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Above is a wonderful TED Talk on the power and importance of disruption in creative work, with some amazing and famous examples (i.e. the resulting work is famous, the fact that disruption made them possible isn't). This is in fact the source for my title “Play the Unplayable Piano”.
Watching the video will be 15 well-spent minutes of your life – how much of our life on the internet can we say that about? It makes me wonder if I should show it at the beginning of all of my courses – might be a good way to warm up creative thinking and help prevent the instinctive resistance that can arise when I introduce something new. Disruptors are an important factor in how I work as an artist as well as how I teach although I've usually referred to the “randomizer” in my brain. A better name for it is “disruptor” since that expresses its effect as well as its role. How has it shown up in my studio? How do I even choose instances? There was the time I decided to take on my least-liked colour, so I kept working with pink until I stopped disliking it. Pink functioned as a disrupter in every painting I put it in, until it became just another colour in my palette. Or the time I decided to work with a brush that had hardened, caked-on paint, instead of throwing it out, then made the best paintings of my life to that point. |
To be more creative, introduce something that disrupts your familiar. Disruption is uncomfortable, even excruciating, at first, because the things that make us comfortable are familiar. |
Top: video of Tim Harford's TED Talk on How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative. Above left and right: Over and Over and Chair with Swatch #1; both examples of work that included disruption as part of their process.
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Every residency or workshop I have taken has disrupted my normal practice, sometimes enormously, especially when being far from home was combined with a really powerful mentoring situation.
More often I am inclined to take on things I don't know how to do as aspects of a project where I do know how to do other parts. Like last summer's charcoal figure drawing mural at the Art Gallery of Mississauga; or the chairs I am working on now. My first efforts to use fluorescent colour was a powerful disrupter, both challenging and fun. When I introduced it in a class I was teaching, I got the full range of responses: from those who giggled with amazement at being completely out of their comfort zones and delighted disbelief at what they were producing, to one who refused to try even a drop, and of course everyone in between. There are a couple of things about disrupters that we need to remember, whether they are an old friend or a scary stranger: they make us far more creative as we struggle to adapt to them, discover new things because of them, and they are uncomfortable! They may even feel excruciating at first, but that's natural, because the things that make us comfortable are familiar. |
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