Essay

How does environment affect the creative output?

In this essay I propose to look at how the surrounding world and the smaller more intimate spaces in a creative’s life can make an impact on their work with particular reference to the work of the Finnish-Swedish artist and author Tove Jansson.

Addressing the issue of work spaces, Christian Jarrett said “The spaces we occupy shape who we are and how we behave. This has serious consequences for our psychological well-being and creative performance. Given that many of us spend years working in the same room, or even at the same desk, it makes sense to organize and optimize that space in the most beneficial ways possible.” In his article he describes how it is possible to improve the existing work space and how using scientific principles can increase productivity and creativeness.

Whilst these findings may be useful, particularly in the office environment, it is debatable as to whether creativity can be increased as a direct response to improvements in the environmental surroundings. This scientific approach takes no account of the differences in the personality of the individual or how they respond to working with many others around them. I first read this article because I don’t work well in my University studio. I find it hard to think let alone have any creative ideas at all with thirty odd people surrounding me. There are people who are discussing their work, people sparking ideas off each other, people responding to the stimulus by  creating an incredible, vast, unending amount of work and at the other extreme is me  who can’t create a single  character I want to progress with. I am not alone many creative people are extremely sensitive to the influence of their surroundings and yet there are others who seem so entranced by their own internal creations that they can work in the most distracting of circumstances.

The poet Robert Frost said  “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts the moment you get up in the morning and doesn’t stop until you get to the office” and this seems to be what happens to me when I go into the studio. While none of my issues with workspaces were addressed in the article I loved the opening quote and it led me to experiment with the impact of   different places on my work; a different place to shape what I was creating. I’ve since found a favorite place to generate  my creative concepts and I then use the studio to put these concepts to use. This creative space is a cliché in itself; a coffee shop named Mrs Athas.  It was here that while I was supposed to be making observational drawings of people I started creating characters, they were little creatures that would wear, hold, hide in various coffee shop related objects; I called them coffee gremlins (fig. one and two). It was then that it was brought to my attention that I would never have created these coffee based creatures elsewhere, even if I had made the same creatures and they had been coffee based they wouldn’t look the same, they wouldn’t wear the same teacups, they wouldn’t hide in the same old wooden coffee grinder. This was a completely subconscious response to the place I was in, the coffee gremlins were not created to show my love of coffee or where I like to draw, these creatures were directly born out the surrounding environment.

I am not making any attempt to claim this as a startling new insight, it is not a particularly new concept that environment is important. In the 1870’s this became a tenet of the group of artists that became known as the Impressionists from the satirical reaction of critics to Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (fig. three). They believed that it was necessary to capture the essence of the moment by painting en plein air (in the open air) and using rapid brush strokes to create an impression of the scene in bright natural light, having scrutinized every aspect. Paul Cezanne said of Monet “Only an eye but my God what an eye!”  Thus to an Impressionist the importance of the scene was how the artist saw it on that day under those conditions of light and weather.  This rebelled against the then absolute norm of painting, creating and working in a studio. As the Impressionists mostly focused heavily on light and the effects it created, it was incredibly important to them to paint in the environment they hoped to capture. This allowed them to fully view the transient and momentary quality of the suns light on the scene they were painting. Moreover they believed that only by  painting en plein air, was it possible to  capture the essence of their subject, which is something that can so easily be lost in the transition from seeing to sketching to studio. The art critic, Camille Mauclair  said “Impressionism is an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation …” It has been claimed  that impressionism can be viewed as at least partly a reaction to the challenge brought to artists by the camera and the ability to simply, quickly and  more accurately capture a scene which could be done by anyone. This seemed to devalue the skill of the artist, however whether or not it was a reaction, by actually going out into the environment they wanted they were able to form their own perception of nature that would convey what they wanted rather than attempting to make an exact duplicate. Thus art became not just a representation of the landscape but a reflection of the artists interaction with the landscape at the particular time it was painted bringing an additional element of the artists personality to the work. This is the complete antithesis of the work of studio based painters such as Van Dyck who employed lesser artists as pupils to work on the background of pictures and reserved their input to important areas such as the face.

