Creativity is hard work

THOMAS Edison was ever so slightly off the mark when he said what he so famously said about genius. In fact, it is creativity (not genius) that is '99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration'.

Too many, perhaps including the creative inventor himself, believe wholeheartedly that creativity is something unique that only a few gifted individuals have.

The Ancient Greeks imagined it to be a spark of intervention by the muses, while philosophers from Plato to Popper have seen it as ineffably unpredictable and randomly non- rational.

In fact, studies of creative people show that creativity entails - above everything else - lots and lots of hard work. Contrary to popular imagination, genuinely creative achievements almost never come from that flash of insight out of the blue but, rather, after years of hard work.

Yes, epiphanies may occur, but only on the foundation of steadfast preparation because they are grounded in enormous bodies of domain knowledge.

You disagree?

Take someone nobody would call non-creative: Mr Iskandar Jalil, Singapore's master ceramicist.

At 64, long after he has indubitably acquired the requisite skills, he still works very long hours at his craft. In him, we see persistence and perseverance.

There is painstaking attention to details in sketching his conceptualisations, then hours spent throwing at the potter's wheel: urging, pinching, pulling and coaxing the clay rhythmically in interdependent movements, like those of a dance - only to cast aside that which is less than perfect.

He said: 'I accept no excuses for poor quality and shoddy work. I pity the garbage man who collects the rejects I junk every morning.'

Such perseverance allows the development of technique and the acquisition of a repertoire of skills - how to do things and how to do them variably and differently, something that can be honed only over the years.

In pottery, Mr Iskandar said, 'to just get the basics of the craft right, you need four to six years. To find out and understand your own style, you need another five to 10 years. And to become a good potter, another 10 to 20 years'.

He himself was declared a master potter by his then 78-year-old sensei (teacher) in Japan, Shoji Hamada, only in November 2000.

Inspiration is hard work

IT WAS in Japan that he first learnt his craft, back in 1972, under a Colombo Plan scholarship. It is virtuoso skills that Mr Iskandar has acquired that allow him to go a step beyond.

Another facet of extreme effort - being completely taken by one's work. Like other creative people scholars have observed, Mr Iskandar is highly engaged in and enormously devoted to his work.

Completely single-minded about pottery, he is most rejuvenated by his work rather than other pursuits. Work is seen as a source of great pleasure, fulfilment and meaning.

'Clay has been a trusted friend, a companion. Not a single day passes by without me touching or thinking about her. During vacations, meals, prayers, even dreams, I conceptualise new ideas of her. Not to touch clay for a day is rare for me, even suicidal,' he said.

He is always thinking about his work - while on his 10km runs in the morning, browsing in the market, cruising on his BMW motorcycle up the North-South Highway to Malacca on one of his clay-hunting trips, and so on.

At the potter's wheel, he experiences a totality of focus upon the work so the self disappears and he becomes one with his work.

'I was often drawn to my workshop at early dawn or late at night, disturbing my parents' slumber (when they were alive), to enjoy the intimacy and response that clay gives me. As my twilight years approach, I continue to love clay not with the passion I used to have but with quiet reverence, respect and dignity.'

Any other reason to work very hard?

One wellspring of creativity is the fusing together of disparate ideas and concepts. This means that the more domains of knowledge an individual accumulates and integrates, the more likely he is to make novel links among them.

New ideas often emerge by making analogies, so new ideas are often inspired by previous situations that don't belong to the same area.

Often, a sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or 'matrices of thought', as one scholar describes it, leads to that creative leap, the seeing of an analogy where no one saw one before.

But you will need lots of domain knowledge to begin with. You must know a lot about a lot, so you need to work hard at learning a lot.

Mr Iskandar said his one weakness is an inordinate love for books. He also learns through travelling. His first Colombo scholarship took him to India to learn about textiles, his second to Japan for pottery. Both experiences are melded together in his work: Nippon and Hindustan, both Asian, yet worlds apart.

