I caught a really interesting Radio 4 program the other day which was the potter Grayson Perry talking about creativity and the different ways it is viewed by society as a whole. He talked to a variety of creative people (writers Rose Tremain and Terry Pratchett, fashion designer Hussein Chalayan (FAVE), and poet and neurologist Raymond Tallis) and they contributed their ideas to the discussion. I found it all good for thinking material and agreed with most of what was said, but was surprised by the sudden end to the program and the concluding comments that Grayson made. I don’t know whether he actually thinks this entirely, or if he was just trying to stick a contrary opinion on the end of what was quite a positive exploration of the creative impulse. ‘Creativity is what drives the capitalist monster thats chewing up the planet’, ‘Maybe we are having too many ideas’ – I find this quite a disturbing view. Ok, so maybe we can keep a close watch on how we use our resources, and there is a vein of truth in the first statement, which I throw around in my brain from time to time when creating things to sell, but I think to attack creativity itself and curb it would have pretty catastrophic results.

Raymond Tallis believes that creative people try to resolve their own difficulties and heal their ‘wounds’ in life through their particular medium, and that we can relate to and understand the results because ‘We all share the human wound of living a finite life, a life with incomplete meanings’ – isnt all human activity the attempt to recover from and solve the problem of the finite life?  There’s also the evidence from brain scans that people with a creative impulse are possibly more relaxed and the signals in the brain are transmitted more slowly, and to be creative is all about wandering around and hesitating – sounds like me.

Grayson also referred to the work of Henry Darger the ‘outsider artist’ who wrote and illustrated a 15,000 page epic called the Realms of the Unreal whilst he worked as a janitor in Illinois. The huge work was only discovered after his death. Darger has been a significant influence on Grayson Perry’s own work, and it was interesting to me to see just how much this is true when I looked back at both today.

I do seem to end posts with how the subject at hand somehow relates to shoes and I see no reason to break with this tradition today. Someone has made a Darger painting into a lovely pair of KEDS – in fact theres a whole site where you can customise Keds like this!