it is the movement from intuitive seeing to actual seeing, from having an idea to having an artwork before you.

It is out of the need for action that the artist develops an idiosyncratic structure that most enables their own process. This structure gives their practice an order that does not limit the chaos of imagination but rather channels it into real forms. Structure is a tool of creativity, one that the artist learns to embrace for regular creating to become finally possible.