Creativity Quote by Ben Nicholson

Nicholson isn’t dressing up drawing as a hobby; he’s insisting it’s a mental discipline. “Meditating” turns art-making into a slow, deliberate practice rather than a performance of talent. The line rejects the romantic myth of the artist as pure instinct and replaces it with something closer to quiet inquiry: drawings as tests, revisions, and small acts of attention. In that framing, the studio isn’t where you express what you already know; it’s where you go to find out what you think.

The subtext is a defense against the demand for explanation in words. Modern artists were (and still are) pressured to translate their work into statements, manifestos, and market-ready narratives. Nicholson sidesteps that whole economy. He doesn’t claim drawing illustrates ideas; he claims drawing generates them. That makes the hand an instrument of cognition, not just craft.

Context matters: Nicholson’s career sits in the churn of early- to mid-20th-century modernism, when abstraction, geometry, and pared-down form were not mere styles but arguments about perception. His still lifes and reliefs treat line, space, and balance as problems to be solved, not scenes to be depicted. “That’s my way of thinking” reads like an artist’s version of “the medium is the message,” except more personal and more stubbornly modest. It’s a quiet rebuke to the cult of grand declarations: thinking can look like a pencil moving across paper, and that can be enough.