Constraints, not Rules: Creativity with Bob Hansman 

Illustration by Bob Hansman. Learn more about our illustrators.

Constraints, not Rules: Creativity with Bob Hansman 

Our illustrator for this newsletter is Bob Hansman, who not only is a talented artist but also a dedicated teacher. As someone who taught drawing to architecture students for many years (including to Annemarie!), as well as art to hundreds of children, Bob brings his full body into creative practice. Liz sat down with Bob to talk about creativity — how he thinks about, experiences, and teaches it. This interview has been edited for clarity. 

PDB: Tell us a little bit about how you think about creativity. 

Bob: Maybe this is tongue and cheek, but creativity is thinking inside the box. Creativity is taking advantage of constraints to work the muscles you didn’t know you had. If you had all the options open to you, you’d default to doing the same thing over and over again, because you only have so many ideas. When you’re forced to do something else, you discover that you can do things that you never knew you could do. 

Constraints release your creativity — they don’t block it. Yet — there’s a difference between rules and constraints. Rules are small, petty, and limiting (and limited!), but constraints are expansive and expanding. 

PDB: One way I’ve seen you express your creativity is through the radio show you host for the Black Radio Hall of Fame (Wednesdays, 2-6p, online here: https://www.nbrhof.com/brhf/). Can you talk about how creativity plays into your radio show, and how that’s evolved over time? 

Bob: What I’ve discovered is that I needed structure to force my hand so I wouldn’t just be in my default setting. When I started the show, I just played stuff I liked. After a while…that wasn’t enough. I would just play Nina Simone every week. Then, I tried out different themes, like “starlight” or season themes. I also set constraints, like I always wanted to have a mix in each show of gospel, reggae, jazz, soul, blues, etc. But even with those structures, there wasn’t enough unpredictability in it — the show was too much about me. 

But by accident, last year, I noticed that some of the people I was playing had birthdays the same month, and I mentioned it on air. Then I got to wondering…who else has birthdays this month? And one thing led to another, and now I have thousands of birthdays compiled. 

So now, I use the birthdays as a constraint. It allows me incredible variety and range, and I don’t repeat artists but once a year. I play a different set of people each week, and if I end up with three songs in a row that are all one genre, or if I jump from John Coltrane to Furry Lewis — then that’s what happens! It’s also fun because I hope that with every show there’s something people recognize, but often I play things you’ve never heard before — an artist or a song that was left in the dust for more famous tracks. 

One thing that has come out of this is that there’s something that happens between songs. There’s a slight pause, and there’s a tingle that happens when you’re shifting from one single to the next. The other song is still echoing — even if it’s the polar opposite tune. I love that sensation. 

PDB: That feeling you’re talking about — it sounds like serendipity. Can you talk about how serendipity and change are part of your process of teaching creativity? 

Bob: For students, it’s not just serendipity — but also it’s having your plans devastated so you can’t go forward with what you were planning to do. 

An exercise I used to do in drawing class was to set up a still life on the ground, and light it with a dramatic spotlight. As I was walking around the room giving the students feedback, I would “trip” over the still life items and knock them out of place. The students would say, “Bob, are you going to put those back?” and I would say, “oh you know, I couldn’t put them back exactly — why don’t you just keep drawing?” Then, they can’t draw what was there before (since it’s now gone). Instead, they’d have to carve back into the drawing and draw a little more aggressively, with a little more conviction. Then, once they got even further along, I would take the spot light across to the other side of the room — and they’d have to revisit everything all over again. By the time they were done, there wasn’t a place in the drawing they hadn’t revisited at least three times. 

Another thing I did was make them go out in the hallway, and then I would pull out a bucket of black paint or ink and mark their drawings, and then call them back in. They’d say “now what are we supposed to do! You wrecked our drawings.” They had to either draw with what I did or override it. 

These experiences were helping them to learn — it’s not about how the drawing looks, it’s about how they approach it and the process they go through. This type of drawing is visceral — it’s through your hands and not your head. 

PDB: In your teaching and work, how do materials and media impact creativity? 

Bob: With students, I want them to work with materials where they have to make a commitment. They shouldn’t be able to easily erase, and I should be able to see their marks across the room. 

In one drawing activity, students would work over the whole semester on a 10 foot by 4 foot sheet of paper, pinned to the wall. We had power saws in the classroom, and we started with two students using 2x4s and building something, while everyone else drew what they built. During class and throughout the semester we’d rotate building and drawing. No one knew how the big form of the 2x4s would come out, or how the drawings would end — we were just drawing and building and seeing how it all washes out. Sometimes you’d have to wipe it out, or adjust. Or you’d really miscalculate and you’d have the whole semester to figure it out. This was an opportunity for them to confront with their bodies the problems of architecture, because they were drawing and building at a 1:1 scale. 

