What is Creativity?

What is creativity? I think a lot about this. As an artist, I’m constantly playing with ideas in my head and dumping them onto paper. I test them to see if they will bend and stretch. As an art educator, I push every lesson plan through this sieve: how can I cultivate creative thought? During the next few weeks, I am writing on this topic of being creative. I certainly won’t  attempt competing with the volumes that have been written on the subject. I will simply offer my own observations and musings.

I truly believe all human beings are creative. However, I constantly hear adults and children declaring their deficiency as if creativity was a vitamin they lack. The truth is that there are so many different ways this creativity is expressed. Creativity lies waiting to be mined in all types of intelligences and personalities. There are Multiple Intelligence Types that displays creative potential like prisms reflect infinite color combinations.

I define creativity as the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way. It is characterized by a high degree of innovation. It includes originality, divergent thinking, and risk. Creativity involves the ability to produce something new, to generate unique approaches and solutions to issues or problems. It welcomes, seizes and embraces opportunity.

I am fascinated with human creativity. I will never tire of being surprised by the variety of    interpretations a class of students can render to an assignment. This is a photo of some ceiling tiles my art students and I created for a local children’s hospital. With the general scenario of making the ceiling look “happy” for sick and ailing patients, the students’ creativity really took over! 

(Can you find me? I'm so short, this looks like a page from a "Where's Waldo" book.)

Creativity is the theme for the next “Dream Portrait” in my Durham Dreams Series of paintings as I feature the “dream” of local artist, Pepper Fluke. Her desire for Durham is that “all our citizens and especially our children have some form of art in their lives - that they all have equal opportunity to explore those things that expand their horizons and bring joy to their lives.”

In closing, I have great news to share! Prints from the "Durham Dreams" paintings are now ready for ordering. The “gallery wrapped canvas” prints look amazing and they come “ready -to -hang” with no framing needed. Here’s the link:

Eleatta Diver - Fine Art - Fine Art America -

Posted in: Create