Richly Wills tends to focus on the importance of creative ingenuity, our problem-solving capacity. However, that’s not to say the other type of creativity that we all possess isn’t useful in unlocking ideas and solutions too. It is also the more emotionally led side of our creativity and allows us to express ourselves and show more empathy through co-creation.

Art has often been desired through the ages. Besides it becoming big business it also helps tell stories of cultures, beliefs, emotions, and hardships.

If a picture tells a thousand words, a painting tells a thousand emotions.

Richly Wills

How Our Senses Awaken Through Artistic Creativity

When we travel around to different places what captivates our attention?

It’s often the senses, the feelings and emotions of the environment. We don’t go to dark back-alleys (yet, even that has a story to tell), we go to the places that tend to draw the most awe-inspiring reactions – the places of beauty or of incredible wonder.

We taste foods from around the world with so much flavour and creative inspiration. We design products and buildings to be inviting, comfortable, to be aesthetically pleasing to our senses, yet also sustainable and functional to a purpose.

We write music that evokes emotion, that helps us express our joy, sadness, or hope. Both music and art have a healing quality to them. For years before art therapy and music therapy became a mainstream tool, we long found solace in losing ourselves from the stresses of life in painting a picture or listening to sounds. They soothe our senses.

We even strengthen our memories through nostalgic recollection when we hear a song or see a setting that reminds us of a certain time in our lives.

Art is very much associated with our emotions and senses, and our senses are like a window into our past, into our memories, but are also a window into our future. We imagine and create from our surrounding stimulus, and if our senses are firing then our electrical connections being wired.

If you want a secret to being creative then it is simply to get in touch with your senses!

What Happens When We Aren’t Expressing Our Creativity?

When we are boxed in or in mindless routines our creativity dwindles. We feel depressed when we are stuck in the same place.

Why?

We often think it is because we simply need to be free to wander and not feel like a caged animal, and you’d be right. Yet, the underlying reason is that we feed off stimulus to boost our electrical connections in our mind.

When we have less stimulus around us then our minds tend to lose connections. We can even feel ourselves become less smart, just like how we have no energy to think or make good decisions when we don’t sleep or eat.

When we starve ourselves of stimulus then we also feel that cloud of doubt emerge.

In today’s world, we are so used to having so much information around us. We are practically always plugged in, and even if we are stuck in the same four walls we still have the internet that allows us to see the whole world and more within the screen in front of our eyes. That’s a lot of potential stimuli, but it’s also a potentially passive form of influence that doesn’t feed our creativity but overwhelms it.

Information overload doesn’t provide us the whitespace we need to clear our thoughts and provide clarity. Yet creativity is often a messy process at first in making sense out of things. If you looked at the average creative person’s workspace it would likely fall somewhere between relatively messy and a bombsite.

Today, often our creative workspace is digitalized, but you can bet a writer has notes everywhere whilst they make sense out of the noise.

That is the point though. Creativity needs stimulus. It needs lots of noise to fire up. The key is figuring out how to process that noise.

If we have lots of noise but no creative way to express that stimulus then we feel overwhelmed. We have to act on stimulus. When we don’t we just become conditioned by what is around us and our creativity suffers.

A creative mind is not a restful mind. It is always thinking of something. You could say that having too much choice isn’t freedom, it’s paralysis, and at times that can feel the way for creative people, and that only makes it more important for a creative person to find a way to express, and somewhat offload, their thoughts.

So, creative artistry, the expression of ones thoughts and ideas, isn’t just a want for creative people, it’s a need.

Where Do Most People Fall In The Realms Of Creative Artistry?

If we don’t find a way to express our creative exploration one of two things happens.

We either go mad in feeling so stifled that we can’t express ourselves properly (like when being stuck in an office job that isn’t right for us), or we hold it in for long enough that we eventually lose the creative connections which then become dormant.

Many of us fall into the latter, a few in the former. There are those happy ones who express their creativity in natural and productive ways too, but the majority of us fall into the ‘park-it-for-later’ category.

We were likely ultra-creative as children, but over time, through years of consistent grooming and logical programming, we felt less and less creative. We were led to believe that only a few with supreme creative talents go ‘make-it’, like creativity was some kind of race to the top like a business.

We were told to grow up and get proper jobs and so forth. Then many of us did.

Yet, all this tells us is just how many people there are out there with dormant creativity in their bones. It’s dormant rather than lost because it just needs to be awoken.

Why should it be awoken?

Well, here’s ‘6 Reasons Why It Is So Important To Be Creative‘. In a nutshell, if you haven’t read that article, it’s even more important to be creative today than it was before.

Why Is It Important To Express Our Artistic Creativity?

Fostering creativity through art might seem to some like a simple, fun way to pass the time, but there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.

It’s not about actually trying to become a good artist as such. That’s entirely subjective anyway.

