Creativity, Resilience & Change

Painting, Smoking, Eating by Philip Guston

‘Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to change.’ Philip Guston

Last year I went to see the retrospective of Guston’s work at Tate Modern in London. Alongside the paintings were some of his observations about creativity and about life. The lines above stayed with me and have given me reason to reflect since.

Sometimes change is a wonderful thing: you meet someone; you fall in love; you buy a beautiful flat together. Other times it’s a right old kick in the kahunas: you meet someone; you fall in love; and they leave you for your best friend.

Either way, change is the condition of life. As the cliché goes, it is the only constant. And, as Guston says, maybe the sooner we get our heads round this the better.

And change is a condition of creativity too. I write, and I’ve always loved how writing is taking the 26 characters of the English alphabet and transforming them into words and sentences and stories. Those 26 characters themselves never change and yet they are infinitely changeable; we can never exhaust their possibilities.

As a writer, a painter, a musician, a designer, you take your lived experiences, your insights, your emotions and, through the creative act, you change them, you transform them into something new.

So in this piece I’d like to explore in more depth the relationship between creativity and change, because I believe that the more we understand this relationship, the better we’ll become not only at having ideas but also at the messy business we call life.

Late in the afternoon of September 17th 1925 in Mexico City, a trolley car collided with a wooden bus. On board was a young woman, just 18. Later she describes how ‘the crash bounced us forward and a hand rail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull.’

She and the other survivors are rushed to hospital. Her injuries are devastating: fracture of the 3rd and 4thlumbar vertebrae; triple fracture to pelvis; approximately 11 fractures to right leg; dislocation of right shoulder; stomach wound due to metal rod entering left side and exiting through vagina.

But, against the odds - and the predictions of the doctors - the young woman survives. Her name is Frida Kahlo …

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