Mark Hobson: Art-making . . . I ‘think’ about nothing when I am in the moment of picturing. . . Don’t think about it now, just picture it ‘intuitively’.

Birgit posted this from Cezanne: “…if I think while painting, if I intervene, why then everything is gone.”

Hobson and Cezanne are both essentially saying: verbal thought, stay out of the art.

The surprise to me is that highly distracting stimuli — the guys working in the café kitchen next door, the book on tape, can disturb me and leave me un-distracted at the same time. My impression from my own experience and what I have read in the comments of the previous posts is that the non-verbal artist “within” for the most part doesn’t care what kind of distracting words are passing through the mind, as long as they don’t interfere with the art-making.

Cogito ergo sum

When we ask the question, “What do you think about when making art?” the real question is: “When we say ‘you’, to whom are we referring?” They guy/gal inside with all the words thinks he or she is in charge, but the real action goes on separately despite the jabbering.

A bit spooky, no? Because, if you think about it, all that art-making doesn’t just happen. There must be a huge amount of judgement, information processing — thought in essence — without words or access to words. The only way to appreciate consciously/verbally what is going on is, as Hobson says, to ‘listen’, listen to the feelings the work evokes. Not that that’s either easy (with all that distraction) or necessary. Better to stay out of it, Cezanne seems to say.

How to make use of that unnecessary verbal thought while working?