Using Conscious Creativity to Help me Live a Creative Life
Conscious Creativity by Philippa Stanton has helped me explore what it means to be a creative.
Understanding Creativity
I have known for many years that creativity is hugely important to me, it gives me joy and enhances my life. My blog Changing Pages was born out of a need to be creative. But it is only recently, I have considered myself to be a creative person.
When I was younger if I had been asked what creativity was I would have equated it with drawing, and painting, or perhaps pottery or another traditional craft. Significantly I also have believed you had to be good at art to be creative. I enjoyed art at school but never believed I had any talent and certainly had no confidence in my ability. It has taken me a long time to realise it isn’t necessary to be able to draw or create a masterpiece to be a creative person.
This sounds obvious, but it was my stumbling block. It stopped me from being brave enough to try anything ‘creative for many years’
Understanding creativity is more than art in its purest form has been a breakthrough for me in my creative life. It has helped me recognise that my writing, cooking, baking, photography and various attempts at watercolour, calligraphy, embroidery, (the list goes on) are all part of being creative. These are all things I enjoy and attempt with various degrees of success. I am a visual person. I have always loved colour and pattern, and creating things is a natural extension of this.
Consciously Finding Creativity
As an adult, expressing myself through writing has become increasingly important to me, and is part of the fabric of my daily life. When I worked full time, writing was definitely my creative outlet, now writing is one of my jobs too, I realise I need to also seek other forms of creativity.
Philippa Stanton, an artist and photographer. firmly believes there is creativity in all of us we just sometimes need help discovering, or maybe rediscovering it. Her book Conscious Creativity was written with the aim of helping and inspiring the curious reader find their own creative path.
I have found this so helpful as I think about what I want my daily creativity away from writing to look like. The book opens with twenty questions to help you think about what creativity means to you. What colours, patterns and structures are important and what sparks your creativity. She then delves more deeply into ways of developing creativity through sight and sound and collecting.
Apart from being a glorious riot of colour and stunning images, the book includes exercises to help the reader develop or understand their own particular creativity. Philippa suggests things such as going for a walk and finding just one colour to concentrate on that day, and taking photos of everything you see in that colour.
Her broad perspective on what creativity is, how it can be honed and the importance of being open and conscious of everything around us as a potential trigger for creativity has been really helpful. I know that my creativity can be stimulated by a podcast, through conversation, reading something in a book or online, or visiting an art gallery or museum. Sometimes it might just be from a walk through London. In fact walking through London never fails to inspire my creativity.
This book has helped me validate my own identity as a creative whilst opening me up to further exploration of how I can develop my own creativity by using some of the techniques in the book.
My blog is Changing Pages
