“Seeing is the essence of consciousness.” Roger Penrose
Every visual choice is a self-expressive action.
Walk into a room and five different people might notice five different things.
Perception is always searching for what we need to see. Just like we pick
different things from a menu, vision is always scanning and selecting, looking
for what it wants, avoiding what it doesn’t. Perception is never passive. It’s
always on the hunt for what will satisfy our various needs from the level of
organism to the level of thoughts and feelings. And since each brain is
constructed by individual experience, the brain is our first creation.
One of the most surprising new discoveries in neuroscience
is the way we sort memories. The
assumption that everything can be broken into categories results from the
dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere, where words, symbols and
classification are the primary tools for understanding. This creates the
impression that everything can be labeled and that what something means depends
on the definition of the label.
The right hemisphere responds to the gestalt, the entire scene, and
represents its significance through feeling. As an instant assessment of
overall meaning, the inner adjustment of our response reflects how it feels to
be where we are, part of a pattern in a particular type of situation. So it makes sense that rather than sort
memories by category as previously believed, our memories are sorted by what
scientists call “mood congruity”. Scenarios and events with the same felt
qualities will be called to mind to clarify the meaning of the event. The
feeling is indicative of our relationship to that pattern. Memories that match
the mood of a circumstance will rise to support the feeling state and
underscore its meaning. A work of art is an armature upon which one’s own
similarly felt experiences attach. This is why art can be such a great tool for
self-awareness. By paying attention to the thoughts that follow a strong
reaction to a work whether positive or negative, we can reflect on the
underlying feelings and learn about emotional themes in our own psyche. Since
feeling is an instant judgment of importance and an urge to act, these
correspondences reinforce our sense of the significance of the situation, a
quality that grows from our sense of balance and proportion.
Finding the art that moves you offers rich new territory for
introspection. Art has always been about feeling. Though there may have been
other things at work it’s the feeling that connects. Recognition gives a sense
of understanding. A wonderful passage in the “I Ching” says, “Music has the
power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of the obscure
emotions.“ Likewise, visual art helps us identify and recognize complex
emotional truth.
Since recent brain science has shown that feelings lead
thinking, we needs tools to help recognize them. Time spent looking through an
art book, in galleries or museums offer opportunities to experience responses
that point to personal themes that open the way for greater self-awareness and
strengthen the guidance provided by the aesthetic sense.
(This Saturday I’m giving a miniclass on this topic at a
SkillShare for Baltimore Mesh.
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