'Their cultures, beliefs and geography have taught me the value of a simple life and the beauty of nature. India taught me how to be happy with little. Japan taught me wabi, sabi and - in later years - shibui, Zen's highest state of reverence for beauty, unassuming and profound,' he said.

The result is a stillness, quietude and contemplation, a comforting silence and peace in and around the subtle and restrained beauty of his bowls, jugs, pitchers and vases, ceramics that speak for themselves.

But what about Edison's 1 per cent?

Even inspiration is never necessarily something mystical. In fact, something that seems quite common in the processes that lead up to the creative moment are task constraints.

Yes, constraints that pundits say stifle creativity actually specify two things: what is precluded - reliable, repetitive, routinised responses; and what is promoted - the unusual and unexpected.

For example, by precluding repetition, you can promote variability or change.

Pointing to three small pieces of work which form the series he calls Square One, Mr Iskandar said: 'I could make these by the hundreds and sell them. But I've made these three, and they are all I'll make. I don't churn out products.'

So he went on to other pots. That is why the Iskandar oeuvre is one of non-stasis and variability, where everything is always up for grabs, shifting, never merely fixed. His work, from the humble, quiet pot to powerful, progressive ceramics, has developed a dual sense of the past and the contemporary, of order and unruliness.

By limiting one's search for solutions, constraints also direct one where to look for them.

For Mr Iskandar, New Zealand or British or Japanese clay is too neat, too clean. They don't have the impurities and graininess that give local clay its character, he said. Using local clay, he has developed his trademark brilliant blue colours and rough earth textures or oriental glazes of shino and ash.

'It makes my day if I can make something beautiful out of the ugly instead. With local clay, the accidental oxidation-reduction reactions that occur inside my gas kiln give rise to many beautiful surprises.'

Yet another example: Once he had decided not to use commercial glazes, which he called 'dangerous chemicals', he chose to limit himself to 'a few self-concocted glazes in order to be resourceful with what little I have'.

After much experimentation, the glazes he now uses are self-prepared coloured slips made from local clays - white clay from Jalan Bahar, red clay from Redhill and brown terracotta from Alexandra Road, for example.

He now glazes only the insides of pots for waterproofing while the outsides are left unglazed and coloured naturally. This, he said, led to a renaissance in his work, with warm oranges, blues and rustic browns emerging.

Once, in Sweden for an exhibition, he was very taken by the gorgeous blue streams in its picturesque countryside. Yet, he observed, Swedish potters did not use blue.

Working with different pottery techniques and clays, he experimented until he found that cobalt carbonate would give him the unique blue he wanted, which led to his signature textured blue-tinted pots.

Strong support needed

STILL, all that hard work so the spark can turn into a fire would not be possible save for a supportive milieu.

Speaking about his family, Mr Iskandar said: 'As a husband, I have to apologise to my wife because I spend too much time at the workshop or travelling. My mother joins me at times, sharing her sorrows and joys, while I work.'

People behave differently in different contexts, just as iron behaves differently if immersed in pure water compared to pure sulphuric acid. But just as both iron and sulphuric acid transform each other, so people and their environments transform each other.

What develops cannot be predetermined by summing up the characteristics of individuals who make up such groups - Mr Iskandar's family, his community of potters and artists, his Malay community - any more than we can determine the properties of sodium chloride or table salt by adding up the properties of sodium and chlorine.

But we can be supportive.

As Mr Iskandar walked me out and showed me his very fetching BMW motorcycle parked by the kerb at his Kembangan home, something about his quietude made me think of philosopher Susan Sontag's description of the artist's renunciation.

In The Aesthetics Of Silence, she said that the artist seeks embodiment in an art form whose very material nature clashes with spirit itself. But having climbed the ladder, in Wittgenstein's metaphor, the consummate artist throws it away behind him.

I think Mr Iskandar has.

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