Art & Intuition

Reading through a few artists' blogs, I realize that most artists, like most people we know, are hell-bound toward attempts at rationality.  The positions and decisions that our friends, children, and leaders arrive at may seem highly irrational to us, but most of us are eager to "rationalize" everything we do.  So, artists who teach -- especially who teach beginners -- have to get folks to focus on creativity, on process.

Angela Wales Rockett (Painted Crow Studio) focuses her students on "intuitive painting -- creating without expectations."  Sandy Bricel Miller (Red Ochre Studio) has told me time and again how difficult it is to get adult students beyond their disappointment at the results of their hard efforts to re-create what they see.  (Isn't that what a camera is for?)  Amy Bryan (Amy Bryan Visual Arts) notes how her sixth-grade students are much more open to their own creativity than her students in higher grades.  I'll bet most sixth graders clamp down on their creativity over the course of the year of being psychologically pummeled by their seniors in middle school.  

While artists of all disciplines know the importance of rationality, it seems we find that our role includes getting others to own their creativity, spontaneity, and even irrationality.

Art & rationality

“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”

--Isaac Asimov, quoted in The Atlantic's Daily Dish