Lesson 4 Spark Your Creativity
Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Creativity. When you hear this word, what instantly ____ into your mind?
____ may think it is a quality that only artists and writers possess— some special talent you are either born with or without.
Many people accept the idea that we can be divided ____ two groups: those who are creative and those who are not.
This common belief, however, is far from the ____.
Everyone has the ability to be ____.
Finding creativity inside yourself ____ takes a little effort.
____ artists, for example, spark their creativity by looking closely at ordinary objects.
They try to discover the beauty hidden within these common objects and then turn them into ____ of art.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Look at these ____ paintings.
Believe it or not, they both depict the ____ person, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
The one on the left might look familiar, as it is a standard style of portrait that you would see in a gallery or an ____ book.
____, the one on the right, called Vertumnus, is very unconventional.
Created by a 16th-century Italian painter named Giuseppe ____, the painting shows striking creativity and originality.
Fruits, flowers, and vegetables are arranged like the pieces of a puzzle to create a human ____.
A ____ and a mulberry become the dark eyes, while an apple and a peach act as the pink cheeks.
This painting is representative of the ____ signature style of “composite portraits.”
He used plants, ____, and other objects to create many other portraits like this.
Another good example of Arcimboldo’s unique ____ can be found in The Gardener, one of his “reversible” paintings.
____ viewed normally, it is just an ordinary still life of vegetables in a bowl.
However, when flipped upside down, it is ____ transformed into a smiling face!
Experts have studied this painting, along with Arcimboldo’s other ____ ones.
Their research showed that he first painted them as still life paintings and ____ turned them upside down and made some adjustments to create faces.
X-ray examination revealed that he ____ changed the positions of some of the fruits and vegetables.
Why ____ he make his paintings reversible?
It was probably because he ____ to add an interactive element to his work by doing so.
Viewers ____ as if they are playing a visual game, which brings them a sense of pleasure.
Each of Arcimboldo’s ____ is a careful study of everyday objects.
When he looked at ____ objects, such as a bowl of vegetables, he saw the artistic and imaginative potential in them.
His ____ approach to art inspired many great artists who came after him, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte.
Helga Stentzel
Take a ____ at this picture.
Do you see a ____ standing in a field?
Or is it simply a collection of clothes ____ on a clothesline?
This witty and amusing creation is actually a ____ of art created by the visual artist Helga Stentzel.
Using everyday items, she creates playful visual illusions that force you to look twice in order to ____ what you have just seen.
Her unique style has been called “____ surrealism.”
Stentzel is ____ best known for her Clothesline Animals series.
She got inspiration for the series while she was ____ her laundry.
By simply adding some colorful clothespins and a dish towel, she was able to transform her ____ sweatshirt and dark grey pants into a horse.
Other ____ followed, including a brown cow standing on some hills and a zebra crossing the desert.
All of these ____ were created from nothing more than laundry and household items.
Another series that highlights ____ astonishing creativity is Edible Creatures.
For this series, she arranges food items you can ____ in any kitchen to create cute animals.
The stars of the series are Brad Pet and Crunchie, a ____ of puppies made of sliced bread and lettuce respectively.
Stentzel says she came up with the concept of Crunchie while ____ together a salad for her family.
What do ____ think her secret is?
Stentzel says that it is her active observation skills that ____ her to make magic out of the ordinary.
As a child, she would spend time staring at the patterns in the wood of her bed, trying to find different ____ shapes.
She admits that ____ today she stares at things longer than is acceptable in society.
This keen observation is what ____ her to continuously produce creative and imaginative works of art.
Creativity is not some kind of exceptional skill that belongs to exclusive ____ of people.
It is actually a part of our ____ lives, a power that we can display anytime we choose to.
Whether we ____ it or not, we are constantly using our creativity to adapt, adjust, and rearrange the things around us.
By doing so, we are ____ the ordinary into something extraordinary—something that has never been seen before.
Take a look at the things around you, but don’t just give them a ____ glance.
Look carefully, and you might discover something that ____ your own imagination and creativity.