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The Importance Of The Art Of Art

Satisfactory Essays

How many times have we looked at photographs or paintings, read a book or listened to music and then find ourselves stopping and wondering to ourselves or thinking out loud “How in the heck did the artist ever come up with that idea?” There obviously was something that inspired them to create what we are seeing, reading or hearing. How to find inspiration is something everyone struggles with in the creative fields.
Everyone!
Our cognitive biases reaffirm our beliefs, shielding us from accepting the possibility there are other ways of doing things. Something such as the way we go about photographing the railroad has been reinforced through habitual thought patterns. “I must stand near the tracks and create a wedge like composition.” “I must have light on the nose.” “The train must be coming towards me.” “The sun must be behind me.” “I must compose by the rule of thirds.”
Talk about complacency. And a robbing of inspiration, creativity and voice.
These unconscious biases are reinforced through rampant social media praise which obliviously paralyzes us into a rut of status quo biased action. We do what others do, as this was the first information we gathered on how to go about taking a photo of a train, we learned by mimicking others. It can be hard for us to change our way of thinking, but if we can become aware of our biases, we can move past the bondage of conditioned thought.
What do we need to do to find inspiration? We can be inspired to get out near the rails and take photographs, but if we don’t add creativity into the mix, we will continue to take the same photographs as we have in the past and eventually feel fatigued due to the limiting beliefs that we are not creative.
We need to find ways to embrace the creative spirit we were all born with, but the indoctrination centers known as school have over time seemingly beat this out of us, through the belief there is only one right answer to any question or problem. And if we didn’t produce the “correct” answer, we began to slowly stifle our creativity out of fear and ridicule of being wrong. So, we fall in line, letting a portion of ourselves perish in the process.
The groupthink of the gatekeepers of railroad photography has beaten the creativity

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