So suitably charged with oxygen we all settled back down again expectantly. Tara sat down too, next to the flip chart on which was squeezed a couple of blobs of black acrylic paint. “Now time for the warm up” she says cryptically! Eagerly we sit there in silence wondering what this warm up might be. Tara reaches out and with splayed fingers pulls her hand through the paint across the paper. Suddenly two people leap up and head for the chart picking up different coloured paint tubes on the way and attack the paper with their hands. More follow and soon the simple black lines are multicoloured and lots of us are trying to get acrylic paint off our hands with one small piece of paper tissue! The second flip chart gets brought into play and now we have two masterpieces emerging from the collective group creativity. There is a pause and Tara asks a question.
“Who finds this a non-creative mess?” This began an interesting discussion about creativity being larger than messing about with paint. Some felt they would do this but not in their home. One person would join in but only with a paint brush. Several people defined creativity as a something happening inside their mind rather than out on public show. All of these perspectives on creativity are valid and expand for us the group the possibilities of creativity. We all have our own preferences and experiences. The ability to adopt different perspectives leads to wisdom. First of course its useful to discover that other people do have thought processes that are quite different from our own. Tara welcomed all these perspectives and diffused some of the ‘internal’ judging that was often expressed by members of the group who felt their unique insight was out of step with the rest of us. We finished our painting and moved on to explore a different aspect of creativity, discovering our own experts. See the Masterpiece here.