There have been 6-year-old child paintings that have ‘sold’ for as much as an established adult artist, and artists tend to become rich when they are dead because the nostalgia and senses side of art kicks in more then, so people become more likely to want a piece of something that now isn’t going to be produced again.

Putting the monetary value of art aside, what about the human value of art?

When we join art classes or find other ways to artistically express ourselves we develop emotionally, as well as mentally and even socially in some instances. Art can bring people together, it can change the way we look at something as it can provoke emotions in people.

It also feeds into the other type of creativity. When we are more artistic our chances of being a better creative problem-solver also increase. We only have to look at Da Vinci to see this in a heighten sense.

We too often think of art as meaningless, the starving artist coming to mind, but that’s because we live in a world where logical factors of life like money and power dominate many people’s minds. They’ve been conditioned to think this way because they subsciously fear for their survival and art doesn’t pay the bills as securely as following logical orders does.

That doesn’t mean artistic expression is not important. Far from it.

If you really want to stand out and escape the masses in the rat race then being even more logical won’t help you, but being able to see things with a different perspective from what others can see and being able to (thus problem-solve more efficiently) will.

Plus, you become far less likely to ‘chase’ things in life that simply don’t really matter.

For example, we can chase more and more comfort to shield ourselves from the feeling of insecurity. We can earn more money, buy more things in shopping therapy, hide behind our job titles, give ourselves a grand illusion that we are better and our life matters, and work towards material possessions that we end up never really enjoying as we are too busy spending our whole time working for it.

On the other hand, if we had a more flexible mind (which creative people have) then we would feel less inclined to chase, as we would value our time, energy, and relationships as more important than castle building, and also look to add something of richer value to the world we live in.

We understand that life is the process and not the product. It’s a journey and not a destination.

We might be selfish in our need for expressing ourselves creatively at times, but we do so because we are more emotionally led people in wanting to ensure we add something of value to the world. That’s the journey creative people are on.

We aren’t simply trying to take our piece of the piece to survive, we are trying to share and develop more of an abundance mentality.

Why Do Creative People Have More Of An Abundant Mentality?

Well, the answer is obvious. They ‘create’, rather than ‘destroy’. They see ways to add something to the world. Artistically this can be through a novel, song, or idea they share, but it can also be through the other form of creativity too via problem-solving to come up with a solution that is a better outcome than before.

It may look like when an innovatively creative person highlights a problem to solve they are being more scarce in their mindset but they aren’t really pessimistic at all, they are rather optimists seeking to create something better by seeing the problems that exist (or will exist).

It’s our ability to visualize what we want to see in the world that epitomizes our abundant mentality. We aren’t happy with what there is, we have a need to create and express more, and we think there’s plenty of room for that to happen.

The Benefits Of Applying Artistic Creativity

When we are kids we don’t think we are learning when we go to art class. We think it’s a good time, a welcome break from other classes like history or math. Yet, we are.

We are silently developing our motor neuron skills.

We are actually learning math too, we just might not realize it. We count colors and code and piece together connections that make up a picture. Yet, it’s not the typical boring algebra lesson, it feels fun.

It’s an opportunity to develop self-confidence as we release dopamine and we make mistakes freely without constant feedback or criticism of what the right answer should be.

Sure, history delves into facts, but why should science, math, English and so forth be so logic and fact based? Why teach it as such?

When we think of the brightest engineers they have to be creative in how they come up with new discoveries through math and science. They are not pure logic. Sure the physics runs by order and rules, but our discovery runs by creative exploration.

We clearly need both, logic and creativity, yet in school, we often heavily weighed on the logic side, simply so it could be graded easier, but it doesn’t help people grow up to be adaptable thinkers, and it is why many are not.

When we are free to explore subjects with the mindset of an artists we feel free to make mistakes, make new connections, and to invent new ways of thinking. This is fundamentally important to our development.

How Artistic Creativity Helped Prisoners Turn Into Reformed Characters

It is why when art therapy was brought into some prisons that reoffending went down dramatically.

People who had lost their way for whatever reason found some hope and value. They weren’t judged when they were simply allowed to express themselves and release built-up negative energy in more productive ways.

Instead of being forgotten about (‘lock up and throw away the key’), they were given a second chance.

Some might think they don’t deserve a second chance for not obeying the rules on the outside, but many weren’t bad people or didn’t commit unforgivable crimes, they were just labeled as undesirables by society. While some might well not be forgiven, others were often just the result of a restriction of rules (that lead to a stifled rebellion) or a lack of guidance from a tough past.

When introduced to their expressive, creative side many turned a leaf and felt a purpose that wasn’t there since childhood.

It clearly shows that when people are given the chance to express themselves creatively they often fall on the positive side far more than when they aren’t.

We just need to help people release creative blocks from themselves and to find ways to be creative.