I have always been enamored with creativity. And just like a Renaissance man from the 1500’s, I want to dabble in all forms of it. This is who I am- how I was made. But thinking beyond a simple interest and hobby- I believe creativity is in the depths of everyone. Weather you are in a lab testing DNA, preparing a lesson for your 3rd grade class, engineering new technology for the next hybrid, designing cell-phone towers or scrimmaging with your Monday night soccer league you must use creativity to succeed. Call it ‘trouble shooting’ or ‘problem solving’ –face it; you seek to be creative! And as Mike Buchanan states in The Holy Wild, “the human desire to create, simply mirrors the God whose image we are made, by whose breath we are filled.”

The Renaissance man is the ultimate creative occupation. Michelangelo, for example, was a painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. I have been fortunate enough to have seen some of his creations, such as: the Pietà, the David, his fresco paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgment fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, as well as the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. From all that I have seen, I give testimony to his enormous amount of creativity. And to think he accomplished all he did without modern technology; his life radiated creativity.

It is the ‘movements’ of creativity and multifaceted individuals, which seem to grab my attention. The De Stijl, literally translated as “the style” was an art movement founded in 1917 by the gems of the 1900’s creators: the sculptor Vantongerloo, architect JJP Oud, designer Rietveld and the painter Mondrian. These men realized their human desire to create should span past their media of art and into a language, culture and geography. Perhaps they were searching for wholeness and identity found only in the creator of creativity. The main principles of the De Stijl movement continued on to greatly influence the Bauhaus movement in Germany in the 1920’s. And beyond being a great font for your text, Bauhaus was bustling with creativity.

I could go on for days about individuals such as Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Finnish architects best known for Cranbrook and the St. Louis Arch, Frank Gehry, best known for the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect known for his Urban Design. These individuals submerged themselves in creativity. Some were sculptors and furniture designers, which influenced their buildings. Or a scriptwriter and journalist, which influenced the integration of society and theory with culture and Urban development. The creativity in their life did not stay compartmentalized. It collided with the dynamic aspects of who they were to form a physical representation.

Will I allow the compartments of my life, the walls I have built to create categories of different friends, coworkers, family, and my neatly separated hobbies to be blown away so I can truly live? I understand God is the author of creativity and desire for my life to be a ‘beautiful collision’.