Its Dec 1 today one day after "Movember" in Canada has ended. "Movember" is where the month before December is renamed in a way to emphasis the mustache in November (stay with me). Every year in November mustaches are grown by Canadian men (I think its only the men) to raise funds and awareness for men's health, more specifically prostate cancer. Now this is all high and good, but looking around I've come to secretly suspect it could just be a ploy so that Mexican drug dealers and Middle Eastern tyrants, can better blend into the general populace. I might be bias, but I would have liked "Soultember" Soul Patches in September instead. How many world dictators do you know with only soul patches :P If you would like to learn more about Movember - Maybe even prepare for it next year, in-between the process of planing your next military coup- here's the link http://ca.movember.com/.
All kidding aside I really would like to post up part 2 of my article on dealing with pain. It might help a few people, though seeing as I'm still not 100 percent yet, I thought I would hold off just a bit. So instead I'm going to attempt to go back to one of my personal goals of this blog and attempting to delve into the creative process . The goal being, to describe thoughts and developments that are in play during the time one pickups the brush and begins, till when the paint has fully dried. Instead of painting however I'm going to focus on music, since well I don't think a creative roundabout for some stick figures and spilled paint bordering somewhere near the lines, would make for a very interesting read.
In the past I've wanted to read other accounts, to learn and to see what it is that a great painter would, or know and experience how a great poet would write. In this sense I've been mostly disappointed. While there are a few cases where the artist leaves us incredible accounts of the process, at times this is not so and the artist recount of their process might more accurately resemble a case study on the effects of hard drugs usage. Either that or you, get the "how do you do that" ? "I don't know I just do" response.
While at first glance this would seem like a brush off (no pun intended), and it very well may be depending on who your asking and what kind of irritable "artistic" mode they're in. In other cases however it can make sense for someone to explain it in this manner. The reasoning being; many skills are often ingrained internally on a level similar to muscle memory. This is beneficial for the artist because when your not conscious of the process while you are working, it frees up the mind to focus on finer details. Here you are in the action of doing not having to worry about how you are doing it. So the creative actions can take place without much reflection at the given moment in which it occurs. In this case many people just take it as is without really reflecting to much on it. This is fair in that sense but the important point here is, what comes about "naturally" and "effortlessly"can for some people be broken down and expressed in such a way that would not only give more insight into what they are doing but also provide help for others allowing them to experience some of the mindset.
While we all think differently and the actions of creating something artistically will differ tremendously between persons, I strongly believe that by delving into the mindset of the artists , we can impart a form of knowledge that can be more valuable then sometimes even years of theory alone. Lets consider traditional theory and its goals of breaking things down into mechanistic values and attempting to relay that working knowledge into a standardized process. There is one great dilemma with this; we are not machines. The information we receive will always be symbolically interpreted and translated into forms the individual adapts from the raw theory. That is, disposition, tendencies, style and expression will filter the knowledge itself. So why then is static theory created in this way ? Well for convince when you are teaching so many people a set method at one time its almost a necessity.
The very process by which the artist actually breaks down the raw knowledge is in itself unique, with its own merit. Consider the Italian Renaissance, one of the great esteemed artistic movements of western art. In this case and time, without having a standardized theory and the need to efficiency teach massive amounts of people at once, they relied on apprenticeships. Apprenticeships were remarkable for creating the likes of Michelangelo , Leonardo (and eventually all the ninja turtles :P) as well as many other incredible talented artists. Following the dark ages there was no set theory in many of the fields, so a teacher, would teach the apprentice not by stale derivative methods, but through their own free understanding and processing of the art (which in itself is an art). The teacher would impart their form of interpretation, working knowledge, post theory and even take into consideration and sometimes even teach based on the predisposition of the pupil. It could be said that the individual interpretation of art was largely responsible for the reemergence of art as a dominate cultural force in the West.
End of Part One
For those of you stricken with the post Movember blues. Perhaps your to afraid to turn on the news to see the toppling of another 3-rd world dictatorships, fearing that yet another good mustache has met its end. Stayed tuned for part two of this article. (Disclaimer : part 2 has nothing to do with mustaches but actually starts off with the question "Can creativity be taught"?)
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