Back around 1970 - so junior year at Kalamazoo College - I was assigned the book Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood which Wikipedia says "was the first book to consider video as an art form." I'm a little leery of "firsts" and "uniquelys" and other such absolute claims, but it is a very cool book. I think it is in a box back in Raleigh, which means it survived nine or ten “bookshelf purges” in which I would clear out books I deemed “no longer important.” I would stack them out side my office door with a sign reading “Help Yourself.” I think Expanded Cinema made the cuts so many times because it has an excellent introduction by Buckminster Fuller, but even more so because it introduced me to the whole notion of synesthesia.
I think of synesthesia as a neurological railroad roundhouse, sort of like in Thomas the Tank Engine, where the trains get shuffled onto the proper track. To greatly simplify, vibrations come into the ear, strike the ear drum and then make their way to the roundhouse - AKA the brain - which shuffles those impulses onto the right track and we hear music. The eyes do the same with visual data, nose to smell, skin to feel, etc. Well, people with synesthesia - synesthetes - have some unusual cross overs in the road house. For some synesthetes the letters blue come into the eyes black but the brain sees blue. Some synesthetes smell coffee and see specific images. Sounds can have shapes and colors. It is a fascinating condition, I certainly hesitate to call it a disability. Especially after watching a couple of recent episodes on Curiosity Stream.
The series is called “Secrets of the Brain” and it is hosted by Dr. Jack Lewis who is out to “learn everything there is to know about the brain!” Well, you know how I feel about absolutes, but he looks pretty young - maybe early thirties - so we’ll cut him a little slack. Especially since since the last two episodes, on synesthesia and creativity are aimed at combining those two of my personal favorite curiosities.
I have already talked about synesthesia, but another episode dealt with creativity. And, as a standard device in the series, Dr. Jack likes to seek out folks whose neurological conditions are the result of other than normal development. In this episode Dr. Lewis encounters a man who, as the result of a stroke develops “sudden creative out put.” Previously the gentleman had no interest in the arts, but post stroke becomes obsessed with the fine arts - painting in particular. He leaves his old life and becomes a fine artist, producing some admirable works, but is unable to explain where the ideas for his works come from.
OK, let’s stop messing around with background information and get to the important part: me. I have been doodling for as long as I was forced to sit in a classroom with nothing but a piece of paper - or to tell the truth, the border of a textbook - and a marker of some type to entertain me. There was a brief, very brief, time when I worried if drawing in a hymnal was a sin. But when I began to help my Catholic buddy make up sins for confession, the whole question became moot. Truth was I just doodled because it was fun and calming. No doubt an argument for putting me somewhere on “the autism spectrum” there, but secretly I’m thinking most creative people are.
Anyhow my drawing, and PPP images are a bit strange, but I am now leaning towards the notion that - having no other rational explanation for them - I have decided that they are a combination of synesthesia and the kind of creativity Dr. Lewis is playing with in his Curiosity Stream series. So I’m going to take you through one image from a “synestcreative” perspective. I call it “The Rose,” but in truth it is a cabbage.
As I have mentioned before I have fallen victim to the “billions and billions” of images trap of digital photography. I have more images than makes any kind of sense, but my experience of reviewing them is different from the social hell of sitting in someone’s living room watching the slides of their most recent vacation to Disneyland. If you are too young to remember “slides” go light a candle or make a donation to some deserving charity.
Rather than beginning to drool and slide out of my seat, when I watch my collected images they shift shape - like digital shape shifters. Like this first image - when viewed statically and knowing it is from a garden show it becomes pretty obvious that it is a red cabbage.
But as I concentrate of the image more intensely its "cabbageness" gets a little slippery, and in my mind it becomes much more like a rose. And having just finished working on the sunflower image “Beyond Yellow,” RoseCabbage begins to suggest that pieces of it should be removed. And I say "RoseCabbage suggests" because I really am not aware of participating in the selection. That is not to say that it works like a Ouija board with the image taking control of my hand and moving it around. Rather I just sort of stare at the image and eventually something feels right. So I draw dark lines around the part of the image to be removed, and blank them out. Like this:
Then RoseCabbage and I work together to decide what designs should go in each of the blanks. And I put the designs in like this:
The next step is adding color to the designs, and RoseCabbage and I will work on that soon. Selecting colors that feel right from this collection. I again say RoseCabbage and I because it is a group effort. A lot of sitting and staring before I pick up a marker. That step takes a long, long time. And I will share the final result with you when it is done.
The point is that I think the process by which my drawings come to be is really a combination of three neurological processes, and it would be an error to think of them as separate, or to try to cleanly unwind them. The initial selection of the primary image is dominated by, but not totally dependent on sights I have seen or images I already possess. I mentioned in the previous post that I have a fairly clear picture in my head of what "home" should look like, yet have no such image in my collection. So it is clear that I will be looking about me for a possible stand in. So creativity plays a large role here. Once I have decided on the primary image the rest of the creative process seems to blend, at least synesthesia with perhaps a touch of healthy autism.
No doubt some grad student - in art, psychology, or psychiatry - is out there hammering away on a dissertation that will explain all this. But, until then, I think I can be satisfied to just enjoy myself.
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