A precursor and important influence on the Impressionists was JMW Turner who has been regarded as a romantic preface to Impressionism. His work also focused on the role of light on a scene, particularly on the many ways it can be reflected and shine on a surface. This meant that like the Impressionists, he often painted in the environment he wanted to capture. He was known to be extremely interested in the effects of storms and fires. In 1843 he even rushed to see the burning of parliament which he then made into several watercolours. A more accurate example of his environment directly affecting his paintings is his work on the Thames (fig. four). He was known to rent a house on it and travel up and down by boat sketching and painting what he saw. The art critic Matthew Collins described Turner as   “ looking for things in the landscape which can stand for a feeling, a feeling that perhaps originates in him already, or in something divine. Rather than in the landscape, the landscape’s a kind of carrier for that.”  This implies that he used the landscape as a medium through which he could convey emotions and thus the environment, not just the lace but the light and weather conditions at the time of the painting were essential to Turner’s work

While these artists chose to go to a carefully picked location and their resultant work was a direct consequence  of that environment, on  others the environment they found themselves in created more subtle but still clearly discernible   influences. Tove  Janssons work reflects both the Scandinavian  landscapes she was raised in and the impact of the uncertain and unstable world she found herself in both during and immediately after the Second World War.

The most obvious example of Tove’s environment showing in her work is in the very world she created for her characters, the Moomins. For many an English child, their idea of Finland is defined by the land of the Moomins, the green valley that would get blanketed with snow every winter, forests and lakes, high mountains and unexplored coastlines with remote islands. Ironically  the soft green valley is generally agreed to be based on her grandfather’s summer home on the Swedish island of Blido in the Stockholm archipelago yet the wilder elements, the forests, the rocky mountains and above all the sea are clearly Finnish. Tove Jansson’s mother was the daughter of a Swedish Pastor and she grew up in middle class comfort where the family would spend the entire summer months outdoors in their summer home on Blido. Tove spent many summers here as a child before her mother started taking her and her brothers to spend summer on a remote island in the Pellinki archipelago. The sea becomes an important theme in her books representing both danger and freedom whilst the security of the Moomin Valley has an almost womb like feeling of warmth and safety.

All the time spent with her parents and brothers in the isolation of the island led to very close family bonds and this can be seen in the Moomin books where the warmth and love the characters feel for each other offsets the sometimes difficult and unpleasant situations the characters find themselves in which are sometimes startling in their apparent unsuitableness for a children’s book such as the story where Moominpapa driven by restlessness and depression forces his family to leave their home in Moominvalley and go to live in a lighthouse on a rocky island.

However environments beyond her control or choosing also featured in her books, paintings and in her work for a Finnish, Swedish language satirical magazine called Garm.  In Garm she showed her obvious displeasure with the war and the affect it was having on her country.  Working for Garm Tove Jansson started  a series of illustrations that reflected the plight of her country these are described by Elina Bonelius,  Finnish art historian and  curator of  the Moomin Valley exhibition at Tampere Art Museum  “There is the angel of peace, and here you can see the demolished earth with the ruins and airplanes bombing. The message is very, very clear, Tove Jansson was very ... upset about the war and  was feeling it very deeply. She wasn’t a political person at all but she sensed it more in a human way. She didn’t like the Germans, she didn’t like the Soviet union, she hated the war” (fig. five and six) The satirical illustrations she did for Garm during the war lampooning both Hitler and Stalin were very brave considering the position of Finland as a small country between Russia and Germany quite likely to be invaded by either country

In her renowned children’s series, the Moomins it is also possible to discern the impact of the war on her creative works. In the preface to her first children’s book, Moomin and the Great Flood, Tove  Jansson explains that the urge to create the Moomins was fired by the desire to escape the  war “It was the winter of war in 1939. One’s work stood still; it felt completely pointless to try and create pictures. Perhaps it was understandable that I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with ‘Once upon a time.’”

And yet, though set in a Nordic fairy tale environment, the disruptions and dangers of war can  be seen  clearly as the main plot line follows the story of how Moomintroll and Moominmama are searching for the family they are separated from,  Moominpapa, and a new home for them to live. As the book progresses refugees can be seen fleeing the flood with what little possessions they still owned (fig. seven).  Another story ‘The Invisible Child’ describes a child who has been so traumatised by unspecified events that she has made herself invisible. It takes the warmth and calmness of the Moomins which ultimately give her the confidence to finally allow herself to be angry before she can take her visible place in the world again.

The war also seems to influence her second book, A Comet in Moominland, where the comet is an overhanging threat of destruction and devastation (fig. eight). The Moomins flee to a cave in the mountains and go to sleep unhappily thinking they are the only people left in a devastated world before waking up the next morning to discover that the comet has missed them by a whisker and the sun is shining and the valley is still green. This clearly echoes the impact of the cold war and the threat of nuclear weapons, a threat that was particularly real to those living in Finland which borders the Soviet Union.  

