About Creativity

I think this is a good article. It's interesting the difference about heightened use of visual cortices and the shutting down of visual cortices to allow other ideas to flow. And that “openness to experience,” is associated with creativity and corresponds with slower nerve traffic. And of course - there is the letting go of the conventional.

Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory From the New York Times...

Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.

...As for Dr. Jung, his research has produced some surprising results. One study of 65 subjects suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence.

“The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. Jung explained. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.”

Although intelligence and skill are generally associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that have the effect of slowing nerve traffic in the brain. This slowdown in the left frontal cortex, a region where emotional and cognitive abilities are integrated, Dr. Jung suggested, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.” ...

“Creativity is a collection of different processes that work in different areas of the brain,” Dr. Kounios said, so the creative act must be broken down into tiny pieces. He also rejects utility as part of the definition, arguing that there can be brilliant and creative failures — what he calls near misses.

...A lot of different areas of the brain are involved in devising a solution, no matter which process is used, but during the Aha! moment, there is a burst of high-frequency activity in the right temporal lobe, Dr. Kounios said. What’s more, he said, he and Dr. Beeman could predict in advance which process a subject would use. They watched the brains of systematic problem solvers prepare by paying closer attention to the screen before the words appeared. Their visual cortices were on high alert.

The brains of those who got a flash of creative insight, by contrast, prepared by automatically shutting down activity in the visual cortex for an instant — the equivalent of closing your eyes to block out distractions so that you can concentrate better. In this case, Dr. Kounios said that the brain was “cutting out other sensory input and boosting the signal-to-noise ratio” to retrieve the answer from the subconscious.

According to Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida and the author of “Creativity and the Brain” (2005), creativity not only involves coming up with something new, but also with shutting down the brain’s habitual response, or letting go of conventional solutions.

Risk taking and addictive behavior should also be measured, since both traits play a role in creativity, he said.

There may be, for example, a dampening of norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that sets off the fight-or-flight alarm. That’s why creative connections often occur when people are most peaceful — relaxing under a tree, like Isaac Newton, or in a dream state, like Coleridge when he thought up “Kubla Khan.”

John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautions that there is always a gap between what happens in the lab and the real world: “It seems that to be creative is to be something we don’t have a test for.”

Hypatia & Raphael

I was reading about Hypatia and came across this:

Raphael was commissioned to paint The School of Athens for Pope Julius II. The fresco was to be painted above the philosophical section of the Pope’s personal library. In his original draft, Raphael placed Hypatia in the center, just below the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. The church fathers ordered her removal. Raphael still managed to sneak her into the fresco, however, disguised as another figure. Hypatia is the woman dressed in white in the lower left of the painting, looking directly out at the viewer. Hypatia, once condemned by a church father, now gazes out over the church fathers.

What a sad reflection on the church "fathers" that they had such a problem with a great woman philosopher being given a prominent position in a painting of philosophers. It is a prime example of men with authority using their power to keep women from being seen as having value equal to men.

In the final version, Painting Raphael painted Hypatia with some guy leering creepily at her. As if to say you can't have a woman in a painting without her being a distraction. Ugh.


_______________
It is becoming easier to find out about women from history - but it takes effort - and knowing where to look.

Hypatia has a place at Judy Chicago's Dinner Party:


In addition to creating a great space for the "Dinner Party" (which is one resource for finding about some historical women), The Brooklyn Museum (& Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art) has a great website. It's great to be able to revisit the exhibit from home.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. - Hypatia

Larry Poons

Duetto (2007)

(2007)

(2008)

Not suprisingly - Poons liked Mondrian and Barnett Newman when he was making his (moving) dot paintings. And was influenced by music. Didn't know about Pollock at the time. Now his paintings have a more Pollock sense about them - but with some of the same ideas about colors.

Via A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

From his interview with Robert Ayers:

When I think back, the dots used to blip around, they never stood still. If you looked at a dot picture and then turned away, your eyes got rested, so when you came back to it, it was an entirely different color until your eyes got saturated again. It changed. And some of these new paintings have that. They move around. They change visually. And I’m not talking about just a little thing, it’s the whole thing.

When I’m working on them sometimes I’ll put some color on and I walk away and I turn around, and I can’t even see it. It’s disappeared. When that happens I’m always quite happy because then I know that the painting is in a place where it’s on its own. It’s natural. And I am just a conduit between the paint and the canvas.

Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good.

When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once. When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end...

The art that we’re talking about is never finished. It can’t be. It isn’t in its nature. When things are finished isn’t a willful thing. Is a Mondrian finished? No. But is a [Fritz] Glarner? Yeah. That’s why a Mondrian’s better. And Mondrian or Glarner, they have no control over this. Beethoven had no control over being that good. Impossible. It wasn’t his fault he was that good. And it wasn’t Pollock’s fault that he was that wonderful. So if somebody says, “Oh, that’s good!” you can’t get a swelled head because you know that if perchance it is any good, that’s almost the way it is – it’s by chance!

