The slightly modified excerpt below is taken from Eikleberry, Carol (2007). The career guide for creative and unconventional people. Ten Speed Press. Image by RosZie.
The artist
“The essence of art lies in an unusual sensitivity to some aspect of everyday experience. This sensitivity is something we were born with. The sensitivity may be to pictures, sounds, language, movement, human behavior, values (truth, honesty), or whatever.
If you are not sure what your sensitivity is, think about the kinds of ugliness that most distress you. A person’s particular sensitivity brings them both pleasure and pain. An artistic sensitivity to something combines the agony of confronting the ordinary with the counter-reaction of artistic expression and possibly the creation of a sublime experience.
In going about their work, Artistic types prefer to use intuition, which looks for what the senses don’t pick up and, most particularly, for the relationships between facts rather than just for the facts themselves. This tends to lead them to awareness of what is wrong, within their arena of sensitivity.
Therefore, artistic creativity begins not with problem-solving, but with “problem-finding”—with the seeing or sensing of a problem. Creative people focus “on what is wrong, what is missing, what needs to be changed to make something better.” And while the emphasis is on problem-finding, as it turns out, the way a problem is set up often suggests the resolution. The resolution then translates in a particular project that the creative individual needs to undertake, which will reveal a suitable job role in a particular industry.”
Go to article 1.6 ‘What career suits you best‘