thinking about the creative process
I've been reading and thinking about the creative process a lot lately. I just finished watching an awesome conversation between David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell on creative process. They discuss an idea where there are two types of creative processes: that of the architect and that of the gardener. (Well, I guess they included a third, they gave the musician Paul Simon a category of his own.)
The architect has everything planned out ahead of time, imagining and planning the finished project before starting to build (or write, or paint, or make music) and the gardener doesn't really know what the end will look like when she begins.
It got me thinking of this book I started making in 2020 and finished in 2021. It started as a way to cope with all the frightening headlines and the stress during those days.
I had planned to cut some things out of the newspaper and magazines in a kind of effort to document what we were living through. I like to document things and life during the pandemic seemed like something worth documenting. I found a great picture of a t-shirt in a catalog and inserted it into the cover of a Field Notes "Vignette" edition notebook I had on my shelf and got started.
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I started with some dry-transfer letters on the first page. I don't think they even make dry-transfer letters anymore, but I inherited a stack of them from my dad the year before and decided to use them. (If you remember them and want to see a great online collection of them, go to https://instantlettering.com. Oh my gosh, I'm such a geek.)
And so I got started. I rubbed a whole page of letters onto the next page and when I was done (or maybe while I was doing it) I decided I would try to create the whole book without a single mark of my own writing.
First of all, I loved that some of the letters didn't transfer cleanly and the whole thing looked a bit messy. That seemed to set the right mood for a reflection on 2020. (Those transfer sheets were probably 50 years old by the time I got my hands on them.) I did a lot of clipping, taping, pasting, and dry-transferring and created this little book. I learned a lot while trying to express myself within the constraints of not making a mark with my own hand. It turned out nothing like I had imagined at the start. I just sort of let it evolve. So I guess I'm a gardener.
In that conversation between Epstein and Gladwell, Gladwell says, "...I think that you discover so much in the process of doing something that all you really have to do is start." Yes, I'm definitely a gardener. Many of my projects turn into something else while I'm making them. So I just have to start.
If you decide to follow the link to the conversation between those two guys, give yourself some time: it's a 50 minute video, but they talk about this idea much more eloquently than I can manage.
Keep on gardening. Or architecting. Or if you're lucky enough to be in the Paul Simon camp, keep doing that. Whatever your style, keep on.
And as always, thanks for being here.
