Bob, Gittel, Graham, Jerry, Max, Michael, William and me
Sometimes, I come across an idea that carries meaning beyond its immediate context.
As I thought about the creative process and how it may be experienced and described, several influences on my own thinking and practice came to the fore.
Following completion of homework where studio critiques were part of the teaching/learning process, some students would be reluctant to share the thinking behind their response to an assignment. But knowing from experience that, more often than not, a significant element in learning resides in reflective moments that focus upon and give voice to the working process, I opted to persist with the request that students share their experience. For the peer group, such exposures cannot help but broaden perspective. In effect and for future purposes, such moments become permissions to think outside the limits of the proverbial ‘box’. With this in mind I borrowed dialogue from a movie I saw in the 1970's:
"How do I know what I think until I hear what I say"?
But saying out loud that which had been a private mental process can be daunting. I understand this and empathise with a student's reluctance to think out loud. I have been there myself both as a student and later as a novice exhibitor who was asked to explain my work. More often than not, I was unsure why I had made particular choices and decisions. But they were decisions and they were choices.
So, faced with silent students who were probably thinking that they really didn’t have anything to say and hoping that the cliched ‘my work speaks for itself’ would be enough, I would tell them about this moment in the movie Two for the Seesaw’ (1962).
Jerry Ryan, actor Robert Michum’s character, is talking to Gittel Mosca played by Shirley McLean. I cannot recall the setting but Gittel’s lines are delivered fast and with passion after which Jerry admonishes her with ‘why don’t you think before you speak’? And this is where the wisdom kicks in. Gittel responds with ‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say'? - a line that still resonates with me.
My own experience underscores completely the legitimacy of Gittel's response. On more than one occasion, when talking about my own work, I have found myself feeling like a fly on the wall hearing what I just said and thinking ‘oh, that must be why I did it that way’.
My guess is that creative activity often includes decisions that, in retrospect, are not entirely apparent to the maker. The opportunity to think out-loud can be a catalyst that sheds more than a modicum of light and, for that particular permission, I and many of my students should be indebted to William Gibson who put the words into Gitell’s mouth.
Writing in Chronicles vol 1 (2004) Bob Dylan says ‘Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.
As a fan of Dylan's music since viewing his first t.v. appearance in 1963, I appreciate the sentiment and structure embodied by the exposition and linking of the three elements: experience, observation and imagination. Dylan is speaking as a musician and poet, and I certainly recognise that his imagery incorporates all three elements and that the same criteria apply equally to how I think when working as a visual artist.
More recently, in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1998) where he was recalling a conversation with a friend, writer Michael Hamburger I read:
“For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one can say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life”.
It put me in mind of a discussion I had with a writer friend who was worried by the fact that his new novel wasn’t going well. He said that was wondering why he even bothered to put pen to paper, a condition that anyone who strives to be creative recognises. Regardless of medium, a block is a block and I know that feels.
Sebald, who preferred to be called 'Max', provides a more nuanced view of process that is neither entirely optimistic nor pessimistic and this resonates with me. After providing examples of behaviours both positive and negative as to why writers write, Sebald demonstrates that he really does understand that they really can’t help themselves. I appreciate that.
Gittel Mosca needs to know how she feels about something so she says it out loud. When I want to know if an array of marks, colours and textures will work together, I need to see it out loud.
May 4 2021
Following completion of homework where studio critiques were part of the teaching/learning process, some students would be reluctant to share the thinking behind their response to an assignment. But knowing from experience that, more often than not, a significant element in learning resides in reflective moments that focus upon and give voice to the working process, I opted to persist with the request that students share their experience. For the peer group, such exposures cannot help but broaden perspective. In effect and for future purposes, such moments become permissions to think outside the limits of the proverbial ‘box’. With this in mind I borrowed dialogue from a movie I saw in the 1970's:
"How do I know what I think until I hear what I say"?
But saying out loud that which had been a private mental process can be daunting. I understand this and empathise with a student's reluctance to think out loud. I have been there myself both as a student and later as a novice exhibitor who was asked to explain my work. More often than not, I was unsure why I had made particular choices and decisions. But they were decisions and they were choices.
So, faced with silent students who were probably thinking that they really didn’t have anything to say and hoping that the cliched ‘my work speaks for itself’ would be enough, I would tell them about this moment in the movie Two for the Seesaw’ (1962).
Jerry Ryan, actor Robert Michum’s character, is talking to Gittel Mosca played by Shirley McLean. I cannot recall the setting but Gittel’s lines are delivered fast and with passion after which Jerry admonishes her with ‘why don’t you think before you speak’? And this is where the wisdom kicks in. Gittel responds with ‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say'? - a line that still resonates with me.
My own experience underscores completely the legitimacy of Gittel's response. On more than one occasion, when talking about my own work, I have found myself feeling like a fly on the wall hearing what I just said and thinking ‘oh, that must be why I did it that way’.
My guess is that creative activity often includes decisions that, in retrospect, are not entirely apparent to the maker. The opportunity to think out-loud can be a catalyst that sheds more than a modicum of light and, for that particular permission, I and many of my students should be indebted to William Gibson who put the words into Gitell’s mouth.
Writing in Chronicles vol 1 (2004) Bob Dylan says ‘Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.
As a fan of Dylan's music since viewing his first t.v. appearance in 1963, I appreciate the sentiment and structure embodied by the exposition and linking of the three elements: experience, observation and imagination. Dylan is speaking as a musician and poet, and I certainly recognise that his imagery incorporates all three elements and that the same criteria apply equally to how I think when working as a visual artist.
More recently, in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1998) where he was recalling a conversation with a friend, writer Michael Hamburger I read:
“For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one can say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life”.
It put me in mind of a discussion I had with a writer friend who was worried by the fact that his new novel wasn’t going well. He said that was wondering why he even bothered to put pen to paper, a condition that anyone who strives to be creative recognises. Regardless of medium, a block is a block and I know that feels.
Sebald, who preferred to be called 'Max', provides a more nuanced view of process that is neither entirely optimistic nor pessimistic and this resonates with me. After providing examples of behaviours both positive and negative as to why writers write, Sebald demonstrates that he really does understand that they really can’t help themselves. I appreciate that.
Gittel Mosca needs to know how she feels about something so she says it out loud. When I want to know if an array of marks, colours and textures will work together, I need to see it out loud.
May 4 2021
P.S. Beyond being energised by reading Sebald, agreeing with Dylan and being confident that my friend will overcome his writer’s block, I had no better reason to put this in writing beyond a need to
say it out loud.
