I just finished reading The Bee and the Acorn, Paula Wallace’s memoir which told about how she started SCAD almost forty years ago. I found myself completely immersed in the book, reigniting the very reason I thrived at SCAD and the reason I had the audacity to start my company at age 22, the basis of all innovation, the source of all things great and beautiful.. Creativity. Now… according to Google, creativity means “the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.” Now us SCAD artists were taught that this definition is somewhat…well false. Paula Wallace taught us through her vision, that creativity is a dynamic entity that is expanded by new and existing ideas that correlate directly with the space around us and how it affects our senses as humans. Art is personal, cultural, emotional, physical, and is all based on perception.
My accessory design professor once drew a box, a square rather, on the board and then asked students to go to the board and draw an apple. Out of this huge 15 feet long board, the student would always go up and draw the apple inside the square. Now having seen him do this before, I was looking specifically for the student to do this, and they always did. His purpose was to teach us to draw outside of the box, think outside of the box. (I even have a shirt that says think outside and looks a little like the background in the picture I have posted here.)Another one of my professors even had us go outside one day and paint the leaves on a tree just to explore the difference between installation art and preexisting art. I have done many many art projects over the years, from painting a purple plastic lizard to blend in with my purple paint I had to mix myself for color theory class, to cutting and layering white paper in different shapes inside of a box to create a 3d space of light and shadows, balance and composition. What I have learned in my life thus far, is that creativity makes life easier to understand, and for us artists, essential to expressing our ideas, thoughts, and our meaning of words. For me, my creativity happens to be in materials, leather specifically, shape, space, and a complete entity, in which everything is encompassing, thus my brand.
So what is art... what is creativity and why do we have this need and want to have it in our life? I would love some comments below!
A friend once asked me why I don't make five of the same bag and sell one in five different stores. Well, I told him, "each bag is a piece of creativity, to mass produce is to loose all creativity." I will continue to stand by that no matter what.