The Painting I Never Forgot

Painting was one of my favourite hobbies during summer vacations at school. There was one particular painting I was very proud of. I painted sunlight filtering through tall trees in the woods. Staring at it transported me into another world. It was an impressionist-style painting. I lost the art piece in between moving houses, but the picture of it is still fresh in my mind. Above is an AI impression of what it looked like — pretty close.

As an art aficionado, seeing landscape paintings triggers memories of my youthful talents. Funny thing is, while I really enjoyed painting, writing, poetry, and embroidery, I struggled with some other creative subjects at design school. And I didn’t know why. I wasn’t able to transfer my innate artistic creativity to some aspects of designing. I thought to myself, “But if you’re creative in general, it applies to everything, right?” Wrong. There are many different types of creativity, and different environments activate them.

We All Are Born to Create

Environment – the key to vault of creativity

For one, it’s freeing. If you believe in God, then you may be aware of the theory that we were created in the likeness of God. We like to create because God creates.

As a creator and amateur artist, I often got comments like, “Wow, that’s so creative, I could never do that.” I found that hard to believe because I think it’s really about tapping into that creative section of your mind. What I didn’t know was the how. My artistry as a youth came as a result of a happy, accidental mix of environment matching my psychological makeup. I believe people who don’t feel creative, or who feel it in some areas but not others, are definitely capable of it — they just haven’t found what gets their creative juices flowing.

Your Soul’s Stamp on the world

There is another aspect that impels the creator to create: the urge to express themselves. Expression through any art or skill is essentially an extension of our personality. It is like putting a stamp of our personality in the living world. That external, tactile manifestation of our personality and skills feels good.

Defy the Critics, Create with Courage

A third aspect of expression is courage. The courage to express yourself regardless of what people think or may say. Last year, a portrait of Australian mining mogul Gina Rinehart was put up in the National Gallery of Australia. Let’s just say it was less than flattering. The entitled industrialist ‘ordered’ that the painting be taken off display. The art gallery stayed put in its decision to keep it. It supported the artist’s free expression over capitalistic entitlement and arrogance. This was a great display of courage from both the artists as well as the Board of the NGA.

Watching Mission Impossible movies, I’m always amazed at Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise’s) stunts, but also his extremely creative problem-solving and daring execution. You need courage to be creative.

History’s Secret Creativity Hacks

There’s a long history of artists and inventors using interesting techniques for inspiration. Have you heard about Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí’s creativity hack? He used to deliberately fall asleep on a body chair, holding a set of heavy metal keys in his hand as his arm dangled over a metal plate. As he drifted to sleep, his grip loosened and the keys would fall, clanging on the metal plate and waking him up abruptly just as he entered the hypnagogic state, a short dream phase at the onset of sleep. This micro-nap sparked creative inspiration, which he immediately captured on canvas.

Modern scientific research supports this theory, showing that N1 sleep, the first stage of non-REM sleep, boosts creativity and problem solving. This technique was also used by scientist and inventor Thomas Edison and classical composer Beethoven.

Wrong soil, Right soil

What makes us creative in one space and a brick in another? Studies showthat our creative juices flow best in environments that align with our physiological and environmental needs. Conversely, spaces, people, and environments that are not matched with our needs will stifle our creative flow. In short, they’re the wrong soil.

We often think of creativity as restricted to art — painting, writing, music, dance. Whether you notice it or not, we’re always using creativity to resolve issues, big and small, in daily life. Maybethe reason we don’t notice it is because we’re having fun doing it. Albert Einstein famously said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

Creativity also stems from necessity. You may have heard the famous saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Knowledge can be transferred, but creative innovation is our USP. It cannot be bought or replicated. Ideas can be plagiarised, yes, but not the ability to come up with good ones.

If you feel like a brick when it comes to creativity or creative problem-solving, the good news is that it can be cultivated.

The more I explored this idea, the more I realised that creativity is not one single trait. It is a set of different capacities that show up differently in different domains. That is why someone can be deeply creative in one area and feel blocked in another. The issue is often not the absence of creativity, but the mismatch between the creative task and the conditions around it.

Ignite the Spark You Already Have

Creativity can be cultivated. What I’m calling a creative-environment framework is the idea that different forms of creativity come alive in different settings. In other words, the right environment can make certain creative capacities easier to access and express. According to creative-environment framework, there are 10 different aspects of an environment that spark different kinds of creative thinking. When you match your creative domain to a conducive environment, your creativity goes through the roof. In a studio full of colour and paintings, you start thinking, feeling, talking, and flowing like a painter. Move to a meeting room with whiteboards and project tools, and you start thinking like a planner and strategist.

The idea that creativity can be cultivated from scratch got me really excited. Upon diving a bit deeper into Creative-environment framework, I created a table of the type of creativity you want to cultivate, the domain of your work, art, or project, and the environment that activates it most. Below is a one-page ready reckoner.

Creativity x Environment Framework

Eye-openers and Realisations

Going through this table gave me a couple of happy revelations. I realised that essay writing and story writing are different: one is an arc that spans imaginary time, the other is an argument of persuasion. I’m not a story writer, naturally. I’m an essayist.

For me, reading anything written by Will Durant heightens my internal register and the quality of my thoughts, and hence, the writing. I also realised that automatic selfhood cannot examine itself. The presence of others activates my social self — the performed, role-appropriate version of a person. That is a mismatch for Self-work because you keep arriving as a familiar version of yourself, with no space for exploration or self-enquiry.

I leave you with this main thought: creativity can definitely be cultivated. And perhaps more importantly, it does not always look the same in every person or every space. If you explore the table, like me, you may discover that your creative elements span more than one domain. That realisation alone can be freeing, because it means the task is not to force creativity, but to recognise the many ways it already lives within us. I, for one, am excited to keep exploring and fine-tuning the different creative elements and spaces in my life. How about you?