Rebecca Boyes
Untitled Alan Fletcher PHAIDON 2001
(The art of looking sideways) This text is important to my practice because it is a lot of different ways of looking at creativity from many perspectives. It is interesting to see all sides to one word such as “creativity” and what it means to others and I also think that this helps my practice as a creative. The many facets of the word help me and my practice because it give me multiple was ways of seeing design work and also coming up with solutions to a problem. I found it hard to decide the design for this piece of text because it was difficult to think about a different layout when it had been designed in a the book “the art of looking sideways”. I also wanted it to reflect the text with being to childish or other the top. I decided to turn parts of the text sideways because the book that the text originated from the art of reading sideways. I considered turning all of the text sideways but that is basically what they did in the book. Initially for my Redacted text I had decided that I was going to redact all of the words except the words “create” or “creativity” or some variation of that because that is the overall message of the text, but after some consideration I have decided I am not sure whether I am happy with that. I think that it is works as an idea but I think with a bit more thought it cold be a lot better. So over the next week I am going to play around with it and see what happens. i decided i actually wanted to create what messages that i took when reading the text without the useful information.
Emilio Ambasz: ‘It is not hunger, but love and fear, and sometimes wonder, that make us create… to give poetic form to the pragmatic.’
Maggie Smith (on acting): ‘The way it ends so totally, with nothing to put on the wall or in the bookcase. Just a lot of yesterdays, and then you have to start out all over again.’
Oliver Sachs: ‘Creativity… involves the power to originate, to break away from existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of imagination, to create and re-create worlds fully in ones mind - while supervising all this with a critical inner eye. Creativity has to do with inner life - with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.’
Christopher Frayling: ‘… at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he verb “to create” was confined to the descriptions of a book of genesis. Good did the creating: human beings did their best with what they were given. But with the romantic period, and the emphasis on individual genius, artists started describing themselves as “creative artists” hence William Blake in Jerusalem, “I will not reason and compare; my business is to create”; and William Wordsworth in one of his sonnets, “creative art demands the service of a mind and heart; though sensitive yet creatively fashioned”. Creativity meant flying without a net; risking t all; challenging the gods; using different parts of the brain to the reasoned (today, we’d say right side equals creativity; left side equals reasoning); and being arty.’
Francisco Varela: ‘Creativity, common sense and love do come together in one fundamental sense. The three of them happen when you reach the point of awareness when you let go of something and let something else emerge.’
John Fowles: ‘The creative persons simplest purpose is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about the outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself.’
Jean Giono: ‘When he reached the place he was aiming for, he began making holes in the ground with his rod, putting an acorn in each and then covering it up again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land was his. He said it wasn’t. Did he know who the owner was? No, he didn’t. He thought it must be common land, or perhaps it belonged to people who weren’t interested in it. He wasn’t interested in who they were. And so with great care, he planted his 100 acorns.’
Rober Grudin: ‘The ways of creativity are infinite: the ways of formal learning are numbered. Restless, curious, playful, contriving, the innovative mind feeds on challenge and creates its home in the province of mystery.’
Arthur Koestler: ‘The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.’
Martin gardner: ‘The sudden hunch, the creative leap of the mind that “sees” in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence.’
Ralph Caplan: ‘… one of the hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.’
Georgia O’keefe: ‘To create ones own world in any of the arts takes courage.’
Gert Dumbar: ‘I want to link creativity with something known as serendipity, which means to find something that you haven’t been looking for but which changes everything that went before and comes after. The English word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole, who used it for the first time in 1754 in a letter. Walpole described the adventures of Three Persian Princes of Serendip. “By chance and shrewdness they discovered things which they were not looking for. They looked for one thing and found another. They were very surprised about this themselves.” That is creativity…’
Saul Steinberg: ‘The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meagre…’
Emilio Ambasz: ‘It is not hunger, but love and fear, and sometimes wonder, that make us create… to give poetic form to the pragmatic.’
Maggie Smith (on acting): ‘The way it ends so totally, with nothing to put on the wall or in the bookcase. Just a lot of yesterdays, and then you have to start out all over again.’
Oliver Sachs: ‘Creativity… involves the power to originate, to break away from existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of imagination, to create and re-create worlds fully in ones mind - while supervising all this with a critical inner eye. Creativity has to do with inner life - with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.’
Christopher Frayling: ‘… at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he verb “to create” was confined to the descriptions of a book of genesis. Good did the creating: human beings did their best with what they were given. But with the romantic period, and the emphasis on individual genius, artists started describing themselves as “creative artists” hence William Blake in Jerusalem, “I will not reason and compare; my business is to create”; and William Wordsworth in one of his sonnets, “creative art demands the service of a mind and heart; though sensitive yet creatively fashioned”. Creativity meant flying without a net; risking t all; challenging the gods; using different parts of the brain to the reasoned (today, we’d say right side equals creativity; left side equals reasoning); and being arty.’
Francisco Varela: ‘Creativity, common sense and love do come together in one fundamental sense. The three of them happen when you reach the point of awareness when you let go of something and let something else emerge.’
John Fowles: ‘The creative persons simplest purpose is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about the outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself.’
Jean Giono: ‘When he reached the place he was aiming for, he began making holes in the ground with his rod, putting an acorn in each and then covering it up again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land was his. He said it wasn’t. Did he know who the owner was? No, he didn’t. He thought it must be common land, or perhaps it belonged to people who weren’t interested in it. He wasn’t interested in who they were. And so with great care, he planted his 100 acorns.’
Rober Grudin: ‘The ways of creativity are infinite: the ways of formal learning are numbered. Restless, curious, playful, contriving, the innovative mind feeds on challenge and creates its home in the province of mystery.’
Arthur Koestler: ‘The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.’
Martin gardner: ‘The sudden hunch, the creative leap of the mind that “sees” in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence.’
Ralph Caplan: ‘… one of the hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.’
Georgia O’keefe: ‘To create ones own world in any of the arts takes courage.’
Gert Dumbar: ‘I want to link creativity with something known as serendipity, which means to find something that you haven’t been looking for but which changes everything that went before and comes after. The English word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole, who used it for the first time in 1754 in a letter. Walpole described the adventures of Three Persian Princes of Serendip. “By chance and shrewdness they discovered things which they were not looking for. They looked for one thing and found another. They were very surprised about this themselves.” That is creativity…’
Saul Steinberg: ‘The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meagre…’