Playfulness of Great Creators: Learning from Artists

by Laura Sweeney, EdD
Copyright July 30, 2008

One does not ordinarily think of playfulness as being the domain of highly successful, mature adults. One envisions them with their eyes on investments, hard work, and other business matters. Yet, there is one thing that separates great creators and self-realized individuals from other adults: Creators such as Picasso, Michelangelo, Einstein, W.B. Yeats, Miró, Chagall and numerous others employed playfulness to conceive great artistic products that positively changed the lives of everyone around them. From joyous solitary moments throughout their lives and especially in mature years, they yielded answers to what really makes people happy: the art of solitary play without limitations or fear of making mistakes. Those creators who fortunately lived long enough to reach what we refer to as “old age” reaped the benefits of personal happiness in elder years that even surpassed their formative years by utilizing playful manipulation of ideas and materials.



To be playful is to be frolicsome and joyful, to utilize the five senses in a manner that brings delight. For example, lively sculptors play with their sensual building materials, rubbing their palms up and down the surfaces of smooth forms that abruptly turn coarse and jagged. Their hands grasp a rigid, unbending object only to cheerily find it contrasts with the softness of humid clay and the texture of jagged wood. All five of the creators’ senses are involved as they smell the sweet scent of a vanilla candle contrasting earthy musk perfume nearby in the aroma therapy environment. Another artist plays with colorful pieces of paper cut into triangles as he fits them together in various playful ways while his wife dispenses glitter-glue in squiggly lines onto their design. A woman awakens from a dream, and like Salvador Dali’, she pours her vision out on canvas. Meanwhile, a scientist experiences a creative spark as he playfully ponders a problem that has challenged others for decades. His friend, the writer, jots down the first words that come to mind, only to rearrange them in playful ways as metaphors with humorous lyricism and underlying meanings. Each of these individuals, no matter where he is located, works together in a unified playful effort that transforms humanity by impacting its global audience.



Many adults do not realize the value of playfulness throughout adult years, opting to give up on their ability to play with unique concepts, shapes, and sounds; however, leaving one’s mind idle eats away at both longevity and memory. Rather than to accept life without playfulness, artists such as Cindy Sherman, a contemporary photographer, have learned how to fully explore the wonders of playful imagination, integrating playfulness into their art. Knafo affirms,


“Sherman's art depicts a theater in which she manipulates her favorite toy--her own body—-to play out an infinite number of roles. She literally makes a spectacle of herself as she becomes innocent girl, seductress, man, woman, hermaphrodite, old, young, rich, poor, monster, beast, etc.” (Knafo)

Sherman does that which countless women of all ages do when they apply makeup, model dresses and color their hair for pleasure in an attempt to act out fantasy roles, like the starlets of cinema, even if it is merely the theater of their own fantasy. Every photo Sherman makes represents a cinema still-life in which she is the ever-changing blonde, redhead, or sultry brunette from the small town to the big city, both a doer and a passive receiver. Her playfulness over the years evolved from putting on shows of a youthful, refreshingly self-absorbed woman to those of a mature woman exploring dolls in photography to enact trauma, to imagine all the possible situations that confront women throughout their lives. It seems she has asked the question through visual metaphors, “What if this happened to me?” The photographic process evidently characterizes pleasure for Sherman who demonstrates that make-believe play benefits all ages and can also be appreciated by observers.



Albert Einstein is often noted for having shared his opinions on play, creativity and fantasy. He revealed it was important that parents read fairy tales to their children to develop their imagination and intelligence and even remarked that cerebral play was just as important as other learning methodologies. Einstein observed, “This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” He found resolutions to problems in playful imagination, through “signs” and “images,” rather than through traditional academia. (Wenger, 12-13) As an alternative of playing games with hands, Einstein utilized inner thought play, a method of combining numerous abstract concepts in contemplation.



Pablo Picasso, although perfectly capable of rendering realistic portraiture, delved into abstract concepts and the visions of children. His paintings seem too childish for some viewers to even give them consideration, but Picasso, who was a teenage prodigy of realism, later chose to play with color, shape, line, and multiple viewpoints in his Cubist style and with monochromatic vision in his Pink and Blue Periods. The artist knew he was capable of rendering perfect realism, but making unique shapes from a child’s perspective took greater knowledge of playful rhythm, balance, pattern, texture, value and color. Berube reminds us that even the best education specialists like Gardner appreciated Picasso’s childlike vision because great minds identified with Picasso’s playful genius:



“‘One of Picasso's dictums was that true art first resides with the child, a ‘genius of childhood,’ in Picasso’s words, that ‘it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like them.’”(Berube, 82)



Picasso’s The Three Musicians (1921) exemplifies distorted forms filled in with outrageous, playful colors to awaken playful visual lyricism while carrying the viewers’ eyes around the canvas in a visual dance. Squares and rectangles seem to boogie with one another as if they were animated on the flat surface. Picasso played with the various layouts before adding primary and secondary colors right out of the tube or barely mixed, remarking consistently, “Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once we grow up.” (Brainy Quote.com) Picasso most successfully returned to playfulness even in later years beyond the age of eighty whilst not sacrificing the fresh vision of his art bringing inner joy and peace to artist and viewer alike.



Salvador Dali invoked playful dream images in intelligent-art-hybrids, juxtaposing anything that did not ordinarily belong together. This playful pairing of dream elements explored the emergent psychoanalysis of his days. (Suckale, 698) Many critics did not understand why a serious artist would clown around in this manner and why his art took on importance for its novel presentation of adjacent symbols. In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Dali’ plays with the realism of the unconscious psyche of its protagonist, St. Anthony, who holds up a cross to a caravan of six animated beasts that carry various temptations upon them. The anthropomorphic animals with elongated legs carry women, gold, a pyramid, shrines and a tower upon their backs—not the average dreamer’s dream—but possibly a jocular observation about the nature of dreaming. The viewer is challenged to guess why there are six, and not seven, beasts and why there are small figures of men beneath the towering animals. Such combinatory pictorial elements are none other than Dali’s playful gesticulation.



