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?
Jonathan Borofsky counts. He says it’s to quiet the mind. He gets to very high numbers, and when he finishes a piece he signs it with the number he’s counted to so far.
At this point I can only report a non-result. I’ve told myself several times recently, before photographing or before processing images on the computer, to try to notice what I’m thinking about so I can tell Karl. But I never seem to remember to do that while working, nor can I recall afterward thinking about anything except what I was working on.
Steve, it sounds like when you work, you start out thinking about Karl and then go into a trance. I wonder if this is common :)
It’s not exactly a trance, but I think Karl zaps my brain to a zero state from which I can then focus on almost anything else. He should patent and sell it.
Steve:
Would, “Gotta tell Karl” qualify?
Jay, just try it!
Ironically, Karl’s post seems to be distracting everyone from mine.
Steve:
Am looking at and relating to your photos. It’s taking me a little time to wrap some worthy words around what I’m seeing.
I was reminded of subliminal seduction and the influence of the subconscious self when I read this post from Karl.
More in the science times of yesterday… “Who’s minding the mind’…
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31subl.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
That’s an interesting article, though it says you can’t affect your own state of mind by priming because you know you’re doing it. Doesn’t sound quite right to me, especially if you’re influencing yourself with something not so predictable, like an unknown book or the radio. Perhaps priming is defined more narrowly than influencing.
Sunil:
Just when you thought that they had tested everything…
Maybe I’ll spray some Lysol around and see if it helps me paint within the lines.
An interesting experiment might be to hand out identical cameras, some with fresh pine scent and the others smelling of lubricating oil, and send the recipients out into a selected environment to take shots. Next day members of the same group would get the other cameras – this to see if the same people in the same setting would choose different subjects depending upon the scent of the camera.
There was the sound, piped throughout the building, of a clock ticking at United Way. It was a little fast for a normal timepiece. After some prodding on my part, I was told that the almost inaudible and hastened tempo made workers move faster.
Finally, there was a report, a few years back,in Science News, of a scent that made the wearer more trustworthy and believable in the eyes and noses of others. I don’t see it advertised anywhere, but I’m sure somebody is making a fortune selling it to used car lots and financial advisers across the globe.
Birgit:
Is semaphorin as a name merely coincidental or are there very small flags waving in my spine?
Steve:
I intoned “Gotta tell Karl” while working on a painting here and the surface began to dissolve – literally. I’m sure the mantra was responsible, along with the hot sun beating down and the excessive amount of solvent in the varnish.
Karl:
My apologies if this horseplay is getting a little long in the tooth.
Jay and Steve,
I wonder if there a connection between the kind of music that I listen to and the prevalence of short aggressive brushstrokes rendered on the canvas when I listen to 70’s rock as opposed to languid and wavy brushstrokes when I listen to Carnatic…
Need to ask my subconcious without telling it that I will be asking it…
Nice set of associations there, Jay – especially the clock one…
Sunil:
How will you know that you succeeded?
Jay,
Googling ‘sema’ lead me to ‘Sema boundary stones in Thai temples’. That is probably what gave rise to the name. Semaphorin was discovered in an INVERTEBRATE where it organizes boundaries.
Jay,
My unconscious mind might report back here. I will check back here to see if it had happened. And no priming allowed.
Gotta Get Karl seems to be a clarion call.
Sunil:
So if somebody by the name of Subsunil shows up…….
Birgit:
Thanks I guess. I was loving the little waving flags and could almost feel them passing the word from brain to bum.
Parts of me are invertebrate – maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.
Sunil:
Gotta GET Karl sounds more like an all-points bulletin.
Sunil:
I’m running up a phone bill here, but finally I must say that my chewing action is more languid when I dine to Carnatic at Bombay Gardens than at that Elvisy joint down by Akron.
As long as this thread has gone off-track: I love the Thai boundary stones etymology, but I’d wager any reasonable amount the name semaphorin derives from semaphore, for their signaling role in axon development; sema is just derived as a shortened form, rather than being primary. Why it came into this conversation, I have no idea.
Jay,
looks like we agree that Carnatic and languid-‘ness’ go hand in hand…
Whomever:
The semaphorin entered this discussion in response to a link posted by Birgit on her blog. The link was in response to a brief discussion about the coast of Corsica.
I realize that I gave Corey Goodman too much credit for being knowledgeable in Asian philosophy. In his traveling to Nepal, I speculated that he had come across sema boundary stones inspiring him in 1992 to name the axonal chemorepellent ‘semaphorin’.
Discussing neuroscience, in our spinal cord development, semaphorin (secreted by the anterior horn) repels sensory axons encoding pain. This restricts pain afferents to our dorsal horn, preventing them from directly accessing ventral horn motor neurons. In invertebrates, semaphorin similarly restricts access .
The real credit for the term appears to go to Edsger Dijkstra:
Crikey, I’m glad I focus on painting. Thinking and distractions can keep things quite busy. Where’s my easel?
I think there are several types of thinking at work when you’re working. The topic reminds me of the story of Michelangelo sitting before a block of stone for days on end and when asked what he was doing he said “I’m working.”
When the art in question involves physical activity, painting, drawing, some types of sculpture, you can think plan out ahead of time, in the same way someone in sports might envision a game, the pregame, warm-up etc. (Another half-remembered anecdote, two basketball players, one practices free-throws in his mind the other practices on the court and the one practicing in his mind improves more.) Point being, the actual act of painting is like a performance, for which you can prepare mentally before hand… so you can “think” less while you are performing. This pre-thinking involves everything from body motions to aesthetic decisions.
Of course, there is also a broader aesthetic, philosophic/aesthetic decision making that can affect the type of end product you wish to make, hence the mental preparation for the “performance.”
Also, depending on the art form there are variations on the freedom you allow yourself for accidents, improvisation while you are performing. In a Sol le Witt piece, for instance, the accidents would be left to the “fabricators”. Many other artists might work in this way, with the design divorced from the execution.
As for what goes through my brain when I’m working, well, I find a lot of my decisions have been made before hand, and the more comfortable I am with what I’ve thought through ahead of time the more easily the work goes. Or I hit a snag and go “back to the drawing board”(drink a beer).