Lyle by Chuck Close
Drawn! has an interesting post about the nature vs. nuture origins of individual creativity, featuring blog posts and commentary from both sides of the fence. Since it’s an illustration blog, the focus is on drawing, but some of the arguments apply to creativity as an entity that manifests in everything from physical beauty to athletics.
If you’re a crazy person, which you most certainly are, you’ll probably enjoy the discussion.
I’ve been a “look, she’s creative” crazy person in varying doses my entire life, and most of that has exited as a compulsion to write, draw and make music. This kind of output usually goes hand-in-hand with mental frequencies like bipolar disorder (officially diagnosed at age 21), but there are two important - and infuriating - aspects about my own “inspired” outbursts that I rarely find in other people:
1. Expressing emotional conflict through rants, poems, songs, drawings, blah, etc. has never been a therapeutic process (it has always felt like embarrassingly ignorant baggage), and -
2. No matter how much I am driven to make something original, my creative compulsion does not make the final project any good.
In fact, most of the things I’ve written or made without research and information absolutely suck. It took me decades to get over this shame.
Going back to college in my mid-thirties to study art has shown me the deep, dark crevices of what I don’t know how to do. Starting at square one has already been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life, and I am thrilled with hanging on the fringes of this weird, new world. In fact, learning the most fundamental processes of drawing and design have clicked a switch in my brain and begun to fill some of those old holes in my head.
Spending a few hours every day drawing simple things, regardless of how well I draw them, is changing the way I see the world around and within me on physical, emotional and physiological levels that I never even thought to examine or consider before. I’ve thought of myself (in vague and messy terms) as a “writer” for so long that the possibility of applying the same concepts I’ve learned as a creative and professional writer to art and design might actually be more in line with the way my brain works never crossed my mind until last year.
This is still a head-scratching sensation, because I’ve neglected many opportunities to explore these things before. It took me a disgustingly long time to get my shit together as an adult, and I could not have jumped into college again without having learned how to work in the real world of corporate hand-shaking, dumb ideas and hard deadlines. I don’t have that kind of self-discipline, which is why I need the structure and formality of art school to even attempt any of this.
With one meager semester under my britches, and fifteen years of work experience on my resume, I believe that nature leads to jack shit without nurture. If you’re one of the scarce lucky motherfuckers with an innate gift and a self-propelled work ethic, or the even rarer gifted, driven and demon-free freaks, I hope you have a nicely polished pedestal to display your creations.
Get back to work.
