The Creative Date is a creativity tool which Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, suggests as being essential for developing your creativity.Last week, my creative date led me to the Stanley Spencer Exhibition at Somerset House in London.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve gone through periods of life when you’ve either seriously questioned your own creativity, or had it questioned by others, or both. Although I was a creative child, for years I convinced myself I wasn’t, and it wasn’t until I did some research into creativity when I had to design a course that I re-discovered my own creative juices. The Creative Date, and the related technique of Morning Writing, have proved critical for me in reconnecting with my creative power.

These techniques are the brainchild of Julia Cameron who describes them in her book The Artist’s Way. Morning Writing involves sitting down for about half-an-hour every morning before you really get going, and writing non-stop for at least 3 pages. If you can’t think why to write, that’s what you write. If you’re frustrated or angry, that’s what you write. If your mind is blank then you just write blah blah blah. The idea is to get it all off your chest, and unblock your creative drain. The more you write, the more you unblock, and the more the creativity starts to flow. It really works, too. Recently I was feeling a bit stuck and went back to my morning writing. it took about 2 weeks to free up my thinking, and now I the ideas and insights are just flowing.

The idea of the Creative Date is that, once a week, you take yourself off, alone, to do something creative. The guidelines are that it should be something you wouldn’t routinely do, and that you should take at least an hour to do it. So it could be a visit to an art gallery or museum you don’t normally visit, trying out some activity you don’t normally do, or taking a walk somewhere you do’t normally walk. My creative dates have included visits to art galleries and museums I don’t know, going zip-lining, going to the zoo and, later on today, going to a pampering and makeover session including a manicure. Technically this pampering session wouldn’t count, because I am going with a friend and a friend of hers, so I won’t be alone, but I NEVER have my nails done or get a makeover, so this definitely has the potential to make me come over all creative!

So What About Creativity And Sir Stanley Spencer Then?

Although I am fairly familiar with the work of the poets of the first World War- people like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke – I’ve never been aware of the work of the war artists from that conflict. This exhibition was largely dedicated to Stanley Spencer but it also included a couple of  powerful pieces from Henry Lamb. Spencer was remarkable because he didn’t just paint powerful pictures; he came up with the idea of a chapel to house an entire sequence of his paintings. He found friends to fund the building and detailed design of the chapel, Sandham Memorial Chapel, near Newbury (now owned by The National Trust).  The paintings have taken a little trip while their usual home is being renovated, and they’ve been joined by a couple of Spencer’s other paintings.

Most of the paintings are of people – soldiers,mostly – either in a military hospital or down on the front at Salonika, but the one that has lingered in my mind is a painting of a poppy. Most poppy paintings show them as very pretty things, and while Stanley doesn’t exactly make them ugly, they have a distinctly triffid like feel. The contrast with the people paintings was extraordinary, as was the colour contrast (there’s an awful lot of brown in the other pictures – the colour of British army uniform).

I can’t put my finger on what this Creative Date has done for my creativity, but I just sense that it has. I think it’s something to do with contrast and difference: the contrast of poppies, on the one hand, with men in uniform on the other; of men on the front with men in a military hospital back in England. And in truth, it doesn’t matter. It’s the sense of something shifting, of movement in my thinking that is the really gift in all this.

If you can introduce the Creative Date into your life, then seize the opportunity. At the very least, check out The Artist’s Way.

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