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Paul Klee’s Theory of Creativity
“May I use a simile, the simile of the tree?”
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born painter. His deep engagement with colour theory, along with his experimental approach to his working materials, gave rise to an extraordinary array of images that range from surrealist landscapes to expressionist self-portraits.
Klee was profoundly interested in the laws that underpin the natural world. He took the world of phenomena to be a series of processes, ratios and forces, and carried these principles over to the idiom of drawing:
“Every snowflake is born of the same underlying principle, though every snowflake is expressed as a different modulation of this principle. I myself, as the artist, I am the modulating effect on the natural principles of drawing.”
In his book On Modern Art (1924), Klee gave his clearest description of the creative process, suggesting the image of a tree as a metaphor.
The overarching notion is that when an artist makes their work, they exert a modifying effect on the world around them — gathering and passing on what comes from the depths, as Klee put it. In this way, the roots of the tree are like the artist’s senses, taking in nutrients from their environment. “From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eyes.”