   

Another environmental factor that influenced Tove Jansson’s work was society’s attitudes to her sexuality as she was a lesbian in a time and place where it was illegal.  This can be seen in Finn Family Moomintroll where the creatures Thingummy and Bob are introduced, they have their own language that is just for themselves, and they carry a suitcase with a secret content. Later in the book it is revealed to be a large ruby with a brilliant glow, which a monster character called the Groke desires and pursues the two to steal it from them. It has been said that this represents the secret love that had to be hidden away from society, lest it be taken away from them (fig. nine).

Although many environments were placed upon her, she did choose one. Tove Jansson and her partner built a house for themselves on a remote isolated island where they could work through the summer and view the sea from all sides. The influence of these surroundings and the sea storms they witnessed featured heavily in her books and paintings.

  

However there are other creatives who found it possible to block out the war completely. Possibly the inner world they created was so strong that the environment they were in simply did not matter. Here is PG Wodehouse describing how he carried on writing his novel whilst in internment camp “I used to sit on my typewriter case with the machine balanced on a suitcase and work away with two German soldiers standing behind me with guns, breathing down the back of my neck. They seemed fascinated by this glimpse into the life literary” This was not simply an  effort of will called up to block out unpleasant circumstances, throughout his life wherever he was PG Wodehouse whether it was at home or on a cruise ship or on tour as writer of musical comedies or during bombing throughout the war, could work.  Similarly it is well known that Jane Austen wrote her novels at a table in the corner of the family sitting room, clearing her work away when visitors called.

PG Wodehouse and Jane Austen found it possible to mentally block out distractions and work whatever the environment, Marcel Proust by contrast literally blocked out distractions retreating to his bedroom which he had lined with cork to cut down on noise and keeping the shutters closed and heavy curtains drawn. Although it seems a very different reaction to the environment, the creative result was the same, a work that had been produced solely from the imagination and memories of the artist.

And so we seen artists who wish to engage directly with their environment in order to create, those whose work is  influenced by the environment they find themselves in and those whose creativity comes from within themselves and is not due to external factors, this latter group can then be sub divided into those who can ignore distractions around them and those who need to shut themselves away. There is yet another group of artists who deliberately try to create an environment around themselves which they can feed off and use to inspire their creativity. This is less about landscape as about people. An example of this type of creative would be Andy Warhol, whose studio, known as the Factory became a hangout for adult film performers, drag queens, socialites, drug addicts, musicians and free thinkers. There are similarities to the way Van Dyck operated his studio, three centuries earlier as Warhol used his coterie as workers producing the silk screen images for which he became famous but he also used this collection of people to create an atmosphere which he found conducive to creativity. Warhol did not restrict his creative output to visual arts being also  involved in film and music so as well as being an inspiration to him it could be said that these people were part of his creative output.

In conclusion when an artist creates he can try escape the environment he is in, either physically like Marcel Proust  or by retreating into the imagination like Tove Jansson and PG Wodehouse but it is impossible to escape the impact that the environment has already had in feeding our memories and imagination and personality. We value creativity as it is a physical embodiment of the differences in human beings. Whilst we may admire the skill with which a painting has been executed, skill only is not enough, it is the individual spark of creativity or originality or seeing the world differently which could only occur from that person in that situation that enables us to recognise what we call genius. It is not possible to create genius scientifically by systematically analysing the environments of successful creatives and then reproducing the most common features but it can be said that artists or writers of genius need to find the environment which best allows their creativity to flourish.

Bibliography

 (2011) PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, Hutchinson

Beckett, W. (2001) The Story of Painting, Dorling Kindersley

Jansson, T. (2012) The Moomins and the Great Flood Sort of Books

Jansson, T. (2003) Comet in Moominland Puffin; New Impression edition

Karjalainen, T. (2014) Tove Jansson Work and Love Particular Books

Kendall, R. (2000)  Monet by Himself  Little Brown

Lurie, A. (2003) Boys and Girls Forever, From Cinderella to Harry Potter Penguin Books

Mazarella, S and Westin, B. (2014)  Tove Jansson Life Art Words the  Authorised Biography  Sort of Books

Rogers, P. (1987) The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature OUP Oxford

Image reference

Coffee gremlins (fig. one &two

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (fig.three)

J.M.W Turner, The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge, (fig. four)

Tove Jansson, Anti-war illustrations for Garm, (fig. five and six)

Tove Jansson, Refugees, Momin and the Great Flood, (fig. seven)

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland, (fig. eight)

 

Tove Jansson, Thigumy and Bob with ruby, (fig. nine)