Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren’s sentence reads like an artist staking out a moral boundary: art isn’t just sensation or technique, it’s a medium that must remember who it’s for. The phrase “even more precious quality” is a quiet value judgment, elevating “consciousness” above whatever craft or novelty he’s just been discussing. He’s not praising intelligence as IQ or cleverness; “human intelligence” here means perception, curiosity, the capacity to connect dots. Pairing it with “the human spirit” adds a second register: feeling, resilience, play. Together they form a manifesto against empty formalism.

The subtext is defensive in the best way. McLaren worked in animation when the medium was often treated as either children’s entertainment or industrial spectacle. His films, especially at the National Film Board of Canada, pushed abstraction, sound-image experimentation, and wordless storytelling. In that environment, you can hear him insisting that experimentation isn’t an escape from people; it’s a route back to them. “Consciousness” implies intentionality: the artist is accountable to the viewer’s mind and inner life, not just their attention span.

The final clause lands the real argument: “man is a social creature.” McLaren frames art as social infrastructure, not private genius. Even solitary viewing becomes communal because meaning is negotiated through shared symbols, empathy, and cultural memory. It’s a rebuttal to the myth of the self-contained artist and a warning to a modernity drifting toward isolation: make the work, yes, but keep the human in frame.