Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

Progress, McLaren suggests, doesn’t move like an arrow. It loops, doubles back, raids its own attic. For an artist who built films by painting directly onto celluloid and composing movement frame by frame, that’s not nostalgia talking; it’s method. Innovation, in his world, is less a clean break than a recombination of old energies with new tools.

The line quietly rejects the modernist myth that “new” automatically means “better” or even “forward.” “New things” arrive because people tinker, misread, hybridize, and get bored with what’s fashionable. Then comes the twist: they “return to the spirit of an earlier age.” Not the surface style, not retro costuming, but the “spirit” - a word that smuggles in values: play, rigor, handmade attention, communal experimentation. McLaren’s era saw animation industrialize, advertising colonize aesthetics, and technology promise frictionless perfection. His phrasing implies that at certain moments the culture craves friction again: visible labor, visible choices, imperfections that prove a human was there.

There’s also a gentle corrective to the anxiety artists feel about being “original.” McLaren frames history as a set of recoverable impulses rather than a museum of dead forms. The subtext is permission: you can be contemporary without worshiping novelty, and you can borrow from the past without becoming derivative. The most interesting “new” work often feels like an old appetite finding a fresh grammar.