Conscious Creativity: Look, Connect, Create

By Philippa Stanton

A self-help book for artists “crammed with practical ideas, inspirational images and creative exercises . . . establishing what kind of creative you are”(Mslexia).

Unlock your creative potential with Conscious Creativity: a practical, playful guide bursting with inspiration to help bring more color into to your life.

There is creativity in all of us, but it can easily be buried beneath our everyday concerns. Whether you’ve lost your mojo or just need some fresh ideas, artist and photographer Philippa Stanton’s lively guide will stimulate your imagination and reinvigorate your creative life.

Engage your curiosity and connect your observations to your creative practice with activities such as:

• Noticing all the hues of one color you can see around you
• Creating an abstract textured image using herbs, spices and other dry ingredients from your kitchen cupboards
• Collecting shadows: photograph hidden shapes and dark spaces that you haven’t noticed before

Conscious Creativity will help you open your senses to the beauty you may not notice every day, and show you how to capture it. Simple, engaging exercises that encourage observation and experimentation will give you an insight into your own aesthetics as you take a conscious step to note the colors, shapes, shadows, sounds and textures that fill your world, and how they make you feel.

Embrace the joy of creating and learn to use your natural curiosity to take a leap into the most creative time of your life.

“Full of tips and tricks on how to look at the world with a curious eye, it’s a brilliant way to breathe creativity (back) into our lives.” —Flow magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781782407317

Book preview

Introduction

I was a single parent with a toddler, a mortgage and a cat. I had no money and no qualifications. The prospect of working all hours to pay for someone else to look after my son and still financially fall short led me to make a massive commitment to my creativity. It was all I had.

A very dear friend told me at the time that, because her family was comfortably off, she knew it had made them less creative. Her husband was incensed and argued that his job had not only facilitated but also supported each and every one of the family’s creative pursuits, including his own! She turned to me as he stormed out and, with a twinkle, whispered, ‘He knows I’m right though.’ It was an enlightening moment which stuck with me, and was one of the reasons I felt I wanted to share my processes.

I’ve written this book as a sort of guide or springboard towards developing your own creativity in a very conscious way, a way of utilizing all your senses and everything around you. There are no hard-and-fast rules, secrets or techniques to unlock your full creative potential, but there are definitely exercises that can help you to look at and see what surrounds you in a different, deeper and more meaningful way.

You may feel apprehensive about embracing a new creative route; perhaps at some point in your life a teacher or family member told you that you were no good at art or that you’re just a maths and science person. Maybe you sat with the high achievers working extremely hard while the arty types listened to the radio in the art room. I was thwarted by academia at school and felt very average. I loved classical civilization and art, and somehow thought my enthusiasm for the subjects meant that I would achieve high grades. It didn’t. However, during A Levels, I was one of those arty types listening to the radio and I was lucky enough to have a life-changing teacher who unlocked my eyes, validated my creativity and made me do things I didn’t want to do, thus pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Some of you reading this will be innately creative, already armed with your own techniques and methods, hungry for new stimuli, new triggers and new ideas, but maybe you have just lost your mojo and feel a bit stuck. Some of you might have small children, limited time and energy, uninspiring jobs, no ideas and feel completely blocked. Regardless of where you have come from creatively, this book is intended to help you devise a personal structure for an ongoing creative practice with exercises you’ll be able to revisit time and time again.

A simple awareness of your personal traits – good, bad, physical and emotional – means that you will be able to utilize or shelve them so as to work to your best ability. Developing an awareness of creative triggers will mean gaining a deeper and clearer way of looking, seeing and sensing everything around you. Our senses dictate how we interact with the world, although we rarely take time to consciously give them any disciplined space. A trip to a gallery or restaurant can give them a moment of indulgence, but the simple key to any creative inspiration lies in consciously taking the time to accurately acknowledge what is around us.

It’s also important to make a genuine commitment to working on your creativity, but at the same time it shouldn’t be something that eats away at your enjoyment and turns days of doing nothing into guilty secrets. Structure and commitment are crucial to developing your work, which is why I’ve used the first few chapters to try and help you define what sort of creative person you are as well as addressing universal obstacles.

Implementing your ideas is often much harder than just thinking about them: a lot of the time it’s about being brave, facing your own notion of failure and finding a pearl of inspiration in what at first may appear to be total chaos. Although minimalism is popular, in this book I want to actively encourage you to embrace the joys of abundance and mess. Mess always sounds negative – a confused collection of unwanted clutter – but mess can also have texture and meaning, and can form a wonderfully accessible, and cheap, creative palette. The amorphous contents of a drawer which have been secretly shaming you might in fact turn out to be a creative liberation.

Although you could be working through this book at any time of the year, I want to acknowledge beginnings, as many people will probably find themselves reading this with some sort of ‘new’ resolve. Resolves always feel strong and positive at first, but that strength and drive often proves hard to maintain. However, in my opinion, it’s that simple commitment that is key to your growth, not necessarily a constant and unfailing energy. If you feel rubbish, be rubbish, if you feel excited, be excited, but don’t put pressure on yourself to ‘get it right’ or be ‘good at it’. Experiment just to see what happens and push yourself to do things that challenge you.

I’m always taken by surprise at how unintentionally creative I start to become during a time of despondency. Feeling dreadful seems to unconsciously liberate me; I allow myself to let go of expectations, telling myself that it’s all pointless anyway, and I begin playing around with ideas: old ones, new ones, regurgitated ones. I start to find a sort of secret and very personal way through my darkness and then slowly come out the other side.

We all work in different ways and that’s as it should be. It’s completely fine if you want to paint using kitchen utensils, write using felt tips or collage a piece of music. The point is, it will always be up to you; you were the one born with the power to invent.

Creativity is about discovering your own ways of working, your own unique practice, and growing the confidence needed to accept that. It’s not about learning how to create something like everyone else, it’s about learning how to acknowledge the true value of what you do.

Chapter 1

What Sort of Creative Are You?

Focusing and grounding your initial journey through investigation and instinct

Being creative and curious is a fundamental part of being a human being – we are all hard-wired to invent, explore

Reviews for Conscious Creativity

[Mariia Adler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best books about art. Few books teach about noticing and thinking like an artist. Instead of rolling out a long list of expensive supplies, the author teaches you to use your most important tools: your mind, heart and senses. It’s not about why noticing and experimenting is important but a rare manual about HOW to train your eye to see all the beauty and diversity around us.

[cathygeha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Conscious Creativity by Philippa StantonLook. Connect. Create.As I finished looking through and reading this book I looked a second time to see what the purpose of the book was meant to be and found two paragraphs that summed up the goal, I believe, of the author: Look, Connect, CreateHow often do you notice the texture of a painted wall or the scent of a friend’s house and, importantly, how they make you feel? Connect your observations and your emotions and transform your creative practice with this essential toolbox packed full of exercises, tips, stunning images and personal experiences from dynamic artist Philippa Stanton. Written as a guide or springboard towards developing your own creativity in a very conscious way, a way of utilizing all your senses and everything around you. There are no hard-and-fast rules, secrets or techniques to unlock your full creative potential, but there are definitely exercises that can help you to look at and see what surrounds you in a different, deeper and more meaningful way. The photographs are evocative and beautiful. The exercises and questions are insightful and thought provoking. The feeling I left the book with was that I will look for the beauty that surrounds me then use what my senses experience to try to create beauty in my life daily. Thank you to NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group - Leaping Hare Press for the ARC – This is my honest review.5 Stars