...I don’t see them as any kind of paintings, but I do see landscape in them. I might think, “This looks like a mountain,” and I like that. Or something might look like an arm, or a figure, and I love it when it gets like that. It’s not that I put them there, but that’s what color does. Color is light, and that’s all that paintings are about: light. Painting is color. Color is light. The light that’s generated by your favorite painting, that’s what you’re responding to.

From the Tim Kane at the Times Union:

Larry Poons' multitude of searing colors -- chartreuse, construction-sign orange and stoplight red, among them -- jostle for dominance in his big and busy canvases. Ultimately, not a single one takes over, reaching an agreement, as if he's a conductor reigning in discordant voices in an atonal symphony.

"Before you knew you owned it"

by Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

----------

I'm watching Alice Walker on Democracy Now. She has such a calm presence and quiet wisdom. A great wise-woman model for us all.

The Art of Barry Gealt

EastPoint-PrinceEdwardIsland (2008)

Greenich Beach II-PEI (2008)


I noticed the Art of Barry Gealt perhaps 10 years ago or so.

He is a professor Emeritus from IU-Bloomington (lives in Owen County, Indiana).

I no doubt saw his paintings in a faculty exhibition there. Later I noticed IU's "Friends of Art" was offering a field trip to his studio and I went. I enjoyed seeing several large scale paintings he was working on - in the space that he had. I also noticed that he used a cold wax medium.

He has used various other things since to enhance the texture of his work. I believe that he builds up a texture and then begins painting. I think he used to build up layers of paint - which no doubt took a lot of paint and medium.

One thing that I've liked about his work is the way in which he uses the materials to suggest nature - in addition to the illusionistic use of paint. Some of his paintings are more abstract than others (ie. the center image).

Thoughts on Feminist Art 2/2010

During February I went to 2 Symposiums put on by the Feminist Art Project - One in Chicago and one in New Harmony, Indiana.

There was an art exhibit in New Harmony at the Contemporary Gallery, associated with the Symposium. It was a juried show - where the criteria was Feminist Art - without a description - so it was left up to one's own interpretation.

Some Feminist art - especially as described by one of the art historians in Chicago - is pretty far out there. Essentially pornography as art. The Wikipedia page of the "Feminist Art Movement" features a photo of a naked Carolee Schneemann performing her piece Interior Scroll.

Artists featured at the Chicago event included an artist who became a "cheerleader" for feminism, and a panel of "lesbian" artists (one did not identify with that label - I don't think any were esp. interested in being categorized in that way).

The artists that were chosen to be included in the New Harmony exhibit included some who used stitching (tying their art to women's crafts (as Margarita Cabrera does), artists such as Kathryn Waters and Sarah Bielski with paintings of interiors and latches, and artists including Mary Ann Michna who painted images of cheerleaders and such.

I like Bielski's painting of the hallway with the cast shadow of the unseen plant on the wall with the photos of men (where you could only see the ties). It could be in a business or a school - some sort of institution.

The women artists on the panel in Chicago were more abstract in what they did. One mainly making textures, others with some recognizable images.

From reading the juror's statement in the New Harmony show - Ester Adler seemed to be trying to find groups or categories to put the women in. This seems rather restrictive to me. I suppose it's one of those things that art historians like to do - but it seems like that can leave out some of the more creative and original artists.

One artist - Jane Case Vickers, with her Roadside Debris Brooch with Crystal, made with exploded tire treads and crystal, was an artist that I could relate to. Bringing together a traditional woman's object and making a statement with the discards of society mixed with something like crystals.

It was interesting to know of Yara Cluver's work. She spoke in New Harmony, she works at IU. Her photo collage of her breasts with a babies head created quite the controversy at Depaw, apparently. The "authorities" were not comfortable with the image going out on a brochure for the art exhibit. It seemed pretty tame to me. Perhaps it upset the Mother/Whore dichotomy too much for some people.

Thinking about how Feminist Art was presented and essentially defined by these two Symposiums, I think that visual art by women can be overshadowed and essentially lost with the inclusion of Naked Women Performance Art, in a similar way in which it is lost in relation to men's art. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that Naked Women Performance Art is essentially different in effect from men's art. The patriarchy is still in place. Women's bodies are objects, they have power as sexual objects - on men and on women (especially lesbian women, obviously).

While I fully support the concept of challenging many of the existing premises regarding women (and our expected place in society), the shock value of women presenting their body pornographically and/or of a woman pulling a scroll out her vagina ends up rendering the rest of "Feminist Art" relatively mute. It may be the most helpful to consider those types of female activist art, Feminist Art - but to still want Woman's Art to have an equal place with Men's Art. In fact - while the the New Harmony exhibit was called Feminist Art of Indiana, the title of the Symposium referred to "Woman's Art" - not Feminist.

