Bureaucratic Nightmare

Visual Choices

I was looking for something else when I came across this painting by Roberto Matta and it made me laugh out loud. Some, maybe most, laughter has to do with other things. The painting is far from funny. I’ve always found it somewhat sinister. The laugh came from recognition. It has such a similar feeling to a drawing I just finshed about all the bureaucracies I’ve been struggling with recently. The laughter of recognition is spontaneous and relates to present emotions. Norman Cousins wrote extensively about the importance of laughter to health. Besides the physical health is the improved mental health and sense of connection, the “I get it” effect. Images prompt associations from our own past experience that shared similar places or moods. Different times in life have different emotional weather. Art builds awareness of these shifts in mood and underscores the most significant aspect of the feeling. We may think we are looking for our favorite paintings, but the eye wants to stop at what is most balancing to the moment. Perception has its own priorities. It stimulates related thoughts and, helps integrate the different pieces of our subjective life as a whole. The overall sense of the painting is an opportunity to think about how a painting we are drawn to balances us in some way. Laughing at the Matta painting signified its relevance to my state right then. Unlike my difficulties with automated systems, the sense of ill-will and impending torment in the image seemed to express malign intent. The intent was different but the similarities were in the sense of dread. Where we gravitate changes with how we feel, and the Matta painting connected to emotions I was trying to express in my own drawing. This propensity for pre-conscious visual choices can be developed consciously. Whatever we are involved with is led by visual choices. Perception has the background understanding of the entirety of our circumstances to focus attention where it’s needed. How to make use of this was recently brought out on the public radio program “Hidden Brain”. On an episode called “You 2.0- The Mind’s Eye”. Emily Balcetis discusses her work on the importance of our visual system and how to use it to improve performance. Her book “Clearer, Closer, Better”, looks at the relationship between conscious use of visual focus and success. With a technique she called “materializing” she adapts visual techniques that top athletes have been using for years to focus visual attention for other purposes. Likewise, emotional balance will seek out the imagery that reflects what’s significant for us at the time. The choices made when looking at art builds self-understanding. Because the feelings are shared with the artist, there’s consolation and acceptance of the difficult feelings that are part of being human.

Delay

My scanner won't connect to my computer. Since my essay to be posted today referred to the drawing, it's all pending until I resolve the issue.

Early Difficulty

Expectations

Lately I’ve been working my way through the Ted talks that focus on the brain. What they all stress is the role of patterns. Life is action. Knowing where any given pattern of action is headed is the general objective. The measuring and naming we’ve been so consumed with is just description. It freezes the continuous motion in one place and time. As David Bohm once pointed out, the concern with the names of things that results from the dominance of noun-centered language took the intellect down the rabbit hole of believing things are more important than events and treating ideas as fixed things. Bohm felt that the truth of any theory required an aesthetic judgment. This depends on relations within a context. The emphasis on relations in the visual arts can build awareness of context and sensitivity to significant patterns. The brain recognizes overall shifting patterns through the feeling of what’s unfolding. You can’t understand the way the brain works just by thinking about its parts or its chemicals. The flow of energy is an action involving many parts. Now that imaging techniques allow us to watch it we might take serious steps in understanding it. Patterns create expectations. Expectations are a primary requirement for perception. Inability to see at birth is more a matter of having no previous seeing to inform what is sought, than of any problem in the system itself. The system is there to be primed with the features of the world it will need to decode. Caretakers, as patterns of movement from above, lay the groundwork for the meaning of above and below with its emotional tone of dependence. The further association of light above and needing light to see builds the positive nature of “up” in our minds. In later life, we conceive of an improvement in our condition as “moving up” and a host of other familiar phrases. This need to “rise above” negative patterns is one of the essential points in Alfred Adler’s philosophy of motivation, that the difficulties of life can be the spur to achievement and high expectations are more conducive to accomplishment than low. When he coined the word “lifestyle” he referred to the patterns of action in an individual’s life and eliminating the ones that are self-defeating. Humor resists expectations, twists away from the predicted meaning. Illusion is a close cousin, running against the expected direction. Surprise stimulates dopamine which stimulates more curiosity. This is why the cultivation of humor and the pleasure of visual illusions is so good for our minds. It opens the mind to the new and promotes flexible thinking.

Last Resistance

The Pleasure of Improvement

I don’t usually write about the drawings I post but since this is the third time I’ve posted the drawing above I’ve already let viewers in on the process and what I’m demanding of it. Over sixty hours of work later I think I can finally let it go. Each time I posted before, I could see, once it was on the screen, that there was more to do to make it look as heavy as I wanted. For a while I’ve had this quote from Leonardo da Vinci in my mind. “The depiction of volume is the supreme mark of skill.” It’s harder than it might seem, with extremely subtle variations in light and dark that the eye doesn’t normally pick up. With many years of this behind the scenes goal, I’ve discovered ongoing challenge, pleasure and opportunity to reflect on what the depiction of volume communicates. With increased illusion of volume, the sense of weight grows. The idea of weight as serious shows in the many metaphors that reflect that attitude. What is heavier requires more of us, a burden, a mood, a responsibility. Surrealist use of illusionistic volume to portray psychological reality added a necessary seriousness to the absurd and implausible. The stronger the sense of volume is the more it’s felt in the body, as a real presence, and engaging the body is always a goal in illusion. As I’ve said to my illusionism classes, one of the benefits of learning this skill is that it can always be pushed more. In my study of brain science one thing that stood out was the idea that the brain rewards learning. There are lots of routes back and forth from the frontal lobe (most evolved mental properties) and the nucleus accumbens (primary pleasure center). It’s a pleasure to get better at something. Building knowledge and skills are our human survival tools. The involvement of video games is spurred by the pleasure of improvement. It doesn’t really matter at what. To push beyond past limitations takes involvement and concentration and that’s what’s being encouraged by the brain’s rewards. We’re meant to increase our capabilities and whether it’s improvement in a game, on an instrument or at baking, brain chemistry is there to reward achievement. We don’t have a good word in English, for satisfaction in the process of getting better at something. Not pride, though that may be a side effect, but joy in the act of stretching ourselves, in our participation in our growth. The state of flow is our best concept to appreciate it as an end in itself. The pleasure of improvement is in the doing, losing oneself in the process. Work done well is its own brand of happiness.