Intuition and art (or is it?)
Here’s a jolly piece about using your intuition. It’s to be found in The Republican newspaper. At first glance, it’s to the point, about artists unleashing their intuition.
Sounds great doesn’t it? The article is all about how a professor of fine art is using radical techniques to get people to create art. Things like painting blindfolded, using string or smoke, splattering or other techniques.
And the point is….?
Well, according to the professor (Dean Nimmer, if you want to know), it is
“to instill is the idea that you don’t have to be thinking
of the finished product but rather maximizing the pleasure.”
Wonderful! But, might I ask what this has to do with intuition? Maybe it’s this quote:
“The more self-conscious your thought, the more of an impediment it is. To me, it’s a lot more important to find your sources of creativity”
So, the question to be asked, is whether finding your creativity is what intuition is all about is is the use of the word ‘intuition’ just a fancy way of getting people to enroll in a class?
I have to say, it sounds more like the latter, for the whole article is simply about how the students splatter stuff around and get to look at it at the end. How is that being intuitive? I’ve got nothing against splattering paint and calling it art, but I hesitate to call the process ‘intuition’.
Or am I just wrong?
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Dear Nigel,
I just found your blog from my Google alert and I wanted to respond to your comments. You wrote about the recent article on me that appeared in the Springfield (MA) Republican newspaper that shows some of my students painting blindfolded, and you questioned whether this has anything to do with intuition. If painting blindfolded doesn’t involve using one’s intuition, then what else is guiding this process of painting? I’ve devoted much of my work as an artist and my 35-year teaching career to using intuition as the most important partner in the process of painting and drawing. The article you referred to showed a very limited, and rather superficial view of which methods I use to teach students to trust their intuition. In fact, I have written a book called “Art From Intuition”, which shows over 60 different methods of applying intuition to creating visual art. I have also shown my own “intuition painting” and lectured on this subject across the US, Europe, Japan, China and Australia. Since you obviously have such a strong interest in intuition, I invite you to see my own blog at http://www.artfromintuition.com and my website http://www.deannimmer.com to get a better idea about my investment in the power of intuition in art.
Regards, Dean Nimmer
Hey! Thanks for responding! Also, thanks for taking the time to explain in more depth.
My response was also reasonably superficial, which i freely admit. However, my main point was to raise the question of what exactly is intuition (or, conversely, what isn’t intuition). The article was just a way into that question.
You’re right, I am interested in intuition and I’m keenly interested in how society in general views it or conceives of it. Very often the idea of creativity is associated with intuition. Creative processes, for their own sake, for the sake of nothing more than accessing creativity is, I still think, not in the intuitive domain.
However, accessing creativity (or, to put it another way, accessing information or knowledge otherwise buried) and then using that to go on and do something with it is, I content, within the bounds of intuition.
I am not implying your methods are in the first example here, by the way.
Where, i think, the whole subject becomes MOST interesting is in the very field you work; art and intuition. Art is just as difficult to define acceptably (by that I mean provide a definition which the average person will agree to) as is intuition. When the two are combined, then the whole concept is given new light, new ways of looking at it, new understandings.
That is of far greater interest to me than a long talk about what intuition (or art) is or isn’t.
I really do think that intuition is defined by its actions, by what it is involved in rather than any static notions. Much the same as art. But where one ends and the other begins is where the most interest lies, and where most debate should take place.
So, thank you again for you thoughts and I shall go visit the sites you recommend and hope that others hwo read this will do exactly the same thing.
Nigel Percy