Associational and adjacent thinking
Want to be more creative? Or push your work out of the shallows and into deeper waters? A core device found in most thought provoking artistic expressions is the use of metaphor and analogy to express or further an idea.
Many of the greats use associational concepts in their work to go from literal statements to the poetic by drawing comparisons to something else. Shakespeare used armloads of metaphors. The architect Santiago Calatrava frequently references skeletal structures in his building designs. George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm, was a statement on the folly of political idealism… only with animals. You probably already use tons of them in your daily conversations.
And associational thinking has a sibling… adjacent thinking. Think of it as adapting an idea from an unrelated source to solve a problem, like borrowing a wheel (transportation) to grind corn into a paste, or to turn water into power. We’ve been doing it for centuries.
I’ve been using this kind of thinking for most of my career in the visual arts. Rather than looking at other artists’ work for ideas and inspiration, I look elsewhere. I’ve pulled abstract shapes from nature, adapted principles from physics to composition and found inspiration for building color from the patterns and textures of old walls layered in graffiti. So many, I could write a book about it.
Inspiration is all around you, and it’s hidden in your history. You already have lots of non-art-related knowledge that can be converted into new ideas. You just have to learn how to look for it.
Here are some examples:
Find the relationships to what you already know.
Years ago, I taught a small representational gouache class in my studio. Two attendees brought a friend, an older man who had never picked up a brush or a pencil. Not surprisingly, he got frustrated within a few hours. When I checked in on him, he said he had no business being there and was going to leave.
I hesitated for just a beat and then said, “Before you go, tell me about you.” He quickly recapped his successful business career, noted his love for scarves, and said he currently ran a thriving high-end scarf business in his retirement. It was then I noticed he was wearing one.
I made a quick connection and said, “Well, you know two things; you know color, and you know pattern.” He lit up and replied, “Yes, I do.” And everything changed. Within half an hour, he was excitedly exploring paint on watercolor paper using the two tool sets he already had, creating large fields of color and pattern.
Seven years later, he came in to say ‘hi’. I asked if he was still painting, and he happily reported that he was.
A simple reframing of what he already knew lit the fire in the belly.
Connect to common themes
When someone struggles in one of my abstract classes, over-filling the canvas with too much stuff, I present an idea that we can all relate to. I suggest that selecting and organizing what you’re going to put into a painting is very much like what you’d do to set up your living room. You don’t put stuff everywhere, on every surface, and you definitely don’t put the same thing all around the room. There are areas to rest the eye, places that have purpose, colors, and patterns that resonate through the living space.
Because a living room is something we’re all familiar with, people can immediately see the connection. Same idea, different format. It’s true with music, film, graphic design, and a gallery space.
We can adapt ideas by thinking about familiar (but very different) things that use the same concepts.
Pull solutions from adjacent sources
Early in the 20th century, from 1929 to 1930, my grandmother wrote and illustrated a book loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. The two central characters were played in two dimensions by my father and my aunt. Very much a family project.
But she never got to publish the work. Six years later, her original art was destroyed in a hurricane. The only images that remained were black and white photos. It would be another hundred years before my cousin approached me with the idea of publishing the book and asked if I would re-illustrate it.
My grandmother’s written text and her illustrations were a remarkable achievement and I wanted to honor her work, not redo it. But how? The photos were small files, a little soft, speckled with dust, and colorless. It was a dilemma.
I digitally scaled up and cleaned the files, but was still left with just black and white as the base. Thanks to my experience as a graphic designer and attending about 500 printing-press runs, I realized that the photos were similar to the black plate in a four-color printing process. I could have the images printed on watercolor paper and tint them with watercolor.
However, all that gray tone could really kill the color. Thinking like a printer, I digitally shifted the art to a blue range, simulating the cyan plate of the black, yellow, cyan, and magenta process. You’d be surprised at how much blue is in most printed colors. The rest was adding warm transparent tones and augmenting the hue of the blue where needed.
Time in the printing room trenches gave me what I needed to figure out a way to create something new from something very old… and very valuable.
Look for a different way to solve.
Creativity is all about how we approach the problems we face. Finding parallels, analogies and corollaries simply means looking for similarities in the seemingly dissimilar. Often, it is a simple reframing of what we are looking at.
Life is like riding a horse. (Come up with four or five ways these two things are similar.)
Now, think of any major historical battle from a bird’s eye view and you might see the strategic connections to soccer, football or chess. Listen to a piece of classical music for the structure, tonal shifts, and patterns of softer or more intense passages. You might find that similar ideas often exist in paintings. Patterns in nature can inspire patterns for fashion and home décor. It’s not a big stretch to think about engineering buildings based on time-tested structures that have been perfected by nature over millions of years of trial and error.
Shakespeare, music, contemporary art, poetry, and a lot of great jokes are all built on associational and adjacent thinking.
The creative act isn’t an operators manual, it’s a poem.