Creativity, like society, thrives when the individual elements fit within, and add to, a bigger picture. — Will Gompertz

Duchamp is a worthy role model. Added to which he believed passionately that anyone could be an artist and spent his life showing the rest of us how it is done. He chose fine art as the vehicle for his imagination, but his approach could equally well be applied to any area of creative endeavor.

His trick was to spend more time thinking than doing. He would pause for thought and ponder on life and creativity and how things might be. Which is what I’m going to do now.

It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.

That’s how ideas are generated. Unusual combinations, mixing old and new, stimulate original ideas, that is, ideas with origins.