What's Found Before It's Known?
- Brian A. Kavanaugh
- 11 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Creativity is often described as a form of problem-solving.
There is certainly truth in this.
Creativity can help solve problems.
But over the past two decades of facilitating creative practices, one pattern has become clear.
Within an artistic or creative studio practice, creativity often serves a different purpose.
A problem is not what initiates movement.
Interest is.
What is encountered first is uncertainty.
There is no singular answer waiting to be found.
There may not even be a question.
There is simply a space where something could happen that beckons one to decide what comes next, guided less by answers than by curiosity.
A mark is made.
That mark creates new possibilities.
A second decision follows.
Then another.
Over time, a path emerges.
Even when the destination is decided upon - a portrait of a friend, a favorite character, or a familiar landscape - the discoveries are made along the way.
Not because the path was planned in advance, but because each decision creates the conditions for the next one.
In this way, creativity can be understood less as a method for solving problems and more as a strategy for moving through ambiguity.
The distinction matters.
When creativity is framed primarily as problem-solving, ambiguity is often treated as an obstacle - something to reduce, eliminate, or overcome on the way to a solution.
Within a creative practice, ambiguity serves a different role.
It becomes the material itself.
The uncertainty is not standing in the way of the process.
The uncertainty is the process.
It becomes familiar - not because it has been mastered, but because it has been visited often.
A person rarely enters the studio to solve a problem.
They arrive with interests.
Curiosities.
Materials they want to explore.
Images that linger.
Experiences they want to understand differently.
They are not trying to communicate something they already know.
They are trying to encounter something they have not yet experienced.
Through the accumulation of decisions, something appears that had not existed before.
That "something" is not limited to the work itself.
The work becomes evidence.
It proves that this particular way of seeing, arranging, deciding, or responding is possible.
Once experienced, it exists simultaneously as both memory and possibility.
It becomes memory because it has been lived.
It becomes possibility because it can be lived again differently.
Every creative act quietly enlarges the world in this way.
Not only because something new has been made, but because something new has become possible.
This is one of the reasons I often describe creativity as a strategy for encountering the unknown.
Not because the goal is to remain lost.
But because the act of making allows a person to remain in contact with uncertainty long enough to discover what it makes available.
Sometimes what is encountered is an answer.
More often it is a better question.
Sometimes it is a preference that did not previously exist, brought into being through experience itself.
The value does not always lie in solving something.
Sometimes the value lies in making something possible that wasn't possible before.
And that begins with the willingness to proceed before knowing exactly where the path leads.
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