Aesthetic Space

Navigating the Unknown - Examiner.com article

David Lynch, the legendary director of many noteworthy films including Elephant Man and Eraserhead, was once asked by Terry Gross on Fresh Air what he does when he makes a movie. After a long pause he replied, “You know, when I’m making a movie, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Of course there is something that is guiding his actions, but whatever it is, isn’t something that he can verbalize. When Lynch is immersed in his creative process, he has a way of knowing that doesn’t involve words.

Even if we are not professional artists, every time we enter a situation not knowing how it's going to turn out, we are engaged in the creative process. How do we navigate this unknown territory? ...To read the rest of the article, go to the Examiner: http://www.examiner.com/arts-education-in-san-francisco/navigating-the-unknown

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Paul Reynard Exhibit: December 5-9 New York, Art Directors Club

The artist Paul Reynard was asked before he died, "What is the place of art in contemporary life?" He responded, "The question could well be formulated as 'What is the place of love in contemporary life?'"

I've always loved that statement--it says so much. I'm also enthralled with his writings on the creative process. He said: "A work of art is necessarily incomplete. It is a way of learning." To my mind, we're all in this process of art-making, whether we think of ourselves as artists...or not.

This December, Art Directors Club Gallery in New York will hold a large exhibition of Reynard's work (he died in 2005.) In my opinion, the best artists show us how to see with love, and that's what Reynard's work is about. Here are the details:

December 5-9, 2011
Reception: Dec. 6th, 6-9PM

The Art Directors Club Gallery
106 West 29th Street, New York city
Hours: Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm
Tel: (212) 643-1440

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Images have a very quiet voice

Lucy Mooney 1935

For a long time, the various parts of me have felt separate: I'm both an academic and a creative. I am passionate about teaching and learning, as well as creativity and the arts. As I've journeyed on my path, I've realized that it's my mission to bridge the academic and creative. Since images lie at the heart of the creative process, images also lie at the heart of learning.

I believe that my academic courses provide a strong foundation for the "legitimacy" of the arts--offering substantial evidence of their centrality in learning and cultural change. Some of these courses include Psychology of Metaphor, Psychology of Creativity, Psychology of Transformative Learning, The Purpose and Power of Image and Imaginal Ways of Knowing. (For course descriptions, go to Events & Classes page.)

I often think of image and imagination as the "language of the heart," and this language needs our support. While images are at the center of any kind of creative transformation, they have a very quiet voice. Images need to be welcomed and given space, else they will not be heard.

We're at our most creative when we actively engage with images

Florine Smith quilt 1975
Creative individuals mentally play with images all the time, no matter what field they work in. But research shows that all of us are embedded in the world of mental imagery all the time... and our cognitive systems are based in metaphor. Even individuals who define themselves as "less creative" are at their most creative when they actively engage with images.

The Amazing Lily Yeh

Before the 2009 Bioneers conference, I’d never heard of Lily Yeh. She was one of the main speakers and I cried through her entire presentation. Yeh is an artist whose mission is to heal. Among other courageous things, she went to Rwanda and made art with the survivors of the 1994 genocide. Below is an excerpt about it from her new book, Awakening Creativity. (from the foreward by Robert Shetterly):

“…Lily Yeh asked me if I would travel to Rwanda with a small group of Barefoot Artists to continue the work she had begun in a village of survivors of the 1994 genocide. I agreed, but with considerable trepidation. I had read the accounts of the genocide. Rwanda seemed a frightening place. And I had also read about how poor this village was. After the genocide the new government built a few villages to provide a safe place for the victims. But cement floors had not been poured, water and electricity was never hooked up, septic tanks never completed. No jobs provided. The bureaucratic agencies tasked with this job had disintegrated into half-measures as the funding dried up. Extreme poverty was compounding the trauma of genocide and reinforcing it with the trauma of neglect.

After our group arrived in Kigali, we were driving several arduous hours in the back of a jeep to Rugerero and the survivors’ village. I’m no longer sure what I expected when we arrived, but certainly not what happened. The back doors of the jeep were thrown open and there was a throng of joyous children calling for Lily. “Turabi Shimiya!” they shouted. “Turabi Shimiya!” “Happy to see you! Happy to see you!” On and on—ecstatic! Lily, not much bigger than the children, descended into their midst and shouted the same back at them. They all began running, shouting, around the village, on the hard dirt between the unfinished houses that had recently been painted with murals designed by these same children under Lily’s direction. Bird and beast and decorative motif murals transformed the depressing gray mud brick. Then came the warm embraces of the adults, bending close and inadvertently exposing machete scars on necks and arms and legs. Then came the singing and dancing. As friend’s of Lily’s, we were all their best friends now. What had happened in this land of grotesque violence to provoke such joy?

