Use It or Lose It

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Atelier Rouge Henri Matisse

We hear a lot about the term “outsider artists”, but there seems to be a lot of disagreement on who that term defines. Jonah Lehrer, in his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, makes his case: “The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don’t call them outsiders, we refer to them as young people. The virtue of youth, after all, is that the young don’t know enough to be insiders, cynical with expertise. While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks, it also comes with creative advantages . . .The young know less, which is why they often invent more.”

Despite the accepted notions that creativity peaks in youth and slowly declines with age, (a phenomenon of creative output known as Quetelet’s inverted U curve), other historiometric data indicates that it ain’t necessarily so. This is good news for those mid-career or middle-aged artists, novelists and scientists, who don’t follow the curve. While it is co…