Joan Miro’ also enjoyed playing with art elements and most particularly line. Suckale writes of “Miro’s art, “Many figures, objects and signs appear, overlap and take part in the magical game that is a mixture of carnival, theatre, and fairytale.” (Suckale, 606) Harlequins, cats, butterflies, anthropomorphic shapes and jocular lines play together in Harlequin’s Carnival (1924/25), and in People and Dogs Before the Sun (1949). Miro’ playfully paints in the basic shapes, filling in the lines like a coloring book with primary colors and black on a neutral background. Flowing organic lines with black dots on the ends overlap and turn into repetitive spirals that dance around the page in visual symphony evocative of dance.



Marc Chagall, in Double Portrait with Wineglass (1917), simplifies the figures to the bare minimum so that they become flat and angular with penetrating geometric lines. The playful female protagonist lifts her male counterpart on her back as his slightly disengaged head laughs about a glass of wine that he is about to consume. From his glass, an angel seems to emerge, splitting the background into two halves, a white sky to the left of the canvas and a yellow sky to the right of the canvas. No doubt, these two painted characters indulge in play amidst the challenges faced by ordinary couples. Most obvious is the way Chagall plays with color in this work in others, teasing the viewer and challenging her to interpret underlying meanings.



Creators habitually prefer to contradict easily understood realism in favor of uncertain play to innovate as well as provide solutions. Without such play, change would not occur. For instance, the director, Federico Fellini, explored the mythology lying beneath imagination in his film entitled Juliet of the Spirits (1965). The director opted to say good-bye to the hum-drum, ordinary world of cinema as his film penetrated the playful, innovative, fantasy realm in which his protagonist named Giuletta, a middle-aged housewife, ultimately freed her own inner child (within her mind) from a symbolic bed of martyrdom. This film characterizes the female coming-of-age story when Giulietta finally can play games with the clown-like and colorful, next-door neighbors who celebrate audaciously throughout the night. They beckon her to act childish and dress in primary colors with them at their home. Meanwhile, her husband, whom she discovers has been unfaithful, decides to give Giulietta some space for reflection for the first time in her life. Whereas some spectators view this film as being too sad, I believe this is a positive female coming-of-age celebration embracing women’s playfulness at middle-age as a viable life option. The enlightened Giulietta cast away the restraints of middle class appearances, but it was really the director of the film who decided to begin to produce films based loosely on ancient mythologies.



The Irish author, William Butler Yeats, also played with myths and fantasies of Celtic origins, pleasant fascinations such as fairies and goblins, the supernatural daydreams of a playful otherworld. He kept private painting-journals which were until recently little known to the world but in which Yeats, also an artist by training, drew colorful mystical symbols to try to understand what he perceived as the spiritual aspects of writing. Without such mindful inner play, writers cannot produce fresh works of poetry and romance. Yeats had the playful courage to produce works that mediocre writers never accomplish for they are too fearful to delve in the playful mind lest their peers might be judgmental of their play.



Michelangelo often displayed this sense of humor and audacity, even hiding his own portrait throughout his mural or displaying hidden symbolism. Whereas his art was based on Catholic mythology, he humorously inserted what viewers might define as playful, underlying commentaries on the subjects he depicted. Hence, even today there is much conjecture concerning the messages he wished to convey. Playing with silly gests throughout the Sistine Chapel added to the appeal found by viewers of later generations.



Creators of great arts played and still do play for hours on end, often in blissful solitude until the final moment when they determine the best way to fit together pieces of an intelligent-art-hybrid and happily reveal their creations to the world. Often times, the public has been shocked by creators who juxtaposed oppositional elements in the same context, such as when Salvador Dali dared depict components of dreams in a manner resembling the three-dimensional world. “Combinatory play,” as described by Einstein, remains the essence of this manipulative process used by creators in which various ingredients, materials or envisioned dances, carouse around in the minds and hands of creators, penetrating each other like Miro’s shapes penetrate one another on canvas or dissected like a Dali’ icon in a dream environment. Everything in existence in the artist’s mind and in his hands is relevant and shares a dynamic relationship once the combinatory play has reached its pinnacle. Playfulness is indeed the domain of great creators who teach us to take it easy and get into the flow of ideas, to enjoy the rhythm of elements that ignite sparks in our brains. The best ideas sprout from play experienced in the classroom environment, from play in solitary thought, or from play conducted on a brainstorming team. Adults today learn from creators that they must lighten up and enjoy the playful emergence of visions, providing hope for all who embrace them.



Laura Sweeney


Works Cited

Berube, Maurice R. Eminent Educators: Studies in Intellectual Influence. Greenwood, CT: Westport Press, 2000.

Brainy Quote.com http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/pablopicas104106.html
Fellini, Federigo. Juliet of the Stars. Film. Rome, Italy: Janus Films, 1965.

Knafo, Daniele. "Dressing Up and Other Games of Make Believe: The Function of Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman." American Imago (1996): 139-64.

Spector, Jack. On the Limits of Understanding Modern Art. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Suckale, Robert et al. Masterpieces of Western Art. London: Taschen, 2007.

National Library of Ireland. "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats." Yeats (2008): 1-20.

Wenger, Win Ph.D. and Richard Poe. The Einstein Factor: A Proven Method for Increasing Your Intelligence. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1990.