Those Painting Days Gone By

It was with great pleasure to receive your blogging missive on soul-searching together with your expo-nenshall rise in creationism. Yes, I know the painting well of Monet’s of his yachts in lovely watercolour. Really spiffing and a pity such a good copy be hidden behind the armoire.

Yep, I like Felix and his gargantuan painting which was all of 600 feet long and took 15 years to paint! I think this was something to do with a recording (well his anyway) of the 20th century and some of his global meanderings. He was not related to Felix Adamant of the Cruel Sea! "Hey, I thort U was kon-fuwsed!"

The portrait is just fine—and who really cares for a true likeness unless the sitter is paying for it – or to impress one’s fellow artist-dabbers? Yeah, I got down to the bottom rung without showing too much humidity.

I got a question: Did you know on Dec. 8, 1903 or whenever, Samuel Langley's flying machine plopped unpleasantly into the river. Nine days later Wilbur Wright got their "Flyer" off the ground so why did these bike mechanics succeed when a well-known dude failed?

Langley's plans were mostly theoretical and his machine was produced from blueprint and built by others. If you look at the Wright brothers' working notes, you see their outsight and their execution are woven together. By tale and error and over a period of time, they solved problems like wing shape and wing warping—hey, they did not worry about air con then. Along the way they found it necessary to build a wind tunnel and other devices to test the lift and controllability of their ever-changing designs. They were not so dum after all! And you know what? The famous Sopworth came soon after.

Applying the Wright metaphor to our artistic creative process, we can see that success might come with a succession of adjustments in a series of daubs, large or small as you say. If you’ve read "Explaining Creativity by Tom Sawyer or The Science of Human Innovation," he explains that these adjustments need not be world-shaking. One does not necessarily have a sense of revelation. Sawyer, a sigh-kologist at Washington University, uses the Wright brothers' "tinkering" as an example. Indeed, it's the minor nature of changes that leads to creative daubing by artists or otherwise.

To bring this line of thought closer to our easel experience—a progressive process of working from one quasi-experimental work to the next might lead to artistic character but this is doubtful. On this path, errors are inevitable, even vital. Failures become the stepping stones to artistic success. By carefully watching and managing a personal progression, a dibby-dabber (a struggling painter) stealthily finds his muse—or self-amusement.

We‘ve often talked about duab-production as an aid to creativity. With small works in series there is greater freedom to experiment and err. Combinations and variations abound within each small work and within the greater series. A feeling of letting go, of "winging it," brings out our innate inventiveness. Instead of a theoretical blueprint-based slavery, one feels the magic of automatic flow. You sense that huh?

The interest and attention of the creator is held by this process and the results often have a sort of celestial inevitability—the look of natural beauty and persistent magic now that would be worth something to put in front of the armoire.

Those Painting Days, what creativity! I will stick to painting-by-numbers or coloring-in!