Article: PAINTING A PICTURE OF THE CREATIVE MIND
It’s in this delicate negotiation of conscious choices and unconscious summons that
art finds its form and communicative power.
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic Monday, May 28, 2007 (on loan)
It’s in this delicate negotiation of conscious choices and unconscious summons that
art finds its form and communicative power.
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic Monday, May 28, 2007 (on loan)
Four years ago, American Conservatory Theater actor Gregory Wallace began dreaming about birds --
birds standing, poised precariously on one leg, birds nesting and lightly ruffling their feathers.
One day during a rehearsal for "Waiting for Godot," Wallace found himself assuming a new posture
at the beginning of the second act, just after his character has been beaten.
"I was aware of standing in a different way," recalled the actor, who played the tramp Estragon in ACT's
2003 production, "cradling myself, holding my arms as if they were wings. I felt like I was perching. I think
those dreams just sat in my body in a particular way and affected my physical approach to that role. I don't
know that I could be more articulate about it than that. It was a very kinesthetic thing. My body was
responding to things that weren't necessarily logical or sensible."
What Wallace experienced is a central, animating mystery of the arts. How do the unconscious processes
of the mind flow forward and take shape in a theatrical performance, a poet's rhythms, a dancer's
gestures, a composer's harmonies or a painter's shapes and colors? How do artists apprehend and tap
their unconscious depths? Or, for that matter, would they rather leave them alone? What do we, as
spectators, listeners and readers, understand of our own responses to art that transcend the conscious
means of reception? Is the unconscious always to be trusted? Or could it be, as UC Berkeley Professor
and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass sometimes suspects, that "the unconscious is incredibly
conservative and consciousness is much more flexible and adaptive?"
While our own era's scientific explorations of human thought and feeling may ultimately remap this interior
geography, the subject of art and the unconscious has been around for centuries, producing everything
from elaborate explanations to informed guesses to sheer bafflement. "I can not grasp all that I am," St.
Augustine said 1,600 years ago. The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) heard
music as "the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating."
Erich Neumann, in his book "Art and the Creative Unconscious," maintains that Leonardo da Vinci's social
diffidence, loneliness and a quality of "never giving himself entirely to anything or anyone, except to his
own nature," reveals his unconscious side, "whose dictates he obeyed as those in a dream." That was
balanced by a highly conscious intellect and "the sharpened alertness of a scientific observer." In da
Vinci's hauntingly androgynous portrait of "John the Baptist," Neumann finds a sublimely expressed
balance, a "focal point between the conscious and unconscious."
In the early 20th century, the work of Sigmund Freud helped cultivate Surrealism and other deliberate
attempts by artists to capture the unconscious. With poet André Breton's 1924 plea for "pure psychic
automatism" as their manifesto, Surrealists hoped to tap directly into dreams, fantasy and other subliminal
churnings of the mind. Paintings by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and others traded heavily in
incongruous imagery -- a locomotive powering through the back wall of a fireplace, a pocket watch melting
over the branch of a tree -- often rendered in a frank, almost reportorial style. Film director Luis Buñuel
conjured nightmarish dream states in "An Andalusian Dog." Poet Paul Eluard and others experimented in
"automatic writing," attempts to free the unconscious in streams of unmetered language.
If many of these ventures now seem quixotic and dated, the Surrealist drive to excavate the mind can be
traced through everything from Abstract Expressionism to Method acting to Minimalist music. A recent,
heavily attended show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The
Treachery of Images," made a strong case for that artist's lasting imprint on today's visual culture, from
fine art to advertising.
Much of our current conception of the unconscious still derives from the dual poles of Freud and Carl
Jung. The former described a potent, sexually charged realm that's continually repressed and unwittingly
revealed in dreams and slips of the tongue, while the latter posited a myth-rich "collective unconscious."
But for many in a rationalist 21st century, those two schools of thought are seen as so much subjective,
culturally bound speculation.
Today, neuroscience, brain cell chemistry, psychopharmacology and other fields offer challenging and
evolving possibilities. According to something called brain blood-shift theory, for example, blood supply to
different parts of the brain may govern the shifts from conscious to unconscious activity. Cross-disciplinary
research in cognitive science and computer-modeled artificial intelligence may yield new insights into the
workings of the unconscious.
