On Being Creative

I’ve been delving into Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, on loan from my friend Heather (find her on Instagram: @heatherdurisart). The book is what I call a slow read, with each page imparting a message to ponder and absorb. To Rubin, “everyone is a creator”: “Creativity is not a rare ability…. We all engage in this act on a daily basis. To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before…the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture…a new route home…. we are all living as artists….”

In conversations about art—usually my art—with “nonartist” friends, acquaintances, and family members, someone will say, “I’m not creative” or “I don’t have a creative bone in my body” or something along those lines. To which I answer, “that’s not true.” Each of us expresses our creativity in our own unique way. The late Corita Kent, an artist and social justice advocate who led an amazing life and whom I just discovered, said, “Creativity belongs to the artist in each of us…. The root meaning of the word ‘art’ is ‘to fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists.” Steve Jobs echoed the same: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they really didn’t do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them….” 

Sometimes, putting our creativity on display can feel risky. What if I rearrange the furniture and my partner hates it? Move it back. What if I close the cookbook and deviate from the recipe? Life will go on. When my husband surprised me with the enormous tumbleweed, I saw a potential Christmas tree (he, a “nonartist,” did, too). But what will the neighbors say when they see my tumbleweed tree? Maybe they’ll love it. I agree with George Lois, the advertising legend best known for his dozens of Esquire magazine covers, who said, “You can be cautious or you can be creative, but there’s no such thing as a cautious creative.” And remember Rick Rubin’s truth: “we are all living as artists.” I urge you to go ahead and take the risk. Hang your painting, paint the living room pink, throw away the recipe, take the long way home, make a tumbleweed Christmas tree. As someone said in a quote attributed to many, “be the artist of your own life.”