Chapter 1 of potential hindrances to our creative development
*00I: The best artists are those who can draw/paint/make something accurately.*
Remember back in elementary school (and junior high, high school, even now maybe?) how the best artists/creative geniuses in the class were considered to be the students who could draw/make a thing that looked most accurately like the thing? Remember how they were/are loved, admired and celebrated for their much coveted gift? (Or maybe you are the gifted one and struggle with the downsides of that) I’m not saying this shouldn’t be celebrated. I mean, mimicry is a legit fascination. A talking bird continues to astound me let alone a child in diapers who can play Mozart. Even a child’s first word is a marvel. It’s not the imitation itself that’s problematic. It’s our cultural and personal perception that tends to muddle.
It’s no surprise that mirroring comes pretty naturally to us. We’re even equipped with what science calls mirror neurons (that were, curiously, one of those serendipitous human discoveries). Makes sense; as most of our learning to survive and beyond involves imitation of such things as language, gestures, civil behaviour, uncivil behaviour… and I’m pretty grateful for all of the discoveries we’ve been able to copy and then build upon. So while I am about to lay out some limitations to our imitation tendency, I would like to cool any resistance out there with the assurance that I will eventually be following with something regarding its unlimiting potential.
But first:
In what way could imitation limit our creativity?
Well, for one, if we see the respect, love, and recognition of others that comes through accurate depiction and then compare ourselves to this one criteria, there’s a good chance we may decide we are not artists and therefore are not creative (throwing up one of those forcefields I’ve mentioned). I would say that the majority of the people I meet in a classroom fall into this limiting cognition. Sadly, 5 year olds included. It doesn’t help that our early attempts at creativity have been educationally-institutionally defined and assessed as accuracy failings (so many of us have some story of feeling scorned by some perceived art authority’s personal judgement).
Francis Ford Coppola’s film based on S.E. Hinton’s novel, The Outsiders
Another detriment comes from having gained the creds and admiration for being a solid copier artist (for anyone out there who has been secretly or openly jealous of these individuals, I’d like to point to what Cherry said to Ponyboy in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders: “Things are rough all over.”) If such an individual has been bestowed with such a cultural projection of value, he or she may never risk going beyond basic copy work or craft- a cruxier barrier, in my opinion. Imagine (or perhaps you are able to relate): If I have identified my artistic/creative self-worth with my ability to mimic awesomely, what are the odds I would abandon all of this success to try something personally expressive or impulsive that may not be understood or accepted? Okay, maybe I wouldn’t want to. Maybe I find all that I need in my craft (what I like to call, ‘trophy art’). But if I did want to know more about the mystery of creative expression, how would I go about letting go of all of the easy and clearly defined conditioning, expectation and judgement?
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble.
It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”
–JOSH BILLINGS