How to be creative? — My first year as a full-time artist

Creativity is a highly demanded soft skill in employees, and in a job interview, most people would say that they’re “creative” to get the job. However, in real life, many people I meet feel like they’re not really creative, or rather that they don’t have the right to call themselves that.

As an artist, you’re probably perceived as a creative person. As a controller, on the other hand, people might judge that you’re not. I claim that there is no difference. I believe that every person is creative, even if often untrained. I also claim that people choose to label themselves “uncreative”, because “being creative” comes with some sort of output that demands responsibility, and responsibility is scary.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines creativity as: “The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.”

What’s an original idea anyways? The truth is that a lot of creative output isn’t very original. Most of the time new ideas are merely a combination of two or more impulses that individually existed before. The originality lies in the symbiosis thereof. So if I could, I would rewrite the definition of creativity to:

“The use of imagination, courage and responsibility to discover a new form within or from existing material.”

Because, creativity is a lot more than “creating something”. For me, creativity is a combination of:

• Observation: Creativity requires looking and listening in order to understand what is already there.
• Thinking: Creativity is finding solutions to problems. It’s repurposing, using tools in a way they were not meant to be used.
• Choices: Creativity means making choices. In my job it’s choices on forms, colors, style, technique, material, concept, message and audience.
• Doing: Creativity requires courage to do something. It’s a process of change from one state into another, and this evolution demands responsibility.

In my interview for Spotlight, I described the creative process as a puzzle factory:

“Creativity is changing the shape of puzzle pieces while you’re trying to put them together. You don’t change their shape to make it easier, but to create something that hasn’t existed before. You keep connecting impulses until you reach the not obvious.”

The attempt to describe what goes on inside when you’re being creative

The Creativity Gym recently published the Creative Canvas which tries to identify all parts of a creative process. There are five categories: the creative engine, the building block, computing, externalization and outside noise.

When I talk about creativity, I usually obsess over the red part of the visual — the internal process. However, for the first time, this look-a-like periodic table, gives insight into what else plays a big role. I believe this is groundbreaking!

This canvas is a work in progress and The Creativity Gym will publish more details soon here.

7 Techniques on how to be creative

Now that I covered the analytical part about creativity, I want to share my way of tapping into a creative flow. I try breaking it down into steps, however, without implying that I follow it as a step-by-step tutorial every time I need to work. I usually mix it up and do what feels needed in that moment, but you can try and do all of them after one another.

• Step 1: What’s needed? A new concept, a solution to a problem or a new product? I internalize the problem. Then I let it go for a few days. I stop actively thinking about it (if the time frame allows it, ideally).
• Step 2: Observation. For new inputs. This means reading, talking to others, watching something, listening to music, visiting exhibitions and traveling. Hemmingway, in fact, did it like this:

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.

• Step 3: Movement. To get into a flow mindset, I need to switch from head to body, from thinking to feeling. I do this best by going for a walk or doing sports. It’s about movement and noticing details around me, like how my nose is cold when it’s warm outside.
• Step 4: Dismiss fear. Fear is definite stagnation. So to get rid of it, I just do something. I fill empty pages with lines, squares, triangles and circles as a warm-up technique. I sketch and accept that I might throw out half of it later. Experimentation is how development happens.
• Step 5: Feel, process, spit it out. Whatever form of expression you choose, may it be words, sounds, movements, emotions, taste or visualizations, the important thing is to get it out and get it done.
• Step 6: Discover connections. I learned to distinguish between my creation brain and my editing brain. I create, then let it go, and revisit the next day. Judgement of what is good is easier this way.
• Step 7: Time frames. Deadlines help and time off is necessary, too. For fictional deadlines (to trick myself into production mode) I use the Pomodoro technique: 25 mins of uninterrupted work and 5 minutes of break. I often skip the break but the idea of having a specific deadline helps to get the pressure and juices flowing.

What helps you feel creative?

This part you need to figure out for yourself. I personally think that emotions make work good. If you don’t feel anything, nobody else will.

Last but not least: be bold. Either you’re creative or you’re careful, but “there is no such thing as a cautious creative” (George Lois).

For more information please visit kingasgrapes.com

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Thank you for reading this. I am writing a series of articles on my first year as a full-time artist. Please leave a comment, I’m happy to read your feedback. Also, feel free to share my content, if you like it.

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KINGAS GRAPES is Kinga Jakabffy’s (*1988) artist name. She is an autodidact artist born in Austria to Hungarian immigrant parents. Her figurative art paintings and illustrations deal with the process of identity creation in social relationships starting from a point of cultural rootlessness. In collaboration with Stefan Draschan and TBWA she won the award Staatspreis 2018 for the project “People matching artworks” for Belvedere Museum. Kingas Grapes studied and worked in Sevilla and Montreal and now lives and works in Vienna, Austria.Her latest exhibitions were Miniscule 2 at Crosslane Projects in UK, Art Attech, and Junge Kunst in Vienna.