8 Reasons Why Creativity is Important
Hi gorgeous,
For many years, I wondered why me and my art students felt uplifted after a creative art session. Whether it’s drawing. painting, arranging colourful leaves or dancing, something happens in our experience to shift our mood and perspective when we make art. But why?
This question eventually led me to study Art Therapy to learn more about the creative process and what happens in our mind, body and spirit when we make art.
So, Why is Creativity Important?👇
Creativity helps with problem solving
Engaging in creativity allows us to solve problems in new and innovative ways. Rather than rehashing the same old solutions, working with a range of art materials and processes means we learn to pivot and rearrange our actions, to meet what’s arising in the present moment.
2. Creativity encourages new ideas and perspectives
Have you ever looked up at the clouds and found shapes in them? That’s your mind naturally making creative associations! Now imagine how much our minds can grow in creativity, if we practice art on purpose?
Creativity, in whatever form feels good - drawing, painting, sewing, baking - allows the intuitive part of our brains to come to the fore, and a flow of new and interesting perspectives to arise (and be acted upon.)
3. Creativity connects us with beauty
I believe Beauty is a powerful antidote to so many challenges in our time. I often wonder how our policy makers might perceive our world differently, via a regular dose of pristine nature, playing aimlessly with colourful paints, sculpting with smooth, cool clay, or finding beauty in an art gallery or scented rose bush.
Simply focussing on beauty can have a positive affect on our parasympathetic nervous system - our rest and digest. It doesn’t have to be just visual beauty either. Sound, vibration, texture, scent, taste, can all feel beautiful when mindfully savoured.
Connecting with Beauty is never superfluous - it’s activism of the highest calibre.
Smell that flower today.
4. Creativity can naturally mitigate logic overwhelm
Creativity by nature, is inherently illogical and non-linear. I define creativity as mish-mashing ideas, concepts and objects that haven’t been together before, to create something new.
This means creative engagement can become a wonderful way to offset logical overwhelm from daily life. Why? It’s the opposite of needing to hold everything together. We can explore gifting our inner mess a moment of reprieve, while we allow ourselves moments to brush paint around a page or dance like no-one is watching. That’s not to undermine our challenges by any means, but to cultivate other possible ways of experiencing.
The truth is, our art doesn’t have to make sense to anyone other than ourselves. It’s our time to be free.
5. Creativity is play!
In my work with children over the last 25 years, I’ve never heard a young child say “I don’t know how to draw a stick figure!” Children just get into art and delight in the creative, exploratory process. I mean, who would want to sit around drawing stick figures anyway?
In fact, having the intention to play is a wonderful way to overcome creative block. It’s often a focus on perceived outcomes that impacts our ability to make art.
I have found creating in a journal or on cardboard offcuts, or using children’s art supplies, can make art feel much more playful. It’s expensive and unlikely to be a masterpiece for anyone’s walls. It can be just play time and often, this is where new ideas and innovative techniques are born for further development.
6. Creativity impacts our self-concept
Our self-concept often relates to the stories, culture and experiences we’ve been a part of throughout our lifetime. Art-making and engaging with art materials is a way of bringing our own chosen culture into being with personal agency.
When we can consciously identify new attitudes and and goals that may shift our lives for the better, art-making can be a wonderful tool to start to building these intentions into our lives. These small moments add up towards creating ourselves anew, with each intentional dance move, brush stroke and poetic word enabling a taste of new ways of being in our world.
7. Creativity enables self-expression
Engaging in creative acts allows us safe ways to express ourselves. One of the things I love most about creativity, is that it can be a non-linear way to explore our needs and desires freely, through metaphor. This can feel much safer than verbal expression, as the only person who knows the true meaning of our art, is us.
I personally find that creativity helps me unbottle concerns and ideas, and see them in a new light - outside of my head, and onto a page. It also helps us feel more empowered, by bringing our voice into the physical world, via whatever medium feels right in the moment. For many, therapeutic art can be a wonderful tool for reimagining new ways of being.
8. Creativity unites, reimagines and regenerates
Throughout history, ancestors across all corners of our planet have engaged in music, dance, art, traditional medicine and ritual as a way to connect, share stories and strengthen wellbeing. Sadly, much of this wisdom has been decimated during the process of colonisation and westernised living.
However creative practices still have power to unite, reimagine and regenerate ourselves, our collective relationships and our Earth.
It is through collective, creative minds with sensitive, inclusive approaches, that we can revision and implement kinder, culturally safe and sustainable ways of living together.
In this way, creativity is a revolutionary way to bring healing and wellbeing to ourselves, out communities and planet.
If engaging in creativity can help encourage new ideas and perspectives, solve problems, reestablish beauty, mitigate overwhelm and positively impact our sense of selves, I’d argue that its crazy not to practice creativity! With greater wellbeing, we have more passion, power and energy to influence change.
That’s why creativity is important for everyone - in whatever form feels right, kind and freeing for you ❤️