Some women worry about how the "F-word" has been defined by others. But I think that organizations such as the Feminist Art Project have to consider their role, as well. The way Feminism and Feminist Art is defined in Chicago affects the way it is perceived in New Harmony.

Margarita Cabrera

One of the presenters at the Feminist Art Project seminar at the College Art Association's conference in Chicago was Margarita Cabrera. I was very impressed with her work because of the integration of social content/mission and aesthetics.

She was born in Mexico and mostly raised in the US - living in Texas and New York City. She moved to El Paso and was motivated by the horrific murders of young women in Juarez (just across the border) to do something. Part of the thing was that there were many new factories being built just inside Mexico and the young women were being employed to work there. The perpetrators may have wanted to the jobs for themselves? Most of the cases have gone unsolved. From a Special Report, "The impunity in which such crimes are then left sends the message that such violence is tolerated, thereby fueling its perpetuation."

Margarita Cabrera started various art projects. One of the earlier ones were the appliances such as blenders and vacuums. These were the sorts of things being build in the factories. Her treatment was to make them out of vinyl and with loose strings so they end up looking sad and floppy - and rather undone. She also moved on to making VW Beetles - also made in Mexico.
As she did this - she had the need of helpers and she was able to employ some of the unemployed women of the area.

She also had a project where she got women making copper monarch butterflies - what with the monarchs that return to Mexico each winter. She has had installations with thousands of the butterflies. It has also been about teaching people skills and having a reason to make the things.

One of her newer projects (from her page):

SPACE IN BETWEEN is a collaborative project in the form of a sewing and embroidery workshop at Houston’s Box 13 Gallery. The title is inspired by the term Nepantla, which in the Nahuatl Aztec Language references “the space in the middle” as it relates to marginalized cultures and their resistance strategies of survival. Gloria Anzaldua, scholar, activist, and author of Borderlands/La Frontera, views Nepantla as a reference to living in the borderlands or crossroads, and the process of creating alternative spaces in which to live, function, or create.

Cabrera’s work continues an ongoing exploration of the defining economic relationship between the United States and Mexico. She is interested in creating an aesthetic platform for political and social-cultural consciousness as a means of survival.

The project is structured in three parts:

First, given the history of the BOX13 space as a SINGER sewing machine showroom, sewing school and repair/factory, a community workshop will produce numerous sculptural replicas of desert plants that are indigenous to the Southwestern United States, the most frequently traveled route of immigration into the U.S. Sewn together out of border patrol uniforms, and planted in traditional Mexican terra cotta pots, these sculptural plants render the role of border patrol officers as the protagonists in the American landscape.
A second focus is the attempt to re-introduce and/or maintain an ethnic connection with vital cultural Mexican craft traditions. Members of migrating communities from Mexico living in the Houston Community will be invited to work with traditional sewing and embroidery techniques from Los Tenangos, Hidalgo, Mexico. Traditionally in mural form, the embroidery from Tenango de Doria Hidalgo, employs colorful narrative renditions reflecting popular culture, traditional rituals and myths of the Otomi indigenous communities. Sometimes appropriating and other times reclaiming these techniques, immigrant workers will use it to relay their own personal border crossing experience. This embroidered narrative element will be combined in creative ways with the desert plants.

Thirdly, the production areas are divided into four parts consisting of a cutting area, a sewing area, an embroidery area, and a construction area.

The work being produced and gradually displayed is primarily made from Border Patrol uniforms resulting in sculptures that represent desert plants that embody personal immigrant stories. The workers sharing in this labor and its rewards (Cabrera is sharing proceeds from sales with the craftsmen/women) are coming to this project from *The Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center.

Zeng Fanzhi

I like Zeng Fanzhi's landscape paintings.

(born 1964, Wuhan, China)
Zeng Fanzhi studied oil painting at the Art Academy of Wuhan and lives and works today in Beijing.

From a New York Times article about him:

"Sometimes I paint with two hands. Sometimes I use two brushes, sometimes four," explained the artist. "With this new technique, I create and yet I destroy. One of the brushes is creating, while the other three have nothing to do with me. I like such creation which happens by chance. Sometime I will loose control over the image, but after you loose control you look at what you have and you try to get it back again."

While his earlier work was influenced by German Expressionism, he said he has become more interested in Chinese cultural art since the late '90s, especially the paintings of the Song dynasty, which influence this latest work.

"Having moved away from the more rigid model of European Expressionism," Kwok said, "Zeng's recent works combine a calligraphic touch with a more romanticist view of man and his relationship with nature."

