Coming to “Terms” with Creativity

Intuitively, it might not be easy to understand that the creative process of an artist is also an explorative one. But, bringing something into existence requires being able to imagine experiencing it first. In this instance, the imagination serves as an unmapped territory for the artist to explore. The objects residing in this territory are often familiar. Yet, the artists exploration of their relationships and/or transformations will often lead to the discovery of a configuration that is unfamiliar. This discovery is initially quite exciting and may bring the artist a great deal of pleasure. But as the exploration continues, and the artist is able to understand the new discovery better, familiarity will lead to restlessness which will ultimately push the artist to move on to new territory. This pattern of exploration and discovery leading to comprehension in turn leading to further exploration aligns closely with Jürgen Schmidhuber’s theory of creativity[2] which serves as the part of the impetus for this current research project.