The sun’s shining and the snow’s melting today, and I’m again looking forward to the warmer days of summer. It’s time to start getting out and about again. It’s time for our winter sale. Come on out and have some coffee, tea, and cookies. Connie has some new work as always and the shelves are getting filled up again. I have a few new things on the go as well.
A question Connie and I get quite often is “Where do your ideas come from?” or “How do you come up with your ideas?” Here’s the best way I can describe how an artists’ mind works. When I was in art school, you first start getting projects from your instructors. You go from one project to another and you need only interpret the instructions and then carry out a solution. So the idea comes from outside of your thinking process. When you get to a certain level in your education, there are no more ‘projects’ given to you. You’re now expected to search inside of yourself for projects to do. All creative thought comes from your own mind.
The more things you have experienced and think about, the more ideas you have to draw from. In a sense, that’s what creativity is. We can all be creative if we want, we just need to apply ourselves. Being creative is like building things from many different ideas we may have. Being a creative cook for instance, comes from cooking many different recipes and thinking about how you could put different parts of recipes together in new and unique ways. You can also challenge yourself to try and combine different ideas in new ways. As and artist I’m always interested in discovering ways to break into new territory, and my belief, in the arts, the only rule is, ‘there are no rules’. Traditionalists would definitely take issue with that statement, but all new things come from breaking with tradition. As you try more and more to develop your own way of doing things, or developing new ideas, you’ll eventually have your own set of ‘go to’ ways or ‘tools’ to see new and unique combinations that just might work. Of course, the more extreme your ideas are, the more failures you’ll have. But that’s the cost of being creative. The more we fail, the more we learn. All new knowledge moves us forward. The first step for me in any idea, is to give myself a project to do. So if I decide to make a new side table for a project, ideas start start flowing because of all the other things I have done over many years of making. My mind starts to evaluate the projects I’ve done and all the things I’ve seen online or in books, as well as the intention I give to the project. Many thoughts are eliminated immediately because they don’t fit my intention or they’re too much like someone else’s ideas. Then sketches are made in my sketch book to see if anything starts making any sense. Eventually I come up with an idea that begins to look a bit like what my original intention was about, or not. Sometimes the idea just keeps alluding me. Nothing appears. Other times, there are just too many ideas to pick from. All in all I love the creative process and all the challenges it presents. In the end, I have way too many ideas and too little time. Bob Pike