"Beginners" by Denise Levertov

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea--“


But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
-- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet--
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.
_________________

I heard Frances Moore Lappé recite this at a lecture broadcast by UCTV.

Zhang Huan

I had seen one of Zhang Huan's Ash Head sculptures at a show at the Hudson Valley Center-Contemporary, in Peekskill, NY called "Origins".

I looked him up on the web and found that he also creates drawings with incense ash.





I think it's interesting how the materials add to the meaning.

Visit to the MOMA

The MOMA was not designed for the type of crowds that arrived on December 30th, 2009. Where some major museums - esp. in NYC can accommodate large amounts of people waiting in line INSIDE - just trying to pay - this was not the case for the MOMA. The line of people outside was 2 blocks in the cold. And the line just to check coats was 45 minutes. Certainly this building - which was just re-done - could have been designed better.

But once a person got past all that - it was fine (except that I suspected that the number of people in the various galleries exceeded the posted limits for each).

One thing I wanted to see were the large Monet paintings. I had thought from the exhibition description that there would be more large ones - the ones on loan from the MET were not that great. But the MOMA's were nice to see. Agapanthus

The Bauhaus show was interesting. Especially the design lessons - colors and glass grids - and weavings.

It was also interesting to see the general collection. There was now a whole room of Jackson Pollocks. The MOMA got rid of one of his large ones and got a different one, instead (I think I liked the other one better).

A nice collection of Rauschenberg's.



I didn't count how many Picasso's there were - but it seemed like more than necessary. Multiple rooms. To the point where it seemed that it would have been nice to see some work by some other people.

They could have had more art by women, for example. There was a Frida Khalo, a Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim's Object, but overall - art by women was pretty scarce.

Tamar Kander

Tamar Kander

I like her use of color and texture. She uses:powdered gesso, cold wax, dry-wall compound, acrylic medium, marble dust and oils, ink, graphite and oil sticks.

Ilana Manolson

scratching in impermanence

winter clarity

Ilana Manolson Oil on panel
the wave

sundance

harbinger 3

big life small pond

Catastrophe Theory II

Catastrophe Theory II
 
by Mary Jo Bang

The foot goes forward, yes.
Yet there are roots. And a giant orb
which focuses its cyclopic eye
on a moiré morning.
When the microcosm is dry—it's earth;
wet—it's water.

Water, reeds, electric eel: one possibility.
Sun, reeds, dust mote and mite: another.
Whatever the elements
(it's urban/it's pastoral,
it's empty/it's open), the theory says
it could always be worse.

Until it is. Then theory fails,
leaving a tracer mark.
From blood you come to blood
you go. Sudden things happen
inside a frame. A flame is
lit. Look

at those pathetic wiggly squiggles.
Inferno or garden?
An immeasurable distance
sizzles between them.
Watching it all. But taking so little in.
Just what will fit on the flat

of a glass lens. The ticker is hopeful.
Pathetic fallacy.
Look at the numbers move.
The mystery of ticks.
One per second, sixty per Mickey.
Four becomes ten, one in six

bombs falls in a bushel, a basket,
a two o'clock casket. Do you wish to stay
connected? The seen blurs
into the just heard. A bird outside the wide
open window. The warm day
of March. It changes. It has

all changed. The world
as a distracting disaster.
MY, what little SENSE you make, said the wolf
to Mary Jo. The theory rests
on a tipping point.
The clock steps in a direction.

Eva Lundsager

“Hermit Style” (2006). Oil on Linen.
Untitled 1994 Monotype
Untitled
watercolor
4 x 3.5 in.

"Eva Lundsager paints abstracted iconic landscapes whose imagery lingers somewhere between familiar and otherworldly.

In small- to medium-sized works, Lundsager uses a complex palette that defines each piece’s distinct atmosphere, from somber browns, deeply saturated cobalt blues and glowing reds, to soothingly lighthearted pastels (it is interesting to note that green is infrequently used). Compositionally, vast skyscapes are usually employed as epic backdrops for more detailed conglomerates of vivid lines and broken-up forms, generating an overall sense of dialogue between universal grandeur and microcosmic existence...

One of the exhibit’s most successful paintings, “Hermit Style,” contrasts expansive color fields with confined areas of great detail. A light rose and yellow tinted sky, reminiscent of a spring sunrise, adds a strangely soft glow to the otherwise predominantly ash gray grounds. However, this soil is far from infertile, and various mysterious structures made of dotted lines and curvilinear swirls have begun to populate the scenery. As they thrive, so might our trust in the eternal cycle of life, which proves that even a lava field will at some point serve as a breeding ground for new life forms.

Looking at Lundsager’s works it becomes clear that it is the moment of transition, when nature morphs from one state to another—like the time before a thunder storm when the darkening clouds foreshadow the theatrical release to come, for example—that remains the most inspiring touchstone for her painting."