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The Nature of Creative Thought - Part 4

At a special symposium on Creative Thinking, sponsored by the Industrial Research Institute, three artists—a painter, a musi­cian, and a poet—were asked to describe, as aptly as possible, what they went through in producing a new piece of work.* Their descriptions show not only great awareness of their own mental patterns, but also great similarities—even though they work in different fields, using different materials and thought symbols:

Mr. John Ferren, of New York, the painter, analyzed the process this way:

Creative thinking, in my personal experience, divides into three phases, of which the middle only contains the essential act of perceiv­ing structure. The first phase, I would call the intellectual sensibility phase. To the scientist it is the collection of data, the period of obser­vation, of speculative thought, of curiosity, of prodding into weak spots, and apparent dead ends. Ideally, all possible knowledge on the particular subject should be covered and exhausted. With the artist, the process is very much the same. The storehouse of visual memory is racked over, the work of other artists is regarded, accepted, or rejected. The errors of the artist's past work are considered and meditated on. New visual experiences are catalogued and correlations attempted in painting terms. Certainly some philosophical considera­tions, ultimate goods, purposes, and so forth cross his mind—psycho­logical ones too. In this phase, the modern artist has widely used automatism, which is a deliberate playing with the brush with no idea in mind, akin to the telephone doodle.

... In sum, this period is that of the accumulation of source ma­terial ... it may be plodding and passive, or playful and speculative or intense and anguished. Its essential character is complexity and diffuseness.

The pinpointing comes with the creative act, and I believe that the occasional intensity and drama of the first and last phases of creative thinking have clouded the true nature of the moment of perception. The effect of an insight may be that of the proverbial clap of thunder, but the immediate cause of insight is to me calm and quiet.

... The moment of insight is nearly always brief, and cannot be long sustained or cultivated, but passes rapidly into the third phase where the insight releases the energy necessary to implement itself and give it flesh. It is in this third period that occurs the conventional white heat of inspiration which is, actually, the mad scramble to fit all the little pieces together in their new order.

The musician was the composer, Mr. Ernst Krenek, of Los Angeles. He agreed, almost without exception, with Ferren's re­marks, and then added these specific observations on his own art:

The writing down of music, the creative act, is a very complicated technical procedure. You can't improvise that. The man who wants to write music has to learn a great deal, he also has to learn a whole set of special symbols in order to produce musical form. I think it is for this reason that the creation of music is really a very highly intellectual activity.

... In fact, the professional composer is extremely doubtful of per­sons who compose at the piano, which most amateurs do. They let their fingers run over the keyboard and wait for something to hap­pen. When they hear it, they think "Oh, that's perhaps it; no, let's see what was it now," and try to write it down, and then reject it again, and start playing around a little more. The real composer does not believe in this kind of preparation because he feels that it entails a great waste of energy and that the person rather confuses the cre­ative intellect instead of stimulating it.

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