Chapter 15, The Voices in Your Head: You're Not Crazy, They're Tools!
From my upcoming new edition of The Art Studio Companion
120 Newberry, Bushes and Rocks in Kalithea, oil on canvas, 2008.
In this study, we introspectively allow for stream of consciousness.
There is a reason why art has been called the technology of the soul.[1] The inner workings of the human psyche are the channels through which art is created and experienced.
Art can be about anything. It can be the things we see around us or the things we imagine. It can depict our emotions or our mental calculations. It can be symbolic, literal, philosophical, political, or intimate.
Contemplating the blank canvas, questions arise: What will it be? Why that and not something else? Is it working? Do I like it? Is it right? Does it convey what I feel? Is the shape of the ear anatomically correct? Is the color alive? Does the shape of the foot help or detract from the theme? Is there enough time to do this?
The inner voices that ask these questions may be subtle queries or thunderous demands, all pulling for your attention and often freezing your creativity.
What is the answer to this phenomenon?
Please them all!
Although there is no magic pill or guaranteed rule of aesthetics, we all have the tools to answer and please these voices.
If you can accept that all your inner voices have something valid to say, you will find that they are awesome tools that will eventually lead to your artistic happiness and confidence.
Never dismiss a dissenting inner voice. Always take the time to listen to it.
For example, I enjoy taking breaks from my principal work to paint landscapes directly from nature. While painting, a dissenting inner voice will tell me that it is not happy with the lack of detail or realism in this work. I engage in a conversation with it:
Dissenting voice: "I can't see the details." Pro-plein air voice: "We can do all the detail you want, but we only have an hour or less." Dissenting voice: "What is so bad if we simply take more time and work at it for several hours?" Pro-plein air voice: "Dummy, don't you remember that time we spent a whole morning on one landscape? Don't you recall it was dead as a doornail? The moving light of the sun kept highlighting new things in the landscape—at the time we were surprised that the more we worked, the more new things we saw. The result was that all the highlights canceled each other out—it looked awful." Dissenting voice: "Yes, I recall that. Okay, but what then about taking photos? We can do the one-hour oil sketch and take details from the photo at home in the studio." Pro-plein air voice: "We tried that too, but many of us voices were not too happy with the flatness and lack of vibrancy—every detail we added took away the freshness and the mood that makes plein air so special." Dissenting voice: "Okay, I got it. You see, I am not so stupid. But the next time we paint plein air, I want us to paint as fast as humanly possible so that we might save 15-20 minutes to relish details. Okay?" Pro-plein air voice: "That is a deal."
Talking yourself through the opinions of the dissenting voices and getting them to agree, and even sing in chorus, makes for great artistic growth and confidence.
Practice
As always, it is crucial to reinforce your understanding through practice. Sit in front of one of your works in progress with a pen and notepad. For an hour, fully allow your stream of consciousness to 'think' about it, jotting down all the positive and negative points. Pick one or two key negatives you would like to change, then give yourself plenty of time to paint the corrections. The next day, do the same introspective stream of consciousness, along with corrections. Continue to do so until your stream of consciousness likes or loves everything about your piece.
[1] The phrase "art is the technology of the soul" is a commonly used expression that highlights the profound impact and transformative nature of art. While its exact origin and attribution are unclear, it is often used to convey the deep connection between art and the human experience.
Yes, Michael, from my experience I would say that the inner voice accompanies most goal-directed human action -- perhaps all, if you permit the pre-verbal neural (synaptic) rearrangements that precede verbalization to count as an inner voice in some respect. To take an example that will be familiar to you, when sending the tennis ball to an opponent and seeing how he is approaching it, one may pre-verbally form a judgment about the most probable return paths etc. Since sports are played in the now, such pre-verbal thoughts can't reach the level of speech unless the play is interrupted, when one might say, "Drop shot, dammit." or the like, especially if the drop shot looked like a low probability.
Where one has time for a degree of contemplation, as in many creative activities, the pre-verbal expectations one has of his media and pre-verbal expectations one has of the results his next choice may readily turn into inner speech, but not necessarily grammatically complete sentences. One may consciously verbalize a few concepts like "cliché" or "redundant", and move on to new candidate expressions, or "ah ha!" (i.e., "success"), and move on to the next step. I find that when the going gets tough, full sentences are very helpful, perhaps even full paragraphs written down in ones working journal. Especially helpful is the writing down of explicit questions, such as, "Exactly what am I trying to do here?" since it's hard to find the answer if you're unclear about the question.
I would love to hear more of your perspective on the psychology of creativity -- you are very insightful on this.
Incidentally, the exact origin and attribution of "art is the technology of the soul" will not surprise you -- The Objectivist Newsletter. November, 1963; "The Goal of My Writing" by Ayn Rand":
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Growing from a common root, which is philosophy, man's knowledge branches out in two directions. One branch studies the physical world or the phenomena pertaining to man's physical existence; the other studies man or the phenomena pertaining to his consciousness. The first leads to abstract science, which leads to applied science or engineering, which leads to technology—to the actual production of material values. The second leads to art.
Art is the technology of the soul.
Art is the product of three philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. Metaphysics and epistemology are the abstract base of ethics. Ethics is the applied science that defines a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions which determine the course of his life; ethics is the engineering that provides the principles and blue-prints. Art creates the final product. It builds the model.