Progress happens so quickly, and although most of the time it is appreciated, sometimes we can feel a little overwhelmed. The loss of our sense of home is real when familiar routines and scenes disappear forever. If you live in the same place for most of your life, the various landmarks and talking points can become more than just buildings and marketing. We become attached to the various feelings and advice that are offered by the things that surround us. By remembering to enjoy things we love that are from times gone by, we can help to remedy this sense of loss and transition. By reliving and rekindling old times, we can remind ourselves that although we have grown and a lot of things have changed, we are still the same person inside. Maybe this is why certain albums stand the test of time and get replayed decades after their release.  

The highstreets were once a natural river of human culture. Before the age of internet shopping, we’d all know the local and city highstreets. The rows of shops became our second home as every week or so we’d go and visit them and look forward to browsing the shelves. It was not uncommon to bump into people you knew from school, work, religion, or your own road, as you’d wander the various frontages and peer in. Something that has been replaced by technology and disposable methods is the old painted signs. Their shadows, or ghosts, can often still be seen haunting the walls of the various buildings that line the way.  

By-gone product names and long-forgotten brands, the occasional success story in which we still buy the subject of the advert, we can remember the past and feel connected to our own by enjoying these almost lost pieces of pop culture. Before they all disappear completely, like-minded artists and history fans are helping to keep them alive by repainting them. Old fashioned adverts often make modern decorative art in the home, so the natural step is to relive the past at large with these shopfront versions of the old message.  

In the British city of Gloucester, a trend of repainting ghostsigns has begun thanks to the handywork of one talented and historically minded artist. Tash Frootko (BBC) was able to find photographs of the original signs after contacting the previous shop owners. The turn of the century hand painted signs were once striking visages on Dynevor Street, Gloucester and now have been lovingly restored to appear exactly how they once did. The theme seems to have continued as other artists and property owners are beginning to follow suit.   
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The people of Gloucester are not alone in their love of the past’s simplicity. A site by a guy called Sam Roberts is dedicated to mapping these hidden gems across London and beyond. Visitors are free to upload and submit their own photographs meaning that the site now has an encyclopaedia of images from around the globe. It was not just a British invention as ghostsigns have been spotted and documented in many countries. Sam Roberts has dedicated so much time and energy to the study and effect of ghostsigns around London that he was able to write a thorough and intriguing book all about them. Well worth a look.  
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Standing out from the crowd is counter to our subconscious program. We are a prey animal as well as a hunter, so human beings have evolved to be safe and to stay part of the group. So, when we do something unusual or something that makes us stand out, we immediately become a target for would-be predators who need a target to focus on. In large groups, people are uninteresting and hard to reach. When you identify one person who has a good idea, that desire to be heard can be used and abused. This is a genuine reality, and many of us prefer to keep our heads down and carry on with what ever is given to us. Lack of confidence to fend off the predators can be a creativity killing sensation. We usually identify it as pride, shame, nerves, or some other common affliction. It can be whittled down to fear, in the end.
 
It's not just standing out from the crowd that makes creativity dangerous. There are many other problems that arise from this direction of thought. It all begins in the chaos of the unknown. To be creative or artistic is to push back the boundary of chaos and replace it with sensation, ration, likeness, and order. Painting a picture or writing a story takes elements of the infinite human experience and makes them solid and tangible, something everyone can relate to. Exploring this unknown darkness is courageous because we open our minds to the depths of our own imagination. A spiral of thought can carry us up, down, or away, with ideas linking in with symbolical meanings and loose translations that fit the emotional background.
 
Not everyone is able to create something useful or applicable from this depth of the unknown. It requires a confidence to continue and an instinct for the right direction when there are no maps or streetlights to help. Like an unchallenged landscape, the natural state of the chaotic and unordered human imagination is a huge story of choices and morality. The sense of being alive and enthralled with a story can be pulled like string from the swirling silo of personal inspiration. The art we create shows us the possible realities of mind and the metaphorical stories that connect and divide us. Manifesting a genuine piece of the world from a poignant or abstract idea that only previously existed in the mind is a huge challenge.
 
Like science, art and creativity make the world more tolerable and enjoyable, safer, and more fulfilling. Unlike science, in which the order of the world is used to make something useful, the arts take the chaos of the world to make something useful. In the sciences, it’s imperative that instructions are followed, and method remain identical throughout the entire regime. This is counter productive to creativity, in which subtle and major changes take place as the uniform behaviour. To apply scientific thinking to the art of creativity, the focus can be shifted from the individual to their process and habits. In this way, artists are often dehumanised and utilised for their textbook worth rather than celebrated as human beings who did something amazing. To be creative means to accept one’s fate to be objectified by many.
 
Although it’s possible to teach creativity by means of psychology, methods, history, sociology, and so on, the mental background for a creative person is something natural in them and cannot be replicated in others. Some of us have next to no creative ability and some of us have an excess of it. Creativity can be nurtured like a seed, but we cannot plant the seed. It’s a factor of genetics and early years nurture. Non creative people often do not want to be creative so it’s not necessarily an issue. It does become an issue when non creative people treat themselves as the standard and try to stifle differences in others. It’s important to encourage daydreaming and imaginative play during childhood so as they grow the adult can access the power of their inventiveness. 

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​Creativity is all about realising our desires. We want a result, we have some tools, and we use what we have to create the situation we were looking for. It’s a sign of creative intelligence to be able to do this, and many animals have the ability too. The process of telling a story via a series of processes that result in something new is not innate to humans, although complex syntax and abstract thought seems to be so, for now. The ability to achieve a favourable circumstance from what is available and within the rules takes the mind of a creative person unless a clear path is already laid out. Someone else’s creativity might be the answer, or else you’ll need to think of your own. Standing out from the crowd with an unusual solution can bring on new problems that we didn’t envisage or plan for.
 
