My husband and I recently attended an exhibit featuring glass artist, Dale Chihuly. If you aren’t familiar with his work, google his name. There is great disagreement in the art world as to whether Chihuly is an artist, a craftsman or a mere technician, but that academic debate does not impact my astonishment and sheer enjoyment of what this man and his team of collaborators have done, and continue to do, with blown glass. As we walked from room to room looking at dazzling, extremely colorful displays of glass work, the word creative kept coming to mind. This man, building on the vision of glass artists before him, has caused me to look at art glass in a new and very creative way.

It also got me to thinking, just what is creativity anyway, and is it confined to the art world? So the first thing I did was grab my trusty dictionary and look up a few related words. To create means to cause to exist, bring into being, originate, to give rise to, produce. Being creative is having the ability or power to create things, characterized by originality and expressiveness, imaginative. A creator is one that creates. Creation means the act of creating.

I couldn’t find a single definition that made “art” the sole vehicle or end product for creative thought and action. Sure, there was a reference to “expressiveness” and “imaginative” but those words do not exclusively belong to the domain of the art world. Certainly architects can be expressive. Inventors are imaginative. And the list goes on.

So creativity is thinking outside the box. It’s looking at something familiar and tweaking it. It’s also inventing whole new things, thoughts, actions.

Next Monday I’ll look at the relevance of creativity in life and in business. In the meantime, check out a press release from John Hopkins University that “sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life.” Entitled This Is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity, it can be found at www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2008/02_26_08.html