Artist and audience: Everyday creativity and visual art.

Abstract

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.-Joseph Chilton PearceEach of us has an enormous reservoir of creativity within ourselves. It is part of being human and provides a means of knowing ourselves and our world in new ways. Revealing inner depths we never imagined, it builds strength through resilience, helps us cope with problems, and allows us to more fully reach our potential. One way we express our creativity is through visual art. The benefits can come through making or viewing art and are available to us whether or not we are artists.This chapter, which focuses on visual art, begins by highlighting our everyday creativity, a capacity that encompasses the wide range of original and meaningful activities in our lives (Richards, 1998). Although we may not be aware of it, we are constantly creative and this capacity is fundamental to our existence. We see how this extensive creative capacity can generate abilities in more than one domain by looking at artists with multiple talents in both Eastern and Western and traditions. This will show that everyday creativity can be a path to eminence. One way this occurs is through creative activity that begins or flourishes during illness. Starting as a distraction from pain, it turned from resilience to a career, and eventually led to fame for the French painter Henri Matisse, the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, and the Canadian painter Maud Lewis.

The Effects of Psychotic Tendencies on Aesthetic Preferences of Paintings

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Will the Real Scientists Please Stand Up? Taboo Topics, Creative Risk, and Paradigm Shift

“…One can also meet the new with more enthusiasm and bravery. Creativity is notably required to be an appreciator , as well as an initiator of change (Pritzker, 2007; Richards, 2007; Zausner, 2007). Appreciation can call on creative vision, openness to alternatives, flexible adaptations to, and changes in our own lives and values.…”