Unexpected Inspiration, Extraordinary Creativity

Friday before last, I woke up with a desire for Indian food and thought about a great restaurant we’d been to at least a year ago in Stamford, CT. The experience then was exceptional, so Greg and I decided to go to dinner and a movie. Taj Indian Cuisine restaurant did not disappoint—the food, cocktails, and service were superb. When the mixologist, Sanket, stopped by our table, and we complimented him on the cocktails, he told us the story behind the cocktail Greg had ordered (the red vase-like container in the wooden box pictured above):

Sanket had a pickled beetroot dish at Barcelona, a Spanish restaurant across the street from Taj, that was so good he decided to “translate” it into a drink. He honored his intuition, and with curiosity took a culinary experience into a novel direction. The result was “Drunken Botanist”—pistachio shell-infused gin, homemade pistachio syrup, and beetroot juice, garnished with mint and pineapple leaves—absolutely delicious. Sanket says that his mixology is his art, and he pulls inspiration from sources all around him, like the organic fruit roll-ups (which were a fragrant delight on my mango drink) from his three-year-old son.

This story says so much about how we can find inspiration in the multitude of things we experience, if we only take the time to sense into the possibilities that can arise. I appreciated Sanket’s creative impulse, taking something from one realm and translating it into a new creation—a new experience. Creativity is the myriad ways we express ourselves to manifest the ideas and dreams that dwell within. There is an ingenuity to connecting things that don’t already belong to a familiar pattern.

Author of Creative Calling, Chase Jarvis, says that creativity is a habit that everyone can develop because we are all innately creative. Jarvis attributes his success as a creator to the formula he calls DEAR:

Deconstruct the various elements

Emulate and put the elements together in the best way you can

Analyze what happens

Repeat and keeps honing it until you find success

Following this formula, Jarvis draws inspiration from other creations and creators, which he says is key to growing and expanding our creativity. Jarvis uses what he calls “cross-pollination” to capture inspiration from other arenas. As a photographer, he’s learned more about light by studying oil painting and, to shoot lifestyle images, he studied figure drawing.

Arthur Simms, “A Ride for the Massive” - Rope, Wood, Glue, Metal, Screws, Wheel Cart, Plastic

Jeremiah Drake, a young artist I worked with in the mid-2000s, when I served as Executive and Artistic Director of the Riverside Theatre, also drew inspiration from the items he came across.  Found objects—the metal, wood, glass, and the like that would call out to him as he roamed the streets of New York City—became the source for his artistic statements.

Assemblage art is taking mundane objects and combining them in new and surprising ways. Such is the visual art and sculptures of Arthur Simms, who began using found materials to create objects as a child. In a recent New York Times article, Simms says his art is a cross-cultural dialogue that merges his Jamaican heritage with his American education and experience. Hemp rope has become the recognizable medium he wraps around his objects. Simms takes his memories and integrates them with the cultural experiences that inform the language he has created as his survival mechanism.

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable, and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

— David Whyte

Whyte's poem brings to bear the question of what creativity can we source to bring our hidden gifts to the world. And if we take the examples from a master mixologist, a photographer, and assemblage visual artists, perhaps our gaze can find inspiration in the commonplace things around us.