Yeh says that the places that are the most broken are the ones that are most ready for transformation. Her website is http://www.barefootartists.org/

What is an Image

I'm really lovin' Lynda Barry's book What It Is.

"When I was little... I would hold myself as still as I could and make my eyes like a toy's eyes that don't movce and I would wait. I would wait for the other things in the room to forget about me and begin to move...I knew I had to be patient and wait for a very long time...I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways. The gray kitten in the picture by my bed would accidentally blink his eyes. The girl in the picture would breathe....Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real. But what caused the disillusionment?...What is an Image? At the center of everything we call 'the arts' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive."

True Art is Found Where We Least Expect It

"True art is found where we least expect it, where nobody is thinking about it or saying its name. Art hates to be recognized and greeted by name. It flees instantly."

--Jean Dubuffet, 1901-1985

"Element Historie" Painting by Jean Dubuffet

Art is Anything You Can Get Away With

... said Marshall McLuhan.

Seeking Something That Doesn't Come By Itself

The cool thing about having a blog is hearing from people all over the world that I would never have met in any other way. Last year I posted a quote by the artist Paul Reynard, and a couple weeks ago Paul's wife sent me an email from France. She just happened to be perusing the web and came upon my blog post. (Paul Reynard died in January of 2009.) I wish I could read French, because she offered me any of his writings that I wanted... I really love his thoughts about the creative process. Here's one excerpt:

"...there is a deep necessity in man to express himself...all arts respond to the same need, the need to express something which could never be discovered in any ordinary way, something that needs to be sought for, that doesn't come by itself...[art is our] attempt to find this possibility, which is really a hidden possibility."

I love the line: we are seeking something...that doesn't come by itself.

Non-Literal Ways of Knowing

Picasso:
Every one wants to understand art. Why not try to understand one song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand? But in case of a painting, people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works because he must, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of others things in the world which please us, though we can't explain them.

Picasso's insight is my segueway to say that I'm teaching a class on image at Pacifica Graduate Institute next year. Images lose their power when we try to explain them. Instead, we can "befriend" them, noticing their presence and the effect they seem to want to have on our life and the lives of those around us. When Pacifica sent me the title, "The Purpose and Power of Image" and the course description, I knew this class was mine. Here's the description:

Depth psychology has always maintained a close relationship with image—-the literal images which visit in our sleep, the fantasy images we flirt with while awake, the autonomous images that appear “out of nowhere,” the metaphorical images we have of ourselves and others—the psyche is always creating images. In turn, those images give shape to our psyche, an idea which archetypal psychologist James Hillman explores in his work. Hillman proposes that “at the soul’s core we are images,” and that life can be defined as “the actualization over time” of the images in our hearts and souls. Hillman goes even further by suggesting that our unique images are the essence of our life, and “calls [us] to a destiny.” Students will study the writings of James Hillman and others on the purpose and power of image in psychological and creative life and meditate upon the core images meaningful to their lives and work.

This is an academic course for "creatives" in their new Engaged Humanities program. The course will incorporate "non-literal," as well as literal, ways of knowing. Call Pacifica for more info!

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.

Drawing More

The anthropologist Margaret Meade said that education would never work unless it was based on art, by which she meant that all subjects should be taught in the spirit of imagination, exploration, and play. "We talk too much," said the poet Johann Goethe, "We should talk less and draw more."

Just imagine what that would be like...

this painting isn't leaving me alone

My current muse is this painting by Tsuguhara Foujita (1886-1968), a Japanese artist who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western-style paintings. There's something that's really captivating about it...the simple lines and muted color make me want to go draw and paint. I love the girl's expression and the cat is cute and hilarious. My photo isn't so good, but thought I'd share it anyway.

Here's what The Art Book had to say about the painting:

"The nostalgic and enchanting scene of a young girl holding a cat was created when the artist was 71 years old. The outline is painted with a fine Japanese brush dripped in black paint. The image was then delicately filled in using only a small amount of color. This is especially noticeable in the girl's pale flesh tones. Foujita was a master of drawing, and this painting demonstrates how he used simple lines to convey a sense of childlike innocence and purity. The Japanese tradition of art is mainly graphic, and Foujita continued this tradition by exploiting the use of ink, while absorbing Western artistic influences." (p. 160, published by Phaidon)

Enjoy!