Samuel Barondes, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at UCSF, favors the view of a sleek and
powerful "adaptive unconscious" that behaves like a "marvelous machine" powering most of what we think
and do. In everything from sizing a person up on the street to creating a sculpture, Barondes argued,
"most of what we do is actually unconscious." This fluid integration of stimuli, information and memory goes
on all the time, without any conscious effort or awareness on our part. "We're not aware of what we're
filtering and attending to," Barondes said.
Timothy D. Wilson lays out this position in detail in his adroitly argued book "Strangers to Ourselves:
Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." Instead of a single, "Wizard of Oz"-like unconscious, Wilson
proposes that "humans possess a collection of modules that have evolved over time and operate outside
of consciousness." Faced with the 11 million pieces of information that our five senses can take in at any
given moment, only 40 of which can be processed consciously, a highly efficient unconscious is adaptively
essential. Wilson compares the process to that of an Internet search engine or a gifted spin doctor.
Composer and Yale University music Professor Martin Bresnick holds a congruent view about the genesis
of his own work. "For composers who come from a tradition of written music," he said by telephone, "the
whole concept of the unconscious is problematic, because in order to do almost anything, we have to be
fully alert and agile. That doesn't mean we're not receptive to ideas in an intuitive way. It just may be that
what we think of as intuition is actually our brain working much faster than we can track it."
That's one way of getting at the fascinating paradox of any artistic endeavor. Only by mastering certain
rigorous skills and navigating a highly conscious sequence of decisions can an artist hope to unlock the
deep chambers of human experience that make the end results matter. It's in this delicate negotiation of
craft and inspiration, conscious choices and the summons of the unconscious, that art finds its form and
communicative power.
Artists are probably as various and distinctive as their fingerprints in the ways they have of understanding
and trying to channel that process. "When I begin a piece," said painter Naomie Kremer, "I don't really
know where I'm going to end up. And I don't want to know. The interest is in the journey and the surprise."
Kremer, whose work is on view through June 30 at San Francisco's Modernism gallery, said her paintings
are "triggered" by a photograph, poetry, even "a flash that I was redoing or reliving an experience that
Monet or Kandinsky or the Cubists had."
Working in small strokes on a very large canvas is one technique Kremer uses to "release the sense of
control over my field of vision. Your peripheral vision is completely enveloped. It's like entering a
landscape. Once you're inside it, you can start looking around. All the associations come from within the
work, rather from outside."
For former Smuin Ballet dancer Celia Fushille-Burke, conscious technical mastery always comes first when
she's learning a new piece. "Once I know what I'm doing, I always have a story running," she said. "If it's a
romantic pas de deux, it might be about meeting my lover or a party I've just left. You don't know what
might affect you -- a film or a piece of music or some devastating news you've just heard. None of this is
willed. It just happens."
Fushille-Burke, who has taken on the company's artistic leadership following founder Michael Smuin's
death in April, said that research on certain roles that are distant from her own character and personality
"feeds my subconscious." That was the case in "Cyrano" and "The Blue Angel." When it comes to the
dancing itself, something else takes over -- "this indescribable element, a spontaneous smooth feeling
where you're just transformed. You feel drawn by something. You forget the audience. And you never
have to ask your partner if he feels it, too, because you know he does."
That kind of unspoken connection, Fushille-Burke added, can sometimes run dangerously deep. During a
run of "Frankie and Johnny," her stage partner began having problems in his marriage while
Fushille-Burke herself fell prey to sexually intimate dreams that left her in tears when she woke. "I don't
normally remember my dreams," she said. "The whole thing was really getting to me."
Playwright Michelle Carter's intuitive faith in her own unconscious is borne out by her experience at the
writing desk. "Whenever I try to be very deliberate and sensible and plot things out," she said, "that's
almost always when I'm writing badly." That, Carter mused, might explain why she's never been an
every-day writer or been very productive at artist colonies. She's fond of citing mathematician Henri
Poincaré, who extols the "subliminal self," with its "simple absence of discipline" and "disorder born of
chance."
The "arc" of a poem sometimes comes to Hass in a kind of unbidden premonition. "It's as if I knew ahead of
time what the next stretch of river was going to be like," he said, "that I was going to round a bend and find
it broad and smooth or suddenly broken into different channels that would come together again in rapids."
