Creatively Thinking Outside the Box

[caption id="attachment_599" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Collage, "Urbs in Horto," Nancy Charak artist, 2010, 18"x24""][/caption]

I have recently been having discussions with a musical friend who says of us visual artists that we are quirky. I had been vigorously denying the notion of quirky to her, saying instead that we artists are less afraid of having unconventional thoughts than non-creative people.

Here's a quote from a blog called Dose Nation: Creative People are Just High Functioning Schizophrenics. There's more at » more at: www.sciencedaily.com.

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

The post refers to dopamine D2 receptors and "High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing."

 

Art is a Conversation, Not a Patent Office

Thank you to David Shields, author of a new book, "Reality Hunger: A New Manifesto." Headlined at the Huffington Post as "In Writing, Art and Music Everybody Steals." As I've always said about my own work, I stand on the shoulders of giants, and at the present moment, Helen Frankenthaler's work is very much in my art-head.

Quotes from the article:

"Art is a conversation between and among artists, not a patent office."

"Reality can't be copyrighted."

"William Gibson: Who owns the words? We all do, though not all of us know it yet."

"And once we all did: artists have plundered one another since the beginning of time; copyright has existed only during the last 60 years."

"In digital culture, it's especially important for us to be able to sample, remix, mash-up materials available to us at the click of a button, but the law has a stranglehold on literature, perhaps because both literature and the law are verbal."

"The mimetic function has been replaced by manipulation of the original."

Shields lists numerous examples of artists using the work and ideas of predecessors. The image is my drawing, "Mountains and Sea," in definite homage to Helen Frankenthaler's own piece of the same name, 44"x30", 2009, pencil, prismacolor and oil stick on 90# Stonehenge paper.

Being Creative

Being creative means allowing yourself to be alone.

The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People

WHAT IS A DRAWING, MORE ABOUT

An artist working in Swansea, Wales by the name of Richard Monahan, defines drawing:

"In my opinion and the definition that is most relevant to my own work is that drawing can be defined as such; The making of a mark upon a surface, with a hard-nibbed tool." - source: http://www.manifestgallery.org/

The most important aspect to my definition is the idea that drawing must be made with a tool that is of a solid consistency, not a brush as this has an articulation, nor a computer, as this has many interventions from the moment the idea leaves the hand to the moment to when it appears on screen, but with a pencil, a pen, charcoal etc.

The reason for this has to do with the immediacy that a hard-nibbed object brings to the work. If you are to draw a line with a brush some may consider this an act of drawing but to me the articulated head of a brush is one separation between the mark made upon the ground from the physical action of the hand and therefore the brain. This separation causes the mark made to be less accurate to the influence of the hand/brain. The more separations you have between hand and ground, the less human the activity becomes.The reason I admire the act of drawing above all other art forms is its ability to convey the artists thoughts, sub-conscious and conscious, to the viewer. This is the reason that seeing artists sketch-books is of vital importance to understanding their work. It is this honesty and the immediacy of the process of understanding thought through drawing and conversely drawing through thought that makes the subject so important to every artist. I believe that to attain the ultimate accuracy and understanding of this relationship between brain and hand, the journey on to paper must be as little interrupted as possible. The pencil is, afterall, a more accurate extension of the hand.

I have expanded this line of thought into differing materials and most recently paint. By cutting and scarring a line through the surface of paint I am able to retain the primacy of drawing in conjunction with the many different qualities of oil paints.

The work is then presented with an oblique light raking the surface of the image that lends each line an accompanying shadow, thereby high-lighting the drawn qualities.

Credit: http://www.manifestgallery.org/nda/nda2006/monahan.html