More Lovely Chaos: Purposeful Collision of Ideas

All image credits: Gina Greenlee collages, paint, ink pen

It is the unpredictability of new ideas bumping into one another that creates lovely chaos. New perspectives mixed in a way that will challenge certainty.

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A year-long journey in Expressive Arts Training in 2011 helped me to understand how my writing benefitted from varied art modalities such as sound, movement and visual arts. I recognized that designing and crafting paper dolls, being part of an Artist Trading Card group, choreographing dance routines, learning movie monologues and sculpting clay were not interrupting my writing, they were part of its process. These different modalities – that also included paint, collage, and singing – brainstormed with the archives of my subconscious. And with that interactive lightning storm came a flood of new writing ideas. Gina Greenlee

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The world of experience, as it is revealed to our senses and our understanding, is always chaotic. Each one of us must seek to organize so many conflicting facts, impressions or sensations in some kind of understandable synthesis...which will allow one to face the world as an individual, without being overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic flow and swirl of phenomena...It is the task of the artist to organize the chaos of the visible world in patterns from which some meaning can emerge. Oskar Kokoschka

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It is important to do what you don’t know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos. Carlos Castaneda

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Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feeling we store away and finding new ways to connect them. Twyla Tharp

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Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity – which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value – more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. Sir Ken Robinson

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Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. Frank Zappa

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In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King talks about always having a “toy truck” to work on. This is a piece of writing that is diversion, not part of his current project. It wasn’t until I began writing four hours daily on long-form narratives that I quickly realized I needed a lot more tomfoolery than a single toy truck. I needed an entire toy chest. Much of the chest is filled with visual art practice. It helps keep my writing skills sharp, interest in my current project high, and advances my craft in surprising directions. Gina Greenlee

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I think creativity is the duality of chaos and order. When there’s excessive order, the artist seeks chaos, and when there’s excessive chaos the artist finds order. Simon Sinek 

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People think when you learn music, the more you trained the better you’re going to get: NOT TRUE. because whilst your technique can be refined, the friction you get between understanding exactly what a thing is and not understanding exactly what a thing is – that’s where the most creativity happens. Because the most amount of change happens between order and chaos. Jacob Collier

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There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “wow,” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas. Steve Jobs

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It’s almost impossible to reconcile creativity with cleanliness. The sculptor gets metal dust all over his studio. The writer must wade through a clutter of notes, books, and crumpled drafts to get to her desk. The rock musician must weave through a tangle of cables, black boxes, guitar stands, and song notes to sit down and create. The business strategist must navigate a thicket of scribbles, arrows, and boxes on his whiteboard while avoiding the distractions of multi-colored sticky notes on stacks of must-read articles. Marty Neumeier

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On the public platform or on television, I have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about. It’s antithetical to the effort you make at the typewriter, where you don’t know a damned thing. And you have to know you don’t know it. The moment you carry the persona to the typewriter, you are finished. James Baldwin

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I find myself blindly flooring it and seeing what happens. Hiro Murai

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Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight. Bruce Mau

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I would argue that 88 keys on keyboard is chaos in itself. Take somebody – a baby – who doesn’t know the keyboard and they bang it. Chaos. And finding order in that chaos is what we call music, creative expression. I think artists inherently have a comfortable relationship with chaos. Simon Sinek

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Never limit your playtime, even if your brain is telling you otherwise. All of your best stuff comes from it if you allow yourself to remain open to the unknown.

Keri Smith

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Creation relies on both divergent and convergent thinking. In divergent thinking we go wide. We create choices. We generate. In convergent thinking we narrow our focus. We make choices. We decide. Tim Hillegonds

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And I would argue that chaos is irrational. We seek order; we seek rational; we seek rules and structures and explanations – that’s all that rational stuff. The irrational, the emotional, the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the unknown, the uncertain, is where the artist plays. And I think great artists understand that what they do is play. Simon Sinek

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To our conscious mind, the language of the subconscious has no discernable structure:

• Non-linear

• Fragmented

• Metaphor

• Imagery

Yet it is in the subconscious that the material of creation accumulates: the coalescence of random, disparate snippets that bubble into awareness as new ideas and fresh projects. We enhance that alchemy when we pepper our subconscious (cultivate inspiration) this way:

• Gravitate toward experiences that light us up.

• Create openings for what wishes to emerge.

• Increase our comfort with creative chaos.

• Let go of expectation, and instead, respond to the moment.

• Sit with uncertainty.

• Embrace the unfamiliar.

Gina Greenlee

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Songwriting is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, and it doesn’t make any sense until you find that last piece. Chrissie Hynde

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The irrational, the emotional, the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the unknown, the uncertain, is where the artist plays. Simon Sinek