Who Are Your Creative Influences?

Our proposition for ISE 3 is that yours is a creative life. Like the Kosmos itself, you are endowed with the supreme capacity to bring things into form. Whether you use it or not, you were born with a remarkable ability to tap into the source of all that is, and to imagine new things—ideas, visions, and possibilities. Creativity will make demands of you in terms of learning to shape and refine these new forms—you will need discipline, fortitude, a willingness to experience chaos, uncertainty, open space, and a few other unknowns as part of this divine gift.

When an idea can be manifested, it is an innovation. When it can’t, it is simply an idea. Bringing ideas down with gravity and into the texture of reality is the creative challenge, and also the creative joy. The contemporary artist, Ellsworth Kelly, says that “Creating is my greatest pleasure.”

Since your life has innate creative potential, one very real part of it—and you know this from Integral Theory—is the lower quadrants or the context in which your creativity develops. Most creative people have had a mentor, a model, teacher or sometimes a good friend, someone who has literally shown them how to open up and interact outside of known territory.  I remember hearing once that Madonna’s whole life changed when she saw David Bowie in concert the first time. She watched him perform one night, and it opened up an entire universe of artistic possibility for her. After that, she saw that her life could become the imaginative enterprise of a pop diva. Now she is in the queenly position of having influenced Lady Gaga (along with Cher if I’m not mistaken) and on it goes.

One of the creative influences in my life was my first husband, Tony Smith, a painter and film-maker. It was through him that I first learned how to see. Before we met, I saw the visual field through a murky set of personal interpretations. I didn’t know how to look at a painting and actually see it—instead I saw a story that I had made up about what it meant.  I didn’t understand how to receive a visual impression on its own terms without the filter of my conditioning and mundane preferences. He taught me to simply see blue for the cool that it is, and green as green—pale or deep—and red as warm toward yellow or cool against closer to purple. There was just color, line, texture, and shape. Clear, immediate, manifest. One day we were walking down the hall in the art department and there in the middle of the floor was a pile of shit left by a dog. I cringed and said something like, “Oh, my god, that is unbelievable”, referring to the size of the pile. He replied, “I know, it is the exact same color as the floor.”

Seeing though his eyes was a constant wake-up call. I learned about light and shade, the conventions of perspective, and how to see beauty in everything lowly and cast off. Entire worlds came into being that hadn’t existed for me before. I watched how he engaged a question in a painting and explored it, how it became a kind of conversation in which the painting spoke back to him, and changed his working direction. I learned about how he looked at the work of other artists and entered into dialogue with them through examining their work. While I stood three feet away from a painting and looked, he stood three feet away and then moved up to three inches away, peering over the top of his glasses at the brushstrokes, curious about technique. His work was influenced by many artists from the past as different as the likes Marcel Duchamp, Edward Hopper or even Walt Disney, and his contemporaries were always a source of inspiration, challenge, and very often, love. 

I understand that Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had a very vivid relationship, very competitive, and inspiring to both of them. Georgia O Keefe was supported to become the great painter she was by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Patty Smith just wrote a book about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and how they grew up together as young kids in New York and supported one another into becoming the artists that they both did. I’m not sure who Keith Richard would be without Mick Jagger, but I know that I wish John Lennon and Paul McCartney had worked it out the way the Rolling Stones did. Michael Jackson became the genius he was in part because of his father’s ambition, his own love of James Brown, and Barry Gordy’s, the head of Motown records, business acumen. His life is an example of the true Miracle of We.

Brian Eno, an English musician, a composer, and producer, is one of the principal innovators of ambient music, but he also seems to be one of the world’s great collaborators, He has formed many working relationships with different musicians and artists including David Bowie, the punk band Devo, and Talking Head’s, David Byrne, as well as Paul Simon and Coldplay. He has some good things to say about his creative process which you might be able to take to heart.

These relationships make all of the difference in a creative life. They are rare, precious, and valuable beyond measure. I invite you to look at the creative influences in your life. Who has taught you how to explore? From whom have you learned your discipline? Whose are the lives that you have read about or seen depicted in a film that are inspiring to you? And if all possibilities were yours, who are the people who most embody the kind of creativity that you would like to see manifest in your own life? Model on them, watch them, listen to them, and enjoy the true inspiration that they are to you.