Fish

Feeling the Picture

My husband still marvels over the fact that when Great Britain voted for Brexit, I spontaneously exclaimed. “God, Maybe Trump can win.” He couldn’t see how I could have related the two, he followed the newspapers more closely while I surf over various, radio, TV and internet sources. The difference in our thinking wasn’t between who had better information it was the focusing on the information and not the overall picture. To use the word of the 1940’s and 1950’s psychologists who studied perception, the gestalt is the sense of the whole that leads the organization of the information. Recent brain science says that the difference between hemispheres is in how they process information, the right dealing with the whole and the left more with the detail. Words are seductive details. As Walker Percy once wrote, “We tame the world with descriptions.”  Words, labels and facts give the illusion of knowing but are only islands in the big picture. Writers are now questioning the usefulness of educational emphasis on accumulating information and seeing the need for ways to build big picture thinking.

The big picture starts with the body’s adjustment. The word ‘feeling’ is not vague but represents specific sensations as the body anticipates what the scene suggests will be necessary. Nervousness is felt in our gut, excitement or apprehension, whatever the situation requires, stimulating hormones to coax the necessary parts into action. Even subtle recognitions are physical, an adaptation to the requirements of what we’ve noticed. The mirror neuron system understands other humans, resonating with body language and facial expression to know from our own feelings what is felt by another.

When my students are drawing only scraps of white paper there is still the wide variety of feelings created by the composition, how active or organized any relationship between scraps can suggest protectiveness or aggression. Perception is perception, the same systems processing art or the surrounding world. Simply how forms are arrayed in relation to gravity creates an expectation that has a feeling attached. This first level perception is often ignored. The cultural stress on language steamrolls non-verbal truth and stifles the development of wisdom.

The stress level created by denying what the body knows contributes to the psychological pathology of our time. The excess of cognitive dissonance, outright double-think requires a mental gymnastics made possible by the detail/symbol oriented part of the brain controlling most thought.  Because the actual picture creates one kind of feeling and the verbal arguments another, persuasion needs the emotional element aimed at forcing agreement. Accepting the explanations and verbal flourishes, the dissonance is between a physical reality felt in the tension of distrusting a person or circumstance, and a layer of words that repeatedly says trust.

Looking at art is a powerful tool for strengthening the early stages of perception that recognize the large relationships unfolding in the gestalt. Artists pull out the essence of the whole and sensitize viewers to overall structure. It’s an area of education that’s been neglected for too long.

Baggage

Truth and Illusion

At the beginning of my illusionism class I often quote the line from Pablo Picasso,

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

Just like in literary fiction, the inventive fabrication can build a way of looking at things that promotes insight for the reader or viewer. The cubist portrait evokes an aspect of being, considered more deeply, perhaps closer to a truth about what a person actually is. The integrity of the truth is in the honesty of the observation.

Art of all kinds takes us beneath the reactive surface to a place where contradictions are the yin and yang of all motion. Truth moves with the scene and situation, always evolving and adapting. Art can give form to what goes unseen but alive beneath everyday concerns. Recognition of the power of art to stimulate insight in the viewer was acknowledged in the recently published letters of Alan Watts. In one, he ended a passage about the difficulties of expressing the realizations in spiritual experience with, “Perhaps the artist can show this much better than the philosopher.”

What the artist shows is not an explanation but a set of relations and qualities that can have the power to open up realization by the viewer. The artist filters the essence to show the viewer something they already know but have never recognized. Many kinds of things can be built on the same armature. The structure resonates with the viewer’s personal experience of that feeling offering a glimpse of the interior world that normally lies hidden. Associations from the past develop the meaning to the individual. A connection vibrates between the emotional state of the artist and viewer.

Younger generations already know the efficiency of showing rather than telling, Instagram builds banks of visual information expressing individual lives. That a picture conveys more information is a given. As visual communication becomes more widespread, education would benefit from spending time with the most developed expression of visual intelligence, fine art, to cultivate understanding of the language of emotional intelligence. Sensitivity to what might be wrong or what fits in a situation are based on concrete expectations about how the world behaves. It is easier to see when something’s out of balance than to read the data. What we can tell is barely a cipher compared to what we can show particularly when it comes to feelings.

The way that images open thought gives a sense of how visual relationships can contain so much which is why philosophical questions can be posed and contradictions integrated. Rather than choose sides, adding new information to the big picture, enlarging perspective.

The skills of illusion give more power to “convince others of the truthfulness of your lies”, to have the viewer enjoy the game of being fooled is momentary release from chronic preoccupations and open the brain to new thoughts.

Bookmark 2018

Happy Holidays.
Here is this year's bookmark
with my gargoyle hugging
our house.
If you like print it out,
cut it out,
seal it between clear contact paper
and let it watch over your books.
Enjoy!

Offering

     Early in our marriage, I interrupted my husband Michael while he was practicing guitar, to ask what was the meaning of life.

    “To find out what we’re capable of” He answered without hesitation.

     When I told that to my class of excellent art students in our last discussion, there were murmurs of agreement all round. Whatever it is we have to offer we should find and develop in whatever form it takes. We feel that in our heart. It’s what the brain rewards to keep us growing.

      My brother Bill has an ability to connect with people, make them feel at ease. He radiates goodwill and empathy, so the fact that now, in his retirement, he’s going to be a hospice volunteer is a beautiful next step in building on that capacity. Each aspect of ourselves we choose to develop offers a window into deeper layers of personal possibility that wouldn’t be seen without new challenges opening new questions. We don’t know what we’ll find, the compass of the heart just gives direction about what matters to core being.

      People might not think of self-development as a gift to others, but it is the particular capacities of different individuals that enriches the world. This is the part that’s not manufactured, that’s not an algorithm, but the sense of individual flourishing led by what we love best. 

      Not using up time finding out what others think of us opens space to build a skill or learn about something that tugs at curiosity. Our pleasure in a task signifies the presence of the brain chemistry meant to encourage us. The more actively we pursue something the more we appreciate it. This actively combats the things that pull us down. When Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Homo Deus”,   says that google will know us better than we know ourselves, it assumes that like the rat with the pleasure lever, we’ll just keep clicking likes and checking for them all the time. We don’t have to behave like the rats.

      Consider the real world experiences that give you the most pleasure as a starting point.

Getting better at something builds understanding of the subject but also of who we are. This is learning about ourselves through what attracts us. The life that is not on the computer is not known to the computer, it may know many of our interests as well as what we buy and who we know. But if we have a life off screen we can have a private space and an enriched sense of what we can offer.