Art & Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

A line this mild is doing sneakily radical work. McLaren isn’t praising art as a finished object; he’s pledging allegiance to mutation. “The process of art evolving” shifts attention away from masterpieces and toward the messy, iterative chain of experiments, accidents, tools, and collaborations that produce them. For an artist who practically treated film stock like a canvas - drawing, scratching, and inventing techniques frame by frame at the National Film Board of Canada - “evolving” isn’t a metaphor. It’s a job description.

The phrasing is almost disarmingly humble: “has fascinated me.” No manifesto thunder, no heroic self-myth. That understatement is the subtext. McLaren’s work helped define animation as a medium of pure possibility, yet he frames his motivation as curiosity rather than conquest. It’s a quiet rebuke to the romantic idea of the artist struck by lightning; he’s closer to a scientist who keeps running the experiment because the results keep surprising him.

Context matters: McLaren comes of age alongside cinema’s rapid technological shifts and the 20th century’s avant-garde faith in new forms. In that world, “evolving” also hints at cultural evolution - how audiences learn to read new visual languages, how institutions (like the NFB) can incubate risk, how craft changes when machines, optics, and sound open fresh doors. The intent isn’t to freeze art’s meaning. It’s to keep it in motion, where discovery is the point.