Reflecting on Creativity

Looking back on our class’ blog, it really amazes me how much I have learned from this unit. Just a month ago, I thought that creativity only really applies to a few areas like painting, poetry, and music. But after looking at my classmates’ posts and seeing their presentations, I have learned that creativity encompasses nearly everything we deal with on a daily basis.

I have learned from my own personal blog posts that creativity is not something that is only a select few can have. I have never considered myself to be creative and art has never been one of my strong suits. When I started my research on my creative field of abstract expressionism, I was dreading the third and fourth blog post. I was worried about how my paintings would turn out and that they would nothing like Jackson Pollock’s work or even an abstract expressionist work. Once I started and put the paint to canvas, I felt the creative juices start to flow. Csikszentmihalyi described this as flow. I experienced a slowing of time and just a complete focus on the task at hand.

The most difficult aspect of my creative work was figuring out how I wanted to approach my painting. Even though it may seem like abstract expressionism is just splatters of paint, there has to be a planned approach. The choice of colors, the placement of the splatters, and the usage of the colors all play a major part in to the quality of the finished product. Another difficult aspect of my creative work was trying to get my imitation and my creative work to be different from each other. I achieved this by diversifying my techniques. On my imitation work, I only used techniques used largely by Jackson Pollock. When I had to do my own creative work, I utilized other techniques by abstract expressionist artists as well as developing my own. These methods include applying the paint to the canvas straight from the tube and painting the green and yellow squares. A method that I developed was putting paint on to the brush and pulling back the bristles so that paint splatters lightly over the canvas. It was messy but it achieved the look that I was aiming for.

When it comes to my classmates’ works, I’d have to say I admire Leondre’s work. He put in a lot of time in producing the beat, writing the lyrics with his friend, and mixing it properly so it would sound as professional as it does.