Creativity & Paint

I was reading a book in Border's the other night, How I Learned to Cook, written by a variety of cooking folks. There are some absolutely hilarious disaster stories in there. The reason I bring this up is that my art classes stink (which isn't even acurate, my painting class stinks) and it's been getting me down. One of the fellows wrote that at one point his cooking gurutold him to be creative. He asked what it is to be creative. The great guru said that to be creative is not to copy. Which sums up my problem with my painting class: all semester long we've been copying. I was talking to the Hub about this last night and he said there's probably a lot to be learned from what we've been doing, which I completely agree with. The problem is not that we've been copying, but that it's all we've been doing. A few weeks would have been fine, even a couple of few-week chunks of time would have been fine, but it's been nearly the whole 15 weeks. The point is, without the creativity the spark dies. Painting loses it's pull for me. Which is sad, but happy too. Now that I have identified the problem, I can work on solving it. And isn't that what creativity is all about?