“Creativity is what happens when the intellect stops working and intuition starts playing.”

 I think of intellect and intuition as two very different functions of the mind. The intellect works out schemes and plans. It is a decision making and judgement faculty based on logic and reasoning. It is good at organization, observation, and calculation in a discipled mind.

But it is not very good at creativity. Creativity depends on other things that are not as obvious and concrete as details, facts, and palpable results. However, many artists work at their craft completely from their intellect, making works based on logic and reasoning, traditions and schools of thought and president from art history. This is a perfectly fine approach but it is not necessarily creative work because unknowns have been pruned out of the process.

Intuition and creativity depend on the ability to have flow and faith. Faith is a quality you have when you take a step into uncertainty, into the unknown and have no idea where the next step after that will take you. In the arts, this ability to step out onto an unknown path toward an unknown objective is where those with the innocence of children and the confidence of the masters tread. This is a path illuminated by intuitive knowing that allows us to navigate where no map has yet been drawn.

When in a state of creative exploration, one must be willing to suspend judgement and calculation and just feel one’s way into a new territory. At first it will be a tentative and clumsy adventure and one might not have the honed skills or the right tools but, through the process of expeditionary peregrination of this unknown, we will soon domesticate it through our imagination and insight for our creative uses.

This kind of creative activity will then allow us to be able to apply techniques of the intellect in order for us to judge, refine and articulate what we have discovered in the creative hinterlands of our own imagination. This exploratory process is often the source for an artist’s body of creative works.

The difficulty for professional artists is the mercurial nature of creativity. Once the explorer’s curiosity is aroused, and one has gained a footing, one will often wish to stay in that mode and have no desire to return from the wilderness and for good reason. For most artists, the creative quest is the point of being an artist in the first place. But, like all explorers, there is also the need for provision.

This is where the intellect kicks back in, to balance the mind and help keep one’s feet on the ground, so to speak. If one is a working artist, which is to say, needs to derive provision from one’s creative passion, then the intellect is the main tool for figuring out how to create works that can be taken to market. To blend one’s intellectual judgement with one’s intuitive discoveries is the balance that allows an artist to complete the circle.

Journal Entry: Sunday, September 18, 2022