When society or nature presents a problem that has no immediate solution for the group or the individual, a creative approach is necessary. Entire generations can go by without an effort to work through certain problems we face, however when artists begin to make these problems part of our regular language and imagination, society begins to tackle the issues. It requires the work of many people to tackle life’s big problems, but the problem of one person can often be addressed by that one person alone. A creative approach will help us to design a new and successful method that can be applied again. Before we have the approach, one must be invented.
 
This is where we separate the true inventive and creative people from those who just like to stand around in colourful clothes, making predictable statements. A creative and inventive individual will thrive in an environment where problems need solving and experience must be gained. An exhibitionist will want the attention even when there is a problem to solve, and the attention needs to be elsewhere. A sense of vanity and the desire to be recognised as a cut above the rest is not what people pay for when they buy art. They want something that works for them, not the artist. It can be difficult to bring yourself away from the wrong crowd, especially if social capital is at risk. To be able to work successfully on something new and inventive, we need to be free from the wrong kind of influence.
 
The marketplace is the theatre of successful creativity. Even if it’s a play, someone must buy it, invest in it, put their time into producing it, and then putting on a show. They’re not just buying the play; they’re buying weeks or months of dedication and work. To be successful as an artist or an inventive problem solver, we need to be able to demonstrate that what we offer really is worth the time, energy, and effort involved in applying it. Let’s say it’s a book, reading a book takes time, it puts images and ideas in the mind that were not there before. Is this a good idea? Is it worth money? These are the questions that the marketplace asks. Creative and new things are risky, because there is little evidence as to their value as an investment.
 
This is where standing out from the crowd is necessary, and the further out we go, the more likely we are to be noticed. Being noticed is a risk because we invite positive and negative interaction from the world at large, criminals, crazy people, buyers, superfans, the whole world. Again, the further away from the normal we go, the less likely that others will have a mental map of what we are for or what we do. To be able to recognise something as valuable or interesting takes an imagination unless it’s been previously stated. People with small imaginations find it very difficult to determine if something novel is a good or a bad idea. Some of us are completely blind to creativity and have no inner method of relating things that we do not already recognise. We need to be told exactly what something is and what it is for. When marketing creativity, it’s important to keep all these things in mind.
 
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From the early days of still photography and all the camera tricks that inventive people sought to employ, the onset of film and moving pictures gave rise to another level of creativity. A whole new dimension of media was outlaid before our very eyes with clever use of illusion and exposure giving rise to a whole new world of visual experience. Realising the full potential of the format required exceptional minds who could imagine the process as a series of tools that can be used to bring joy and information to people all over the world.
 
We’ve all probably seen the film clip of a human face made to look like the moon with a rocket in one of its eyes. A black and white silent production, the iconic image sems to stick around even to this day. That film is just one of hundreds made by the French film pioneer Georges Méliès. Because of the ground-breaking and classic nature of this cult film producer, the works are lovingly kept alive across various platforms. The two online go-to places are YouTube and the Internet Archive. Both of these repositories contain a large collection of major and lesser-known examples.
 
The actor and film producer was born in France, Paris, where he lived until he died in 1938 aged 76. During his life as a performer Georges Méliès was able to manifest a lively and dynamic imaginary universe in which ghouls and ghosts danced alongside mad scientists and maidens. A jagged and off-centre style kept audiences on their toes as the imagery and concepts leapt from one tangent to another across his run of highly entertaining creations. 
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​Having learned how to manipulate puppets as a boy and discovered a thrill in the art of entertaining others, Georges began to learn magic when he witnessed tricks by two prominent British illusionists, John Maskelyne, the inventor of the pay toilet, and David Devant, famous for his magic kettle. When he came of age and inherited some money from his father’s side, Méliès invested his capital in a small magic show theatre previously owned by his long-term mentor Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Soon after this acquisition, he was able to witness one of the world’s first displays of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph. This immediately struck him as a novel and potential world-changing method of demonstrating his genre of entertainment.
 
Using his theatre and his knowledge of performance art and illusion, Georges Méliès applied himself completely to the manufacturing of short and entertaining films. He soon found success with this venture, as it became a perfect extension of what he was already well-known for in Paris. His experience as an assistant for Robert-Houdin and then his following chairing of the theatre had provided him with a local fame and respect that could be immediately applied to his new media style. With the proceeds of his filmmaking, Georges Méliès again invested his capital in an expensive yet fully furnished film studio at his grounds just outside the city of Paris. A risky yet fortunately wise investment, the quality of the productions increased by an order of magnitude. It was at this new studio that many of his ground-breaking and genre defining works were made.
 
A completely glass-made building, with natural light making up a large feature of the studio, the venue played host to the making of all his films until the end of his career. Sadly, for Georges Méliès, he did not survive his risk-taking personality forever. His career fizzled out with an accumulation of debts and unmanageable overheads. The one-of-a-kind glass house film studio was demolished just after the end of the Second World War, not long after its illustrious occupant had deceased. Let this be a lesson to all of those who enjoy the arts, look after your artists, and ensure they can live a happy life. After-all, they’ve given one to you. Never-the-less, his amazing collection of creative genius is available to all via the magic of the modern-day internet. Let’s hope they stay relevant for another one hundred years or more.

​Visit the Georges Méliès Section in theInternet Archive 

And view this Curated YouTube Playlist
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A kindred spirit? Why not get to know him better with this beautiful illustrated paperback