Cricket, Art, Intuition…What a combination!!!
For those of you who know nothing of cricket except that it’s probably baseball played by lunatics with all the wrong equipment and no idea where to run, this might take a little more concentration than usual.
The article which sparked this is to be found here….in the Financial Express, something I constantly have open before me(!).
It is about the display of paintings about cricket which coincide with the Cricket World Cup. (Yes, there IS such a thing and it raises passions, I tell you!)
The painter, Wendy Nanan, has something most interesting to say about what she does. Firstly, she works with very basic equipment, just trying to capture the scene before her; a cricket match.
She referred to her method of working in the following way:
‘I had found myself shifting into this method of working, the intuition taking over the thought process, opening myself to the field and players in a kind of pranic osmosis, like breathing. The drawings flowed without reworking. What was put down was the final version. May be I’d have to repeat the process a hundred times before I got it jut right.’
Now this is what really caught my attention, because she is referring to intuition in a way not usually thought of. Generally, we tend to think of intuition as being of a warning or a feeling about something; perhaps a guide as to what to do. But this is totally different.
Here she is saying that intuition, or, more exactly, working intuitively, is a way of meshing with the subject seamlessly so that the dividing line between the observer and the observed fades away. By allowing this to happen, she is able to let the drawing flow from her without conscious thought.
Now, although that might seem to be quite a bit different to the way intuition is normally discussed, a little thought soon reveals the similarities.
For example, when speaking of ‘usual’ intuition, the implication is that there has to be some form of openness to the great ‘whatever’ in order to get anything at all. Therefore, the greater the intuitive ability (to pick up signals, hunches etc) the greater the openness required (whether conscious or not).
With Wendy, the greatest difference is not that she is trying to get a hunch about a cricket match, but trying to represent its essence. This is a more complex thing. It is also not going to be ‘felt’ or sensed, but expressed via the medium of art, on paper.
In other words, the end requirements are (probably) helping to shape the way her intuition works. If we all wanted to express ourselves in some concrete fashion through wood, metal, paint, clay or what-have-you, the likelihood is that we would try to capture what our intuition (our openness) was trying to tell us.
This subject is really just not explored very much. Intuition and art, whether it is in music or painting or any other form, make for a formidable combination. Just as we find it difficult to express our hunches or feelings beyond saying the banal (”I had a feeling he’d do that”), so artists have to respond to their intuition in ways other than the banal if they are going to say anything at all.
Let’s be honest, if we had to describe with complete clarity your intuitive ‘hit’ about whether to go to a place or not, to see a film or not, to take a job or not, how good would we be at describing it unless we left the grammatically sound, verbally correct route behind and used flights of fancy and thoughts plucked from the air?
In other words, unless we used our intuition to talk about our intuition…..
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This is a fascinating and wonderful post. I so appreciate your site. I love that you are exploring the intuition in such varied approaches and ways….And thank-you for blog-rolling me!
Shelley
Pleasure!! And thanks for the comment. It’s always good to see what you do appreciated. The trouble with intuition is that has always tended to be treated in a vague sort of way (”Oh, yes, I get hunches”) and never really talked about as something everyone has in some ways all the time.