From:
Norman Watts <Norman_Watts@zzzzzzz>
Date:
Mon, 11 Oct 2004 09:28:40 -0400
Subject:
creativity, gestalt, dreams
For some time now I have been thinking about some recent comments by
Bill, Oscar, and Clive (and to some extent also a question posed quite
a while ago by a lady from the UK who wrote about coming up with forms
to carve, only to find that someone else has already done it -that
never got much response). I don't know if they are connected and/or
have given rise to one another or not. Is the cycle described by
Resnick the same one described by "gestalt"? And is the completion of a
series of successful sculptural forms (as described by Clive), that
express even for the sculptor what s/he urgently needs to ask/say, the
end of these cycle(s)? Then what is the painful funk? Is it to be
caught between the hard reality that you can only illustrate and the
remaining desire to make the elusive concrete. The key, as Clive
describes it, seems to be to dip into forms (possibly archetypal?) that
send OTHER PEOPLE of into reveries. But what for the sculptor? The path
to the mysterious is obscured by familiarity with the piece and hard
work.
Bill wrote:
Quoted text begins.Saw a tv show about Milton Resnick the other night. He said something
about the inevitable highs and lows of an artist's development that I
thought was profound,
yet disturbing. The idea was that you work up to a plateau of
discovery, ride it for a while, then it runs out and you plummet into a
painful funk of dismayed aimlessness. The memory of that pain is so
terrifying that artists unconsciously seeks a way to avoid the cycle
again, so he/she develops what Resnick call a "technique" by means of
which the artist avoids the pain of fall from grace >painful
muddle >regrowth into new areas. When the artist settles on that
technoque, he's done, says Resnick. It's all over after that.
End of quote.
Oscar wrote:
Quoted text begins."Gestalt" as a German word means form or shape. In terms of human
psychology (the science of the soul) it is used to refer to the process
of human perception, which forms our sensory experience into
"meaningful wholes." Further to this is the idea that the sum of our
experience forms a whole (a "gestalt") that is larger than the
individual pieces of data, of sensory input, that we perceive.
The process of learning to nourish ourselves (which of course does
include the parents at times, as you say, Jane!) has similarity in all
fields. For example, learning to eat has some real similarity to
learning to carve stone!!
One more aspect of gestalt I want to mention here is the idea of a
"cycle" that we experience, that we go through, in any meaningful
engagement we are involved in. Very briefly I talk about this cycle in
four stages: gestation, active work, merging with the activity
completely, and withdrawal, letting go.
This has been very descriptive and useful for myself in the creative
process. We go through this cycle (both macro and micro levels) in
every creative engagement. I could say, we go through this with every
stone we work.
End of quote.
Clive wrote:
Quoted text begins.In a way this gets right down to the basics. that weird stuff between
visualisation in the mind and what actually winds up as sculpture, I
don't think we should ever think that what we dream, visualise or think
of is anything but just that, a sort of amorphous liquid. A dream is
always a dream, an artwork illustrating a dream is always just an
illustration. People basing their art on an attempt to create what's in
their mind's eye will usually suffer badly because the art never quite
gets there and simply frustrates the maker because it attempts to
concretise the fleeting. Its pretty much a futile pursuit trying to
pretend that something that is really
abstract, exists purely as an idea in the mind, is in fact real.
On the other hand setting out to make an art that causes people to
dream or conjure up all sorts of other visual images, ideas even
voices, noises, smells, times etc in the mind is well and truly in the
ball park of what art can do very well indeed. This tends to be
attainable when we do exactly the opposite to dreaming and that is
noticing with the eyes wide open in real time that a surface, mark
particular kind of shape appears to have a potential to send
people/viewers off into another realm. It is then up to us to attempt
extract as much as we can out of the observation.
Of all the things that can send people off into other worlds I have a
sneaking suspicion that we stone carvers have the very best, the
ability to seduce our viewers into touching the surfaces/volumes of our
work Even when the viewer is denied the opportunity to actually touch
the sculpture their imagination take over.
End of quote.
Norman Watts, Ph. D.
National Institutes of Health
50 South Drive, Rm. 1509
Bethesda, MD 20892-8025
Phone: (301) 402-3418
Fax: (301) 480-7629
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