Eureka (1999) Clarity Out of Chaos (2009)

 

Mind Map No.1 (Black, Green, Red Marker Pens, White Emulsion, Mixed Media On Found Board 1999)

Mind Map No.2 (Black Green, Red Marker Pens, White Emulsion, On Found Board, 2009)

Marks Upon a Beach By David & Joanne (Cornwall 2008)

The creative process is one of humankind's great unfathomable mysteries.  The experience captured in the photograph above is one of my own classic examples:

I had no thought except to write a title in the sand to make my mind feel more certain and solid about my future creative intentions. Somehow I thought that if I wrote it in the sand it would be a statement to myself that such a manifesto would somehow come into being.  As I was enjoying the process, my thoughts were drawn to the Normandy beach landings in World War II, and how symbolic beaches seem to be considering that in the UK, we live on an Island.  I could not help but think of all those thousands of lives lost on the Beaches of France in WW II in the fight for freedom.  How could scenes of such natural beauty become killing grounds of such base destruction of human life?

I knew that in an hour or so the tide would rise and the sea would erase anything I wrote in the sand.  It was just a temporary mark soon to be washed away.  As I came to dot the two letter I's in "creativity", I had a beautiful inner feeling that two hearts were more appropriate. Then as I went to dot the third "I" in th word manifesto which had been written by Joanne, a friend of mine who had invited me down to Cornwall; I realised I would not be able to, as there was already a large rock there embedded upon the beach in the exact spot above the third "I".  It was by pure chance she had written the word manifesto there, as it was where I had written the word "creativity".  But somehow, in my mind the rock was symbolic of something I couldn't quite grasp at that moment.  All I knew and felt, was that somehow it seemed perfectly appropriate the rock was there, and would remain there long after the words and we two people had gone.

We finished  the beach markings and looked over the words; but again, for some reason, I felt an intuitive sense that it was not quite complete. A few minutes passed in this relaxed state of this feeling, and then gradually I felt a slow warm glow within myself, an almost strange mental and physical sensation that somehow led me to mark the symbol of Yin and Yang inside the final letter "O". 
It was at this moment that Joanne who had clambered up the rocks behind the beach to get a view from above took this photo, one of series she took as she documented our collaborative creative process.  I had never written the words on a beach before, and never in this way with these spontaneous additions, even though I have written down this idea probably hundreds of times before.  Somehow, in that moment,  I felt that for a few fleeting moments, everything made absolute perfect sense. 

Two years later, as I post this on the internet now, I realise that the two hearts could represent myself and Joanne, and the Yin Yang could represent both our masculinity and feminity. Or maybe it's an collective unconscious representation of all of us.

Why and how the creative process in humanity occurs is a mystery, I just know that it makes me feel really alive, in tune with my-self, nature and the Universe. Every single human being is creative, humanity has always been creative since the beginning of our evolutionary (creative) process, being-creative is what we are.


(A Grain of Sand is Connected To The Whole Universe (Zen Philosophy)