Something that I have never understood, or even least, appreciated, is the insistence in education that everyone should take mathematics, five days week for the majority of their school lives. The reality is that most people never again use the mathematical processes so diligently learned beyond the basic necessities of addition, subtraction and multiplication. As I have written before, I have a friend who states on a regular basis that another day has passed when she didn’t use quadratic equations and I’d be the first to admit that any enjoyment I got out the said mathematical process was in laying it out on the page like concrete poetry. I never cared what the right answer was. Probably that was why the headmaster at the time took one look at my choices for further education, sans maths, and literally ‘washed his hands of me’. At least some of my contemporaries went on to Oxford and Cambridge, completed a degree and then promptly abandoned it all in favour of something distinctly different. One became a greengrocer where the display of vegetables by colour and shape defied mathematical logic and tapped into a deeper understanding. He reserved his skill with numbers for the vagaries of calculating VAT, an early version of GST, which is guaranteed to confound anyone without a degree in higher mathematics.

Maths teachers talk about the value of logic, about its application to everything else in life and of course this is all reinforced by a system that places such emphasis on this one area of human activity in that everything else is measured against it. Someone once said to me that a failed maths student is worth more than a passed arts student. In fact, I can recall one year where so many students did so poorly in the final maths exams, that all of their grades were altered upwards and all of the lesser subjects were downgraded to achieve the ‘proper’ balance. It certainly didn’t make any sense to me. Linear logic as a measure of human capacity has its place but it certainly is not the be all and end all.

Recently I saw a devised means of assessing one aspect of creativity. It denied linear logic completely and embraced the random. The essence of the test was to have the recipient write down ten words that have the least association. Perhaps the reason why maths figures so prominently is that there is always a right answer. When it comes to creativity, the supposed foundation of all current educational practises, there is not one answer but a plethora of possibilities. Does this mean that creativity is illogical or beyond logic and therefore can’t be measured in ways that satisfy examination algorithms? The safe bet is the single answer.

Over the course of time, I’ve had debates and arguments with a variety of people over the definition of creativity and imagination. Sticky topics. Those that talk about coming up with something completely new, miss the point. The results of both imagination and creativity may well look like the result of magic or at least a process defying logical thought up by an eccentric. I have always valued the eccentrics.

 Adjective:

…..deviating from the recognized, the irregular; the erratic, the peculiar, the odd, having the axis or support away from the centre: an eccentric wheel.

Making the seemingly irrational jump has been the basis of human discovery and understanding for a million years or so depending where you think the axolotl

ends and homo sapiens begin, but no one starts from a blank canvas even when the answer to 2 + 2 seems to equal 4. If 4 was the only answer we’d still be back in the pond. As far as I’m concerned, it is the realigning of known elements, the random association, that is the key. For every stage production I put together over thirty years I often had a beginning point and sometimes an end point, neither of which responded to any kind of mathematical logic. As with the Divergent Association Task, they were far apart semantically and the narrative that eventually linked them was one of suggested connection much like the word game of altering one letter in a word to create another in the sequence. Plot and story had no bearing. These were and are literary elements. Theatre is different. What I created were linked visual experiences. The closest I ever came to finding an equivalent was in the work of Robert Wilson, creator of Einstein on the Beach which has nothing to do with either Einstein or beaches….but that was a discovery very late in my career.

As a visual artist using painting as a prime means of expression, my approach is no different. The notion of a linear approach as in a portrait or a landscape, creative as either of those motifs can be, has never been a consideration. Yesterday I read a comment from an artist who bemoaned the lack of a story in painting. He considered painting that did not have a recognisable internal story or a backstory of artistic venture, as inferior and quoted Rothko as someone who did not have a story to his work but only a conclusion. In my mind the difference between story and narrative is crucial. Story is a literary device based upon a known logic of sequence derived from the seven plotlines dreamed up by the ancient Greeks and flogged to death ever since. The word story pertains to a set of scenes sequenced to seem significant. It can be something as simple as relating a personal anecdote, with a beginning, middle and end. Narrative can be defined as a flow of events and derives from a quite different place with the creative reassociation of elements that is the basis of creativity and imagination coming into play. Rothko is a narrative.

To suggest that the known plot lines resemble LIFE as we live it, is nonsense as is the idea of beginning, middle and end let alone the predictable conclusion. The constantly shifting realm of possibilities creates a fluidity that denies all such linear mathematical logic. The possible jumps that are the very definition of creativity and imagination cannot ever be linear in the sense of moving logically towards a single answer. Even before the answer emerges the problem, and its parameters, have altered shape.

I can’t speak for the maths teachers in the world because I simply don’t understand their world but as an artist I know that the way that I think won’t get me any credit in maths exams unless I can turn the exam paper into a three dimensional sculpture but then again, that would drive the marking algorithm into a frenzy from which it would not recover, assuming that it had consciousness in the first place – a noted aim of the world of mathematicians who dream of creating an artificial intelligence that can either imitate or outdo the human brain. I somehow doubt that the illogical creative jumps of which the eccentric human brain is capable will ever be imitated.