Hass finds a touchstone in the writings of psychologist James Hillman, who describes "psychological
creativity" as an artist "living into his myth (that) is pre-patterned by tradition."
Many artists -- and people in other occupations, for that matter -- speak of trusting their gut instincts and
learning not to second-guess themselves. "You can definitely over-intellectualize the process," said stage
director Kent Nicholson. Short rehearsal periods may be a challenge, he said, "but they also can get the
actors trusting each other in a quicker, almost reflexive way." Kremer said that when her work is going well,
she feels "sucked in on an almost physical level and not intellectually looking at what I'm doing at all."
For others, like the Kronos Quartet's violinist David Harrington, access to the unconscious has at once an
almost tactile reality and a free-floating ambiguity. In several conversations, one by telephone from Naples,
Italy, Harrington spun out a free-associative train of thought on Chinese and Iraqi music, Henryk Górecki's
String Quartet No. 3 (recently recorded by Kronos), a Finnish stringed instrument he'd just heard, the
"shape" of musical notes and "music as this mysterious human substance that no one fully possesses."
Harrington went on to discuss the death of his son, which happened in 1995. "It was almost unbearable for
me to play concerts," Harrington remembered, "because I felt like people were hearing me in a way that
was so raw. The friction of the bow hair on the string felt extremely painful to me. At the same time, I
couldn't hear my inner sound anymore. The only thing I could do was listen and try to be there and hope it
would come back. Eventually it did, but it wasn't the same sound. Other people could hear it even when I
couldn't. That became the guiding sound for the rest of my life, my musical truth. That's my son as well."
However they discover and nurture it, or have it thrust upon them by external circumstances, artists
engage in an open-ended, unpredictable dance with their own unconscious natures. It happens on a stage
that is at best murkily lit. Once clearly grasped, the movement of the unconscious becomes deliberate,
conscious and perhaps even drainingly self-conscious.
Choreographer Martha Graham spoke of a "blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more
alive than the others." Songwriter Harold Arlen sat prayerfully at his piano in hopes that the "unsought"
musical phrase would come to him by some mysterious means. The novelist Edith Wharton took a more
practical view. While her characters emerged "in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness,"
as she put it, that process was "always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention."
However fundamental it may be to the creation of great art and the profound connections we feel to it, the
unconscious has always been an elusive, culture-bound subject. In the Enlightenment of the 18th century,
consciousness and rational thought prevailed, only to be swept aside in the Romantic era. Exalted by
Freud's and Jung's influences in the early 20th century, the ethos of the unconscious subsequently gave
way to the objectivity and rigors of behaviorism. Now, in our more layered, post-Freudian and post-Modern
age, introspection has grown more complex.
"Over the past 50 years the unconscious has made a comeback," writes Joseph Newirth in "Between
Emotion and Cognition: The Generative Unconscious." The once "brilliant and illuminating torch of
consciousness," he contends, will "very likely appear increasingly insignificant as exploration of the
unconscious continues." That exploration advances on many fronts, from brain chemistry research to
modern opera, sleep and dream studies to movie houses, new drug therapies to music festivals.
Now, as ever, artists remain on the forefront. They may view the unconscious, as Bresnick does, as a
sequence of lightning-fast choices operating below our conscious thresholds. Or it may be, as it is to
Harrington, a deep well filled with personal experience and sensory detail. It may be unlocked in learned
strategies for painting, writing or dancing. In the end, the most eloquent testimony of artists about the
unconscious comes from what they create in that essential, dimly lit chasm of their humanity. That's where
we find the meaning of what they do, and sometimes find ourselves as well.
-- Tuesday: What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious.
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com. Arts and Culture Critic Steven Winn conducted the
interviews and research for this two-part feature over a period of months.
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
birds standing, poised precariously on one leg, birds nesting and lightly ruffling their feathers.
One day during a rehearsal for "Waiting for Godot," Wallace found himself assuming a new posture
at the beginning of the second act, just after his character has been beaten.
"I was aware of standing in a different way," recalled the actor, who played the tramp Estragon in ACT's
2003 production, "cradling myself, holding my arms as if they were wings. I felt like I was perching. I think
those dreams just sat in my body in a particular way and affected my physical approach to that role. I don't
know that I could be more articulate about it than that. It was a very kinesthetic thing. My body was
responding to things that weren't necessarily logical or sensible."
