Creativity isn’t a cookie cutter concept. Creativity can be so many different things…

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River Island Maxi | Mer Ka Ba Bikini (underneath) | Quay Sunglasses

Photos: Jenelle at Inspiring Wit

 

My little brother once mentioned to me a conversation that he had had with friends, about him not thinking he was the creative type.

Our dad is a great visual artist, but unfortunately my brother and I didn’t inherit his steady hand, beautiful, loopy cursive, or ability to conceptualise and bring to life a painted piece (or a piece of furniture). My mum is very much an ideas woman – she knows how to put together a mean event, and she has a thousand and five ideas to help revive a flailing business. I inherited some of this trait from mum, but I am not too sure about my little brother. He doesn’t doesn’t sing or dance (like myself), he doesn’t act, he doesn’t sew. He doesn’t do any of these ‘typically creative’ things.

My little brother just so happens to be one of the smartest people I know – very much a numbers and facts man – but in no way, shape or form would I ever have regarded him to be a ‘non-creative’. I always considered him to have a knack for putting together an effortlessly cool, Scandi style outfit, and to have an incredible eye for travel photography. He has always been able to decorate his home impeccably well, and his kitchen skills far surpass anything I could ever dream of doing in the kitchen. I always thought he was incredibly creative, but creative in his own way.

Creativity might traditionally encompass art and design and the performing arts, but outside of that cookie cutter, it wears so many more hats. Creativity is a mind set, not a physical talent. It can’t be measured or marked as right or wrong. What one person sees as creative is not always going to be seen as creative by the next. Just as art is subjective, someone’s creative flair is too.

Yesterday, Jenelle, Mario and I wandered around the newly opened Sculpture By The Sea exhibition on Cottesloe beach, and it was a prime example of the subjectiveness of creativity and art. There were larger-than-life, real life pieces, sculptures that literally looked like a giant rock painted white, sculptures with moving parts and others that, well, I am not too sure what they actually were. Regardless of whether I, or the next person, liked them or not, each piece was still a reflection of somebody’s creative mind. While there were artworks I might not have necessarily been drawn to, and ones that I even questioned (a lot), I am not one to knock down anyone’s creative expression. They might not have been my type of creativity, but it is all creativity the same, creativity that deserves recognition.

Sculpture By The Sea runs from 4th – 20th March 2016 at Cottesloe Beach, Perth.