Philippa Stanton’s Conscious Creativity is filled with beautiful images and offers many daily practices and other exercises to develop and deepen your creativity. The focus of the exercises is to see the world mindfully, and more meaningfully. I summarise the themes of each chapter below, but not the exercises.
To begin, Stanton asks you to identify what sort of creative person you are. Through this, you can continue to develop yourself within that path, or alternately you can work to change the sort of creative person you are. Creativity is a practice, and must be worked at. Doing things you aren’t good at or don’t like is often more beneficial that doing the things you are good at or enjoy. Considering and understanding your aesthetic preferences is as important as knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Stanton encourages the creative seeker to develop structure and good habits in their creative practice. Freedom from time pressures is key to creativity. Boredom can provide the space and motivation for creativity. In contrast, comparing yourself to others can be paralysing, especially if they are doing the same thing you’re doing. You need to have a clear sense of who you are. You will fear and experience failure and rejection. This is the reality of creative progression. But failure is part of the creative process, not the end of the process. You will need to find a way to sustain your excitement and enthusiasm and manage your fears. Creative burnout will occur at some point. When that occurs, take some time out to rest and recover, make some changes to your routine, and assess your habits. “Your creative muse has probably been starved of stimulation and any genuine excitement has vanished”, so you will need to feed yourself.
Looking is integral to creativity. Curiosity and observation feed creative ideas. Never lose your curiosity. Stanton introduces the idea of lateral looking, in which a person tries not just to see the patterns they normally see, but to be as open as possible to what is there. It is important to document your observations and ideas. Collect and organise them every day in an allocated space, in whatever form you like, whether in hard or digital form, or even in a blog. Observe texture, colour, your own sensory responses and the atmosphere, light and shadow, shapes, forms, and patterns, and composition. Cultivate this heightened level of visual engagement, and you will begin to truly see the colour in your surroundings and appreciate the “emotional and logical language of colour”. Synesthesia, “a merging of the senses”, is not available to everyone, but this sensory mixing and overlapping can lead to important discoveries in your creative work. Pay attention also the imperfections or irregularities in your context, and accept the impermanence of your surroundings, and your existence.
Allowing yourself to do nothing is important too. Going about your everyday routine, boring though it might be, can be helpful for the creative process. In doing nothing you might find the something you can focus on, and taking a break from the creative project can help you find a way forward with it. Invoking atmosphere through your work requires spending time with observations and with the feelings those observations evoke. The best way to bring atmosphere into your work is to have personal experience of it. Light and shadow influence atmosphere, so look for and collect shadows. Take notice of what shadows do to the light, shapes, and colours in and around them. Finally, good composition is important for art. Stanton offers a simple checklist for composition. Do learn the rules of form and composition, but do not let that limit your self-expression. It is best to “arrive at composition through genuine interest, experimentation and experience”. Find your piece’s composition at your own pace. You can practise and experiment with composition by ordering objects in different ways. This will also enhance your observational skills.
You can find Stanton's colourful website here, and her colourful instagram here. Features a beautiful Siamese cat.
There is also a Conscious Creativity: The Workbook.
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