Artists know how to manage ideas. There’s a misconception that they’re airy-fairy people who daydream through life, waiting for inspiration to appear, floating along wherever the muse takes them.
In fact, they provide a model of how to frame creativity and move it into form.
For ‘creativity’ read ‘ideas’. What do you do with your ideas?
Do you put them into action?
Or do they stay in your mind, in your imagination, concepts of what could be?
If so, look to artists for your inspiration.
Artists establish the structure they’ll work within before they begin anything…be it the large canvas, the sonata form, the sonnet. And the structure is at the service of the idea – it holds the creativity, it doesn’t dominate it.
Do we not find freedom along the guiding lines of discipline?
Yehudi Menuhin
At each step of the creative process the artist constructs a framework to carry the results of their creative endeavour. Without it, the creativity – the ideas – will come to nothing.
The balance between structure and creativity is as vital to the process
as the balance between consonance and dissonance, conflict and resolution, light and shade
are essential to the work itself.
If you have an idea, create the structures to hold it. And then pour your creativity into them.
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