Creative Bulletin n.292
I took this photo last month while visiting the Fundação de Serralves in Porto. It’s a piece by William Kentridge. What really struck me was the idea of drawing directly over the pages of a book: I’d love to try something similar for the cover of the manual I’m working on.
The movements of creativity. This past week has been intense. Every morning I work on the new manual about creativity (still no title), and every afternoon I’m trying to put together a course, also on creativity.
It’s like a maddening dance. One day, I try to build a clear, linear framework that makes sense and can be followed. The next day, I realize it’s not working—or not enough—so I tear it all down and follow a flow of thoughts that comes out of nowhere, makes no logical sense, and yet somehow feels more true than anything I wrote before.
It’s like building a sandcastle the way you’re supposed to, only to look at it in the end and feel just horrified enough to smash it down and start over—this time, letting it be wild and alive.
But that second movement couldn’t exist without the first.
How does creativity even work? And how can I help others experience it? These are the questions that have been really weighing on me. I know some people want a method (honestly, sometimes I wish I had one too!), but how do I explain why that artwork caught my attention? Or why that idea for a book showed up, and not some other one?
I don’t know. No one does.
You just have to trust those movements when they come and not interrupt them.
Maybe that’s what needs to be taught: how not to stop them.
🌈 Creative takeaway: dreaming, and inviting others into our dream
What if there’s another kind of movement, more like dreaming? Like slipping into a different reality, chasing a note only we can hear. You catch a story, or catch sight of an artwork, or an object, or even an entire company. And then you realize you can’t go back and say, “Come! Come see!” because it was just a dream.
So you do your best to show them anyway. You try to recall the details, the tastes, the sounds, and put them down on the page.
That, too, is a movement of creativity.
With ❤️,
Matteo
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