Creativity

I even resisted sitting at a desk, so my studio mates rarely saw me, and most of my work was done in nature, underneath trees, by the water, and sometimes in cafés, galleries, and the botanical garden. And the rest was a vast, empty space that I didn’t know how to navigate any more than I knew how to start drawing from a blank piece of paper.

Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” What you pour out is a culmination of everything you’ve filled up on previous to that point.

In the mid-1970s, he developed a system called Oblique Strategies to help people maintain a creative state.

Let me walk through the problem that Eno was trying to solve.

He believes that enthusiasm and alertness are key components of creativity. However, he noticed that artists tend to struggle with maintaining these qualities when working under pres... See more