Art and creativity. Will Gompertz

Will Gompertz is the Art Director of the BBC and was the Communications Director of the Tate Gallery for six years.

In 2013, he published "What Are You Looking At? 150 Years of Modern Art," one of my favorite books. This book changed the way I see art and artists.

The author encourages to go further: "It's not deciding whether a work is good or bad, but understanding in what way and why it fits into the history of modern art. Art is like a game. All you need to know are the basic rules so that the previously bewildered begin to understand something."

Throughout the book, he explains the reasons behind movements, artists, and their works in a different and highly entertaining way (you learn a lot!).

One comes to the conclusion that it is as important what surrounds the artist (his influences, at all levels: artistic, political, social and technological), as his own personal vision.

In his book "Think like an artist" (published recently, in November 2015) he develops this very interesting topic of personal vision.

In it he encourages the development of creativity, based on the premise that "human beings are born with the capacity to be creative and that we also have the need to express ourselves. The only decisions we have to make are what we want to say and through which medium.

Our unique vision of things motivates the choices we make, differentiating our work from anyone else's. Our point of view is our signature.

The individual peculiarities, often interpreted by society as weaknesses, become a strength when we create. They are defining traits that give us a unique filter when we look at the world and when the world looks at us.

No one else could make those connections in the same way: what we conceive is uniquely ours.

If we observe the early work of any artist, we will discover an imitator in search of their own voice.

It's not about where you get things from, but where you take them to (Jean-Luc Godard)."

There are two artists who impressed me a lot when I saw them in a video while reading "What Are You Looking At?".

They conveyed to me truth and heart in what they were doing:

Marina Abramovic. Performance. "The artist is present" (2010)

"In the work Marina Abramovic remained seated in a wooden chair at a small table in the middle of MoMA's enormous lobby. She committed to sitting in the chair for the museum's entire seven and a half hour opening hours, without moving or taking breaks. Visitors, if they wished, could sit in the empty chair facing her and thus consider themselves an integral part of the artwork."

Jackson Pollock. Abstract Expressionism. "Pollock 51" (by Hans Namuth, 1951)

Hans Namuth photographed and filmed Jackson Pollock while he worked in his studio: "Enormous canvases splattered with paint. There was no trace of brush or brushstroke because there couldn't be. Pollock had spread the canvas on the floor and thrown household paint onto it, striking and letting it drip. He attacked the surface from all sides: walking in the middle, stopping; all of it was part of the painting. He manipulated the fresh paint with spatulas, knives, sticks; he added sand, pieces of glass, cigarette butts. However, the work emanates a surprising sense of coherence and rhythm, despite the speed at which Pollock painted. It's not anarchic, it's improvised. The size of the canvases (his work Mural measures two and a half by six meters) makes you feel like you're witnessing an event."