Creativity, the only compass
Written by Ben Tallon
The Christmas rest looms and I find this week brings on many reflections.
Today is the 2nd day of talking to a new arrival in Salisbury on the dog walk. Another artist/illustrator/lecturer/designer-ish hybrid. We get chatting about the hard task that is creative education in this age of data obsession and hyper-capitalism. This conversation starts because she asks how my deadline is looking. Last week the deadlines were several owing to a much-needed pile-up of projects at the end of one of my quietest years.
This week I’m illustrating the biography I’ve ghost-written, but as a short story. My exclusive focus is on this one brief – a bit like the best kind of college project.
She’s curious about how I ended up on such a hybrid project, and we get talking about the need in 2024 to lead with creativity and not a job title. A coaching client of mine goes under ‘designer who animates’. We’ve been exploring an idea of his; an opportunity he’s spotted to bring a project management aspect to his practice. This is good for him because he’s got great initiative. He attributes some of this to his father, who always gave him a long leash, and instead of feeding him easy answers, encouraged him to work things out, and take the lead. He’s an example of this; a person with some core skills, but crucially, the initiative and vision to take them to places and people who value them, packaged with his personality.
This, I tell the new friend, is what I’ve been doing for years. It’s hard at times because I never know what to call myself. Illustrator, artist, writer, coach, educator, I don’t fucking know. ‘Creative’ doesn’t cut it because, as I’ve written and talked about extensively, it’s far too general a term, often bracketed as either time-wasting or mere artistry. So I pick a hat, and wear it confidently depending on the outcome I’m hoping for according to who I’m talking to and how I can best bring something to their table.
Anyway, on this brief, I’m truly alive because it demands all of the traits and skills I most like to dance between, mixing like a witch’s brew: empathy, sensitivity (I’ve spent 8 hours listening to this person’s wild ride through life and it’s my job to turn it into something alive, and as restless as he is – dictating and transcribing won’t cut it, he came to me for my creativity), writing (prose style, non-fiction), illustration (conceptual in part), art (I’m as much artist as I am illustrator), design (we’re laying out the book between us), editing, storytelling… I’m boring myself now, but my point is this: no one vocational course can teach this and in 2024, nor should it try. I didn’t simply learn to illustrate on my degree – I went to the pub a lot and basked in the stories shared by my lecturers about absolutely anything from the obscure and eccentric, to culture, politics, whatever. This carried into the studio. My love of storytelling had been in me since the earliest of ages, and the course they built fostered it and showed me many ways to use it. But today, when any action must be justified financially to avoid damnation by politicians in newspapers and paranoid well-meaning parents, this more diffused, natural, fun nurturing of personality, interests, and hidden abilities is the work of the devil.
Creativity and personal development must be at the core of any creative education because automation and increasing big tech dominance are revolutionising the creative industry. No matter how shit we think generative AI looks – and in my opinion, it’s obscenely soulless – it is a cheap solution for many with passable results when boxes must be ticked. It will impact every singular trade and already has been doing: illustrator, animator, designer, filmmaker, writer: by no means mortally threatened, but now faced with a ubiquitous, affordable competitor, heightening the need to bring far more than visuals to the dance. But true creativity, the kind where our life stories, experiences, ideas, and view on the world are called upon to drive these skills? Less so.
And that’s what we natter about as the dogs bark and run around. Courses need titles and structure, and students want guarantees and certainty when they’re paying silly money for a degree, but now, more than ever before, an art school approach where self-initiated exploration, play, and curiosity are fostered and grown is essential to prepare the next wave of industry talent for the world in 2025 and beyond, to instill adaptability when things move so fucking fast. But there’s a huge gap between the two mindsets and neither of us knows how it will be bridged, so in the end, we just watch the dogs and remark on the way they bark more than the others.