Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren is sidestepping the lazy comfort of the “everything is cyclical” cliché while still admitting why it tempts us. His phrasing is deliberately hesitant - “I don’t know whether” - not as indecision, but as an artist’s refusal to turn pattern into prophecy. What he grants is subtler: history and style don’t repeat like carbon copies; they “return to the spirit” of something earlier. That word choice matters. “Spirit” points to mood, energy, appetite, and constraint - the invisible conditions that make certain forms feel inevitable again.

The subtext is an argument about innovation that doesn’t flatter novelty for its own sake. McLaren suggests that new work often arrives wearing old clothes: techniques, rhythms, even ideologies resurface because cultural problems resurface. But the return is never pure, because the materials have changed - technology, audiences, politics, the artist’s own nervous system. In animation (McLaren’s home turf), the same is obvious: a revival of hand-made texture, abstract motion, or visual music may echo early modernism, yet it’s filtered through new tools and new anxieties. A “previous period” is not a destination you can visit; it’s a set of pressures you can feel again.

Contextually, McLaren lived through rapid transformations in media - from wartime propaganda to postwar experimentation to the institutionalization of avant-garde techniques. The line reads like a quiet manifesto: stop arguing about whether art is “back.” Ask what’s haunting the present, and how the present mutates its ghosts into something that can only exist now.