Where do creative ideas come from?

NINA GONZALEZ-PARK

Where do creative ideas come from? What do creatives mean by being “in the zone” or in a “flow state”?

Although the current cognitive paradigm proposes that creativity is unique to higherlevel cognitive processes – a result of analysis and evaluation built on experience and memory – it is not supported by the lived experience of creatives.

Rather, it may be necessary to expand investigation outside of the consciousness/ unconsciousness and into what N. Katherine Hayles calls ‘the cognitive nonconscious’. This is a cognitive level shared by all living organisms, where the sensorial information from the environment is directly processed, functioning in humans like a supercomputer within the mind.

Within this framework, it is possible that creativity originates in nonconscious cognition and then is processed by consciousness and unconsciousness. However, more rigorous research is needed to shift the current paradigm.

‘Palenque’ represents the moment when a giant elephant ear plant is about to unfurl, a moment of potential energy transforming into kinetic energy, of possibilities unfolding.

In 1954, British zoologist and artist Desmond Morris undertook a strange experiment at London Zoo: to see whether animals could create art. His subject was Congo, a chimpanzee chosen for his boisterous personality. Morris taught the chimp how to hold a paintbrush, provided him with paints and paper, and observed his first artistic attempts.

Congo’s initial paintings would probably fail the criteria for what most of us consider ‘art’. Primarily, they lacked creative intent. Each painting consisted solely of brushstrokes in a radiating fan shape – a wild chimp makes this movement when spreading out leaves for a nest, so these early paintings arguably just represent a reflexive action.

However, Congo’s paintings began to change as he started using a wider variety of shapes and colours. The first painting that really excited Morris was titled Split Fan Pattern with Central Black Spot. Here, Congo disrupted his usual fan pattern with a bold circle of paint in the centre. These small decisions, claimed Morris, marked the chimp’s transition from animal instinct to aesthetic intent and indicated that Congo had a nascent understanding of artistic composition.

call him an artist? An eye for colour is present in many animals for survival reasons rather than aesthetic reasons. Bower birds, for example, decorate their tunnel-shaped nests with brightly coloured objects; by arranging these from smallest to largest, they create the optical illusion of a much larger nest, to attract mates. This is arguably more of a method of communication and manipulation than it is art.

Whether they were horrified or thrilled by the irreverence of displaying Congo alongside Pollock and Picasso, those within the art world became intrigued by the chimp’s paintings. Picasso himself held no grudges against animal artists: allegedly when asked by a reporter to comment on Congo’s art, Picasso left the room, returned clutching his newly purchased Congo painting, wildly swinging his arms like a monkey, and bit the reporter. Works by Congo hung in the homes of other well-known artists like Joan Miró and were publicly praised by Salvador Dali.

But was Congo’s “natural curiosity for shape and colour”, as Morris called it, enough to

It is Congo’s behaviour that arguably sets him apart from other animal artists. For example, he often threw tantrums if his paintings were taken away before he deemed them finished. Just as importantly, he exercised restraint in his painting – while some compositions were dense with colourful brushstrokes, others were strikingly sparse, and Congo would refuse to add to them further. These accounts suggest that Congo cared about how his paintings looked and had an artistic process.

Since Congo made his artistic debut, many more artists have undertaken collaborations with animals. In the 1970s, the Russian artistic duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were the first to equip Asian elephants with paintbrushes and colour. The sale of the elephant’s paintings raised more than £19,000 for elephant conservation. In a Guardian interview, Komar said of the animals’ aptitude for painting “elephant art is only new to people, but it's not new to the elephants”; wild elephants had been seen doodling in the mud with sticks previously.

This raises another question: to what extent are animals capable of enjoying art for its own sake? It is difficult enough to establish neurobiological reasons for why art elicits emotion in humans, let alone animals. However, Stendhal, a 19th-century literary realist, suggested that we enjoy beautiful things because “beauty [is] the promise of happiness” – a principle which can be seen in the theory of sexual selection in animals.

For example, in many species of butterflies and birds, males have evolved beautiful colours which they use to woo females. Modern evolutionary biology would identify this as a tool for the female to pick a partner with the best reproductive fitness. For example, in birds like peacocks, abundant and colourful feathers are a sign of good health. However, Darwin himself was convinced that female animals “appreciated the beautiful as [beautiful]”. While studying butterflies, he decided that females did not favour flashier males solely because their beauty was a sign of fitness. Rather, he believed that the females enjoyed the males’ beauty for its own sake. Personally, I think that we should not be hasty to overexplain this behaviour with aesthetic judgements, we cannot assume that our human tendency to enjoy the ‘beautiful’ extends to birds and even insects. In peacocks, scientists have found that aesthetic factors as seemingly frivolous as tail symmetry are linked to environmental and genetic stress, providing potential mates with valuable information. This research suggests that even some of nature’s most beautiful animals are not motivated by straightforward aesthetics.

Congo, on the other hand, appeared to genuinely care about how his paintings looked. In a review of a Congo exhibition, art critic Waldemar Januszczek found it notable that the artist’s brush never shoots off the edge of the paper or blends colours into an unattractive muddiness. Congo was even said to have had favourite colours, preferring to paint with reds over blues.

Whatever the judgement, animal artists like Congo continue to capture the public imagination. The well-respected Mayor gallery in London exhibited 55 of the chimp’s paintings as recently as 2019. To enthusiasts, animal art is like gaining an insight into the secret inner world of a being with whom you can never otherwise communicate. To detractors it perhaps cheapens the definition of art, surely an animal could never compete with the emotion and aesthetic intent of the human artistic process?

However, I think that the aesthetic imperfection of true, animal-created artthose crude yet promising suggestions of selfexpression through symmetry, shape, and colour - is part of its appeal. Because there is something captivating about the idea of animals creating art, of creatures transcending the boundaries between species and doing what is, essentially, communication in its simplest form. After witnessing the creation of the famous Split Fan Pattern with Central Black Spot, Desmond Morris said that watching Congo paint “was like witnessing the birth of art”. To whatever extent animals can be said to be capable of creating art, the results are certainly fascinating to look at.