breakTHROUGHArts
a free newsletter for visual artists

Thanks to all who have passed breakTHROUGHArts on to other artists! To share this newsletter with friends who want more creativity in their lives, use your e-mail Forward button. To subscribe or schedule your complimentary coaching hour click: connect@dianereardon.com.

A Special Note to my Subscribers. The newsletter is taking a summer vacation! I’ll send a brief hello to all in August and September to keep e-mails current and update you all as to when breakTHROUGHArts will again arrive in your e-mail boxes as usual. A makeover of my website is underway to include both my artwork and a blog so you’ll also have new options for staying connected. Thanks to all for your patience, enjoy your own summer breaks, and feel free to e-mail me any comments or wishes about these changes.
Best regards, Diane

July 2010 Contents
I. Aesthetic Decisions
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room, and the Shrink’s Couch
III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading, listening, or surfing the web
IV. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe

I. Aesthetic Decisions
I like to hear how my art friends think about their work. I hope you have found your own groups of like-minded creative folks to hang out with also. Sometimes we just trade great info about techniques but the tribes I’m most comfortable with also share ideas about the basics of visual art. For example, in a recent carpool, someone described good art in terms of the colors and proportions of a good pasta dish.* I enjoyed the different opinions about the role of both garlic and freshly grated parmesan.

By just listening, I’ve also noticed how differently folks talked about color vs. texture. In talking about color, I heard folks trading the names of books that had helped, while others chose to go with a gut reaction, feeling hamstrung by those tried and true color wheels and well-known palette combinations. In a conversation about texture, heard a few days later, there was more a sharing of delight at the textures achieved in different felted pieces. Here the vocabulary was all about feeling, using poetic and metaphoric language (juicy, slubby, crinkly, cloud-like). Not a peep about a texture “wheel”.

In the fiber art world, I and my friends attend to and create great textures. But there’s no analytic map behind us to help organize the variety of effects we can create. Writers and teachers compare on one dimension at a time (smooth/rough; reflective/absorbent; tight/loose), but I’ve not met any system that pulls the different dimensions together with the neatness and agreed-upon logic of the old color wheels.

Think about your own medium and about the aspects of it that engage you these days. Are you attending to aspects that have several hundred years of artistic tradition behind them (color wheels) or are you making up the traditions up as you go as many fiber artists do with texture? How do folks in media like video and digital apply formal systems from other media? If I were making images that move, would I go to the movement vocabularies of dance? How often do those making wearable art study sculpture? If you add embellishment layers to 2-dimensional pieces at what point do you begin thinking 3-dimensionally? As you consider which aesthetic element you focus on these days, how much are you going with your gut vs. working from some organized map of choices?
*Jonathan Talbot is the first artist I heard offer this comparison. www.talbot1.com
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II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch
Lehrer, Jonah. Michael. How We Decide. 2009.
Lehrer’s review of the latest research can teach artists a lot about working from a gut reaction vs. thinking through our options. The study situations run from the serious, where people hurt or help each other, to the trivial of how we choose a shampoo. The bonus is images showing which areas of the brain are doing the deciding. The “gut reaction” areas, firing quickly and strongly (amygdala and lower brain), are usually experienced as “feelings”. Thinking-it-through happens in the more recently evolved frontal cortex (your forehead) and most of us learn, as adults, that we can use this function to override initial emotional reactions by our thinking.

The examples of when each is more useful, alone or in sequence, helped me understand better how I make art. It turns out the frontal cortex is not so good when the elements to compare are greater than 9.* So, in the shampoo aisle with way more than 9 options, you might as well use some felt impulse to choose and avoid the “analysis paralysis” of too many choices and overthinking. Several of my artists friends have similar reactions when their color manufacturers add more and more pre-mixed shades to choose from; many stick with their 5 to 9 basic colors and mix from there.

Another branch of the research found that making choices that were empathic or not totally shifted when choosers could not see the person they would help. Once the folks were out of sight, the brain shifted to the thinker areas, using logic rather than felt reactions. For me this echoes the limits I find in designing while away from my materials; I have great conceptual ideas and can sketch them but I also know that once I am with the evolving piece my thinker gets set aside as I react to what’s visually in front of me. A well-known northwest teacher Lorraine Torrance says this succinctly in “Make visual decisions visually.”

There are situations where it’s better for the frontal cortex to lead the way to later “gut reactions.” For example, studies of backgammon and chess masters’ decisions found that their quick judgments were only good “gut reactions” after many years of intense practice. Also, ability to

use “gut responses” was improved by reviewing every game for mistakes. After the heat of the game was over, one master used his frontal brain to think through what each mistake could teach him.

These ideas about how general decisions are made can give hints to us artists. I’m looking forward to when I can pass on studies that watch how artists’ brains light up while they are creating.
*See Miller, George. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Psychological Review, 1956, 81-97
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III. Friends in the Media: When you feel like reading, listening, or surfing the web
Nights in Rodanthe. Movie starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane. 2008. 
Catch this movie if you are a woman artist balancing family and creative callings. An added attraction is a seaside house that should have had star billing in my opinion.

IV. E-mail changes. To change your e-mail address, subscribe, or unsubscribe please e-mail connect@dianereardon.com. If you use a spam filter, please add this e-mail address to your list of approved senders. This material is included on the breakTHROUGH Creativity Coaching (website www.dianereardon.com) All material is copyrighted ©, 1 July 2010, Diane Reardon. All rights reserved. Visit the website for back issues and details on scheduling a complimentary one-hour coaching session.
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