Stanley's usual term for his creativity - in the sense of power to create - was his energy.

The French intellectual writer Julien Gracq (Louis Poirier, obituary The Times 30.12.07)), celebrated for his literary style and the precision of his thought and language, refused to use the word 'creativity' or 'creation', on the philosophic grounds that nothing now can be 'created' but only re-formed from what has already been created, and so exists. A so-called 'creative' writer or artist merely adapts his own experience of what we all experience in our own way in order to present it in a form he finds satisfying to himself. Sometimes we others can recognise his presentation as matching and hopefully expanding our own adaptation of experience, and thus, in that process, the adjective 'creative' and the noun 'creation' become meaningless. Each of us is simply exchanging our knowledge.

Gracq explained his system as : I start out with a sort of attraction for something, a place or an action that is very simple, and then it gets complicated. I don't like the word creation. What I do is recompose elements furnished by memory. I find it very difficult to use a ready-made setting, a real setting. I need to redo it, to fashion it in my own way.

Gracq's comments, as will be argued in this website, so exactly match the 'creativity' (the energy) of Stanley Spencer that perhaps we too should be wary of using the word in connection with his work. Or if we have to use it, at least we should have Gracq's proviso clearly in mind.