Creativity

Everyone uses the word. Everyone feels that intuitively, they know what "creativity" means. Everyone also knows that it is a highly desirable quality to possess. Yet the definition of creativity is not so easy. The Oxford English Dictionary succinctly puts it as "The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness." Wikipedia gets broader in concepts: "' the production of novel, useful products' (Mumford, 2003, p. 110). Creativity can also be defined 'as the process of producing something that is both original and worthwhile' or 'characterized by originality and expressiveness and imaginative'." The article goes on to add that there are countless other versions of definitions.

Of course, in the art arena, creativity is deemed indispensable if the artist is in any way to be successful. Yet, as we all know, there are so many versions of artistic expression that most are considered creative only by a few viewers. Only the truly exceptional are heralded by most people, and until very recently, the culture of each country also played a part in the degree of appreciation of the work created.

What set me off thinking about the concept of creativity was a wonderful expression I read in a marvellous new book, "The Churchill Factor" by Boris Johnson (Mayor of London Boris Johnson). Discussing Winston Churchill's amazing abilities, particularly in the World War II period, Johnson says, "he (Churchill) also had the zigzag streak of lightning in the brain that makes for creativity."

It is so often just that aspect, the "zigzag streak of lightning in the brain", that allows for unorthodox approaches, solutions that come out of left field, images configured in a wholly novel way, vivid writing that none else has achieved.

In art, for instance, every generation has had truly creative people who have broken out of the mould and done things differently. The Renaissance was full of artists - think, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer, Titian - developing linear perspective, depicting landscape in naturalistic fashion, executing portraits of people in realistic fashion, modelling with light and shade. Later generations perfected oil painting, shifted the focus of Western art to Mannerism - such as Tintoretto or El Greco.  Then the Baroque artists flourished, like Caraveggio, Rubens or Rembrandt, and on the artists marched. Look at some samples of the different ways artists worked down the centuries.

Virgin of the Rocks, 1483-1486, Leonardo_da_Vinci_- (Image courtesy of the Louvre)

Bacchus and Ariadne, Titian, 1520-23, (Image courtesy of The National Gallery, London)

St. Martin and the Beggar, 1597-99, oil on canvas, El Greco, (Image courtesy of the Widener Collection, National Gallery, Washington)

Portrait of Susanna Lunden(?) ('Le Chapeau de Paille') probably 1622-5, Peter Paul Rubens, (Image courtesy of the National Gallery, London)

By the 19th century, art needed some more innovatively creative artists and the Impressionists came to the fore, with Manet, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro leading the way. Creativity certainly flourished with Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne, as they laid the groundwork for 20th century artists to find entirely new paths to follow in creating art in tune with their tumultuous century.

Tahitian Woman with a Flower, Paul Gauguin, 1891 (Image courtesy of NY Carlsberg Glyptotek)

Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (c. 1887), Paul Cezanne, (Image courtesy of Courtauld Institute of Art)

Perhaps another aspect of creativity as it zigzags through the human brain is that it very often has, as a springboard, the social and cultural context of the time. To me, creativity is partly a spontaneous phenomenon arising in some wonderfully imaginative human mind, but it is also like a seed that has been planted in soil fertile and well watered enough for the seed to germinate, grow and flourish so that others see and appreciate it.

Only when Churchill was at the helm during World War II could his multifaceted creativity flower so successfully as he led his country out of peril and to victory in 1945. In the artistic world, the Leonardo da Vincis, Titians or El Grecos needed the powerful patrons of the land and Church to enable to give successful expression to their creative skills.

Later artists have had a harder time finding patrons and supporters to allow them to create and to live decently, a situation known to most artists at one point or another. And does creativity flourish as fully and successfully when the artist is worrying about the next meal or the next rent payment? In every field, from art to architecture to engineering or technology, the same considerations pertain - how to ensure the optimum conditions so that human creativity can flourish. In truth, our collective future depends in large part on that zigzag flash of creativity in the human brain.

Painting the Atlantic Ocean

I have been reading Simon Winchester's book on the Atlantic and found it interesting to read what he wrote about this mighty ocean being the subject of paintings.  It started me thinking of paintings I have seen in museums which depict maritime scenes. Then, of course, there is the distinction to be made of where exactly is the body of water that each artist shows.