At the same time, I also had them work on postage stamp drawings, where they had to really exert judgement about what goes in and what comes out. As an example of that, I had a student who wanted to make drawings out in the city, but couldn’t carry the giant rolls of paper on his bike. Instead, I had him take a bedsheet and a stack of post-it notes — since he could carry them. Then, he could draw the same thing at different scales. It wasn’t just obsessing over the detail on the Post-It piece, but also figuring out how to get the same view and see what kind of judgement you have to make to get to that scale without losing the detail. 

PDB: What prevents people from being creative? 

Bob: They’re so unused to it, especially these days. They’re used to being given instructions and having to follow them to a tee. Which is interesting…because if those instructions were constraints, they would be constructive. But instead, the instructions are rules you have to follow. 

One of the things that I talk about with students is that you have to develop criteria internally. A lot of times, I will not give specific guidelines, and then we’ll have a conversation as a group about why some solutions or approaches are better than others. Invariably, it comes up that students say “If you’re not going to give us any guidelines, then isn’t anything as good as anything else?” To me, part of creativity is being able to be a thinking person and have some self-reflection and evaluation to understand the criteria to know if you’re performing creatively, appropriately, dynamically, without having some outside voice to tell you if that’s the case. If all you’ve been doing is working in a frightened way, trying not to violate the little instructions — the rules — this kills the spirit. 

To me, part of creativity is being able to be a thinking person and have some self-reflection and evaluation to understand the criteria to know if you’re performing creatively, appropriately, dynamically, without having some outside voice to tell you if that’s the case.

An example I always think about is one time in class, a student had two drawings, and we were critiquing them. I asked the students in class, “Which do you think is a better piece?” They all picked the same one, so since there was consensus there, we started talking about structure, composition, rhythm, balance, color — these were objective reasons why one was a better piece. It wasn’t just a matter of taste.

Something that worries me now is that people are losing out on the visceral, tactile experiences when they do everything on a computer and print it out. For me, drawing is about what you learn while you’re doing the drawing — what you know at the end that you didn’t know at the beginning. I want you to explore that idea on the computer; in charcoal; in a small painting; with a brush; in a delicate pencil; in watercolor. Every one of those materials will bring up another aspect of your idea that you’re thinking about. If you only draw in charcoal, you won’t confront the ideas the computer will make you confront. It’s important to remember that how you get to the image matters — it’s not just getting the image, or the end product. You can get an image by taking a photo, or cutting something out. But drawings are research in the best sense of the word. Researching and going shopping are two totally different things. 

PDB: You’re someone I think of as a connoisseur of creative people — musicians, artists, poets, and so many more. What does it feel like to witness and experience creativity in others? 

Bob: Exhilarating! I love seeing something wonderful and unexpected. It’s a high. 

In class, I have a presentation I give called “What is creativity?” A lot of the words that come up from students are originality, no one has ever done it before. To me, those are the laziest ideas to attach to a word like creativity. A new idea can be absolute crap. The best idea is the one we need to be doing now.  It can be as creative to bring out an old idea as it can be to bring out a totally new one. Creativity is how you put things together to find the answer. 

Creativity is how you put things together to find the answer. 

PDB: What advice would you have for someone who wants to be more creative, especially adults who feel like they have lost their creativity? 

Bob: You should start by immersing yourself in other people’s creativity — start listening to music, reading amazing books — surround yourself with stimulus. This is second nature for me now. 

Sometimes you need to switch up your process for creativity. When I was working on drawings about my friend’s suicide, I would sometimes have an area where I wanted to apply a woodcut in an open spot at the end. I liked the tingle in between the materials. Sometimes, I couldn’t wait to get to that part…so I started putting the woodcut on the page further towards the start of the process, rather than waiting towards the end. That’s when the work transitioned. I put a challenge on the page (or the kids at City Faces would put it on the page for me), and that moved me from drawings I made to drawings I discovered. Those drawings I discovered maintained a freshness that the ones I made do not for me. 

The other thing I do is just start and the process runs away with you, if you’re committed to it. Creativity comes from the inside, not the outside. Sometimes working on more than one thing at a time can prevent you from getting into a rut. When I was working on drawings, I was working on 6, 7, 8 of them at the same time. Some would take only 20 minutes, while others would take 20 months. With that many going, you can’t go through all of them in the same way. 

Bob Hansman is a teacher, an author, an activist, and an artist in St. Louis. He teaches in the College of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, and is the founder of City Faces, a program for children living in the Clinton-Peabody housing project. The illustrations in this newsletter are drawn from his book, Ratzo, A Prayer. You can buy Bob’s illustrated books, including Ratzo and Edward, by contacting Bob at hansman@wustl.edu (or reach out to us at hello@publicdesignbureau.com), and listen to his radio show for the Black Radio Hall of Fame on Wednesdays, 2-6p, online.