I think,what I have learned over my many years,is to trust my initial design and put it aside. because chances are that that is more me than any thing else i could create with deliberate purpose. I always doodle designing with all the forms that are in my experience, as you might with words and combinations of them, which is what i just don't have." Forms', I have. I truly believe that that is where our aesthetic best is hiding from us. We tend to kill our best given creations with our studied knowledge.
I visualise three or four members of this group thinking"'what is this guy doing here" ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, September 5, 2011 8:02:28 AM Subject: Re: "not the hand" In a message dated 9/4/11 9:27:27 PM, [email protected] writes: > in my case, Cheerskep...... my hands are just a tool controlled > by the mind . On occasions an aesthetic accident will happen. > mando > I believe you when you say this, Mando. But you have gifts that people like me don't have. I've mentioned on this forum the surprise and dismay of M.M. Kaye who wrote large-canvas novels of nineteenth century India and the Raj. ( e.g. THE FAR PAVILIONS). I'd just praised her description of a vast cavalry charge up a hill in the battle for Jalalabad. She said, "Oh that was so hard. I had to run that film again and again." Startled, I asked, "Er, what's that, Moll?" She continued: "At one point I realized I didn't know where Wally was. So I had to get them all back down to the bottom of the hill again." She then shut her eyes and said, "Then I charged them back up the hill, and there he was in the upper right hand corner!" I told her: "Moll, do you have any idea how different your head is from mine? When I shut my eyes, I see approximately what you see when you open your eyes in a totally dark room." She reached out and squeezed my hand in sympathy. "No!" she nearly sobbed. My point: Very often, people who have a gift are astonished, even incredulous, when told by others that they lack the gift. (Granted, I haven't tried to describe/define what I have in mind when I say "gift". Perhaps it's serviceable enough to call it a very rare and highly prized characteristic -- sometimes an ability, sometimes extraordinary good looks, sometimes an extraordinary immune-system. In other words, lots of "gifts" never arise in discussions about "art".) Nor do I have anything approaching what some might call "artful" hand-control. For many reasons I could never have been Horovitz, Jimi Hendrix, Aubrey Beardsley, Hokusai, or even a great comic-strip illustrator. I can't insist on any of this. I assume many visual "artists" will feel I'm talking nonsense, mere manual dexterity has nothing to do with "artfulness". Music cognoscenti may assert that whatever "artful" that emerged from Heifitz, Oistrakh, Gilels, Casals et al came from their minds, not from anything physical below the neck. Or, at least, not from anything they'd want to call "artful".