Think, for instance, of all the wonderful Impressionist painters' works showing the sea off the Normandy coast of France.  Is one being purist in defining those maritime scenes as of the English Channel, rather than the Atlantic? Eugene Boudin with his base at Honfleur, Monet, Manet, Courbet, Pissarro, Sisley - they all gravitated to the Normandy coast from the 1860s onwards. Their paintings show the sea in its many moods - sparkling, like Monet's wonderful

Manneporte Etretat, February 1883, Claude Monet,

(Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Gustave Courbet studied the power of the waves at Etretat too, but his paintings show the darker moods of the sea. In 1869, he did two paintings of

The Wave, 1870, Gustave Courbet, (Image courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie)

There was, of course, endless experimentation amongst artists working on the French coast. By 1885, Seurat was treating the sea very differently. This is his English Channel at Grandcamp.

English Channel at Grandcamp, Georges Seurat, (Image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Gauguin perhaps painted the Atlantic more directly, during his stays in Brittany in the 1880s.  Based in Pont Aven and at Le Pouldu, he painted feverishly, both looking to the green Breton lands and out to sea, the ever-changing Atlantic.

Seascape with cow/At the edge of the cliff, 1888, Paul Gauguin, (Image courtesy of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris)

Rochers au bord de la Mer, 1886, Paul Gauguin, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of Goteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden)

However, earlier artists had depicted the sea, further north in what is perhaps even less the true Atlantic Ocean and more the North Sea. During the 17th century, when the Dutch were consolidating their mastery of the sea, their artists were celebrating the many moods of ocean and shore.

(‘Fishermen on Shore Hauling in their Nets,’ c.1640, Julius Porcellis, Oil on panel, 393-by-546mm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK).

Willem van der Velde, both father and son, were also famed both in Holland and England, for their maritime scenes, in which naval engagements were often depicted.  Both showed a knowledge of the Atlantic and the North Sea, but again, it is, I suspect, often hard to distinguish where the divide between Atlantic and adjacent waters exists in the art.

Three Ships in a Gale, W. van der Welde, 1673 (Image courtesy of The National Gallery, London)

Small Dutch Vessel close-hauled in a Strong Breeze. W. van der Velde, circa 1672.  (Image courtesy of The National Gallery, London)

However, by the 18th century and the era of great voyages of exploration (think Captain James Cook on the HMS Endeavour, with Sidney Parkinson as the official artist on board during the 1768-71 voyage, or the  much later, famous 1831-35 circumnavigation of the globe by the HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin as naturalist and Augustus Earle as artist), maritime art had widened its scope.  It was not just the Atlantic Ocean that was now well known, but the other great bodies of water around the globe.

Nonetheless, J.M.W. Turner, in some of his great sea paintings, looked back to Williem van der Velde the Younger.  In his amazing use of light, gave the feeling of the ocean new and dazzling interpretations. In the painting of the Slave Ship, based on anti-slavery poetry,Turner depicted the slavers disposing of dead and dying slaves before an impending storm.

The Slave Ship,  J.M.W. Tuner, oil on canvas, 1840, (Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

By the mid-19th century, many sailors knew first hand of the fury of hurricanes and typhoons. On the Western/American side of the North Atlantic, artists were also beginning to address marine painting.  One of the first was Massachusetts-born Fitz Hugh Lane, (1804-1865), known as a Luminist painter and a most successful exponent of the Atlantic as seen from the New England coast. 

Brace's Rock, Gloucester, MA, circa 1864, Fitz Hugh Lane (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Other famed exponents of the Atlantic include Winslow Homer.  His most acclaimed marine paintings date from the 1890s, when he was living some seventy-five feet from the water in Prout's Neck, Maine.  Like so many artists, he was fascinated by the power of waves crashing on rugged coastlines.

Sunlight on the Coast, 1890, Winslow Homer (Image courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art)

Today, we artists have a wonderful heritage to which to refer when we think of paintings of the mighty Atlantic Ocean.  There are countless artists working today along the coastlines of North and South America, Western Europe and Africa, for the power of the ocean summons us all.