My thoughts on working with right-hemisphere faculties and "unlearning" perception, from someone who spent two years studying art in ateliers by drawing and painting naked people! Inspired by @Malcolm_Ocean's thread on the divided brain.https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1101313537492815873 …
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One of my teachers always said “you should draw 1/3rd of what you see, 1/3rd what you know, and 1/3rd what you wish you saw”
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Left-brain dominance leads to a lot of literalism in what you see, difficulty in updating what you know to have more accurate symbols (or stop symbolizing when necessary), and not even knowing what you wish to see.
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There’s something magical about “looser” painters like Sorolla who can get you to believe something is a face, until you zoom in and realize “WTF it’s a blob with nine brush strokes how can it look like a face.”pic.twitter.com/CWUqFU0Y5t
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And loose painting is shockingly hard to do, because when you have 1 or 2 paint strokes for margin of error, it's way more obvious when you put something 1cm out of place than if you spend 1000 strokes shoving the paint around until it's good enough. Ex. by Sargent:pic.twitter.com/OpgKkq1kS0
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Left brain dominance, along with rationalist devotion to finding generalized principles or ways I could get it right every time, threw a wrench in my artistic development. I was really good at talking about art, not so good at doing it...I may be repeating the issue here haha
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So I may not be the best person to talk about how to train your way out of it, but here are some patterns I saw (beyond simply practicing to absurd degrees)
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Imitating a master you admire is key. There are certain painting decisions by masters I look like where I don't know how the hell they got the guts or intuition to do it, choices that I never would have thought possible w/ just a set of general rules or photorealism
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There's a virtue in repeating a form of practice so many damn times that you just get TIRED of analyzing it. Ex. in my meditation I'm far better at working with koans, using via negativa, etc. than just sitting (for better or for worse). I have to manually stall my mind first.
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A lot of people think intuition / loose painting = just waving your brush around and literally speeding up, this rarely is the case (at least at first). Being slow and deliberate, without that deliberation turning into cognizing and making the process a checklist is tricky
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The hardest part, and a more universal lesson, is that the left brain inhibitor is almost always tied to the emotional pain of perfectionism, failure, etc.
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Most of the good artists I saw at the school just didn't give a fuck about steamrolling through the bad beginner phase and got valuable experience out of making stupid mistakes. They participated in communities early to get feedback and make connections with other artists.
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I'll end with a story from Art & Fear that always inspired me. Although I'm not sure if it is directly relevant to left-hemisphere inhibition, it may be helpful to youpic.twitter.com/BrtjBDw8Dv
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End of conversation
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