Lynda Barry on Why We Create

A painter, cartoonist, and writer, among other disciplines, Lynda Barry served as an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the school.

One of her insights:

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

Writer Michael Cavna notes in his Washington Post article that she has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly referred to as a “genius grant”) — “only the second female graphic novelist to win the award, after Alison Bechdel.”

He continues:

“Barry is pushing the envelope on understanding how the brain creates and responds to words and pictures — a scholarly envelope that, in her mind, should be positively covered with illuminating doodles.

“As part of her mission, Barry thinks preschoolers hold many secrets to creativity, before education and social expectations have trained their natural artistry out of them.”

Barry says, “That’s something I’d like to do — to get literally on the floor with these 4-year-olds and spend a year at least just figuring out: What happens before writing and drawing split, and why did we split those things — and what happens when we do split them?”

Cavna writes that Barry’s techniques, such as ones she shared in her book Syllabus “have helped non-artists and acclaimed cartoonists alike in becoming creatively unstuck and inspired.”