What Wallace experienced is a central, animating mystery of the arts. How do the unconscious processes
of the mind flow forward and take shape in a theatrical performance, a poet's rhythms, a dancer's
gestures, a composer's harmonies or a painter's shapes and colors? How do artists apprehend and tap
their unconscious depths? Or, for that matter, would they rather leave them alone? What do we, as
spectators, listeners and readers, understand of our own responses to art that transcend the conscious
means of reception? Is the unconscious always to be trusted? Or could it be, as UC Berkeley Professor
and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass sometimes suspects, that "the unconscious is incredibly
conservative and consciousness is much more flexible and adaptive?"
While our own era's scientific explorations of human thought and feeling may ultimately remap this interior
geography, the subject of art and the unconscious has been around for centuries, producing everything
from elaborate explanations to informed guesses to sheer bafflement. "I can not grasp all that I am," St.
Augustine said 1,600 years ago. The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) heard
music as "the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating."
Erich Neumann, in his book "Art and the Creative Unconscious," maintains that Leonardo da Vinci's social
diffidence, loneliness and a quality of "never giving himself entirely to anything or anyone, except to his
own nature," reveals his unconscious side, "whose dictates he obeyed as those in a dream." That was
balanced by a highly conscious intellect and "the sharpened alertness of a scientific observer." In da
Vinci's hauntingly androgynous portrait of "John the Baptist," Neumann finds a sublimely expressed
balance, a "focal point between the conscious and unconscious."
In the early 20th century, the work of Sigmund Freud helped cultivate Surrealism and other deliberate
attempts by artists to capture the unconscious. With poet André Breton's 1924 plea for "pure psychic
automatism" as their manifesto, Surrealists hoped to tap directly into dreams, fantasy and other subliminal
churnings of the mind. Paintings by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and others traded heavily in
incongruous imagery -- a locomotive powering through the back wall of a fireplace, a pocket watch melting
over the branch of a tree -- often rendered in a frank, almost reportorial style. Film director Luis Buñuel
conjured nightmarish dream states in "An Andalusian Dog." Poet Paul Eluard and others experimented in
"automatic writing," attempts to free the unconscious in streams of unmetered language.
If many of these ventures now seem quixotic and dated, the Surrealist drive to excavate the mind can be
traced through everything from Abstract Expressionism to Method acting to Minimalist music. A recent,
heavily attended show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The
Treachery of Images," made a strong case for that artist's lasting imprint on today's visual culture, from
fine art to advertising.
Much of our current conception of the unconscious still derives from the dual poles of Freud and Carl
Jung. The former described a potent, sexually charged realm that's continually repressed and unwittingly
revealed in dreams and slips of the tongue, while the latter posited a myth-rich "collective unconscious."
But for many in a rationalist 21st century, those two schools of thought are seen as so much subjective,
culturally bound speculation.
Today, neuroscience, brain cell chemistry, psychopharmacology and other fields offer challenging and
evolving possibilities. According to something called brain blood-shift theory, for example, blood supply to
different parts of the brain may govern the shifts from conscious to unconscious activity. Cross-disciplinary
research in cognitive science and computer-modeled artificial intelligence may yield new insights into the
workings of the unconscious.
Samuel Barondes, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at UCSF, favors the view of a sleek and
powerful "adaptive unconscious" that behaves like a "marvelous machine" powering most of what we think
and do. In everything from sizing a person up on the street to creating a sculpture, Barondes argued,
"most of what we do is actually unconscious." This fluid integration of stimuli, information and memory goes
on all the time, without any conscious effort or awareness on our part. "We're not aware of what we're
filtering and attending to," Barondes said.
Timothy D. Wilson lays out this position in detail in his adroitly argued book "Strangers to Ourselves:
Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." Instead of a single, "Wizard of Oz"-like unconscious, Wilson
proposes that "humans possess a collection of modules that have evolved over time and operate outside
of consciousness." Faced with the 11 million pieces of information that our five senses can take in at any
given moment, only 40 of which can be processed consciously, a highly efficient unconscious is adaptively
essential. Wilson compares the process to that of an Internet search engine or a gifted spin doctor.
Composer and Yale University music Professor Martin Bresnick holds a congruent view about the genesis
of his own work. "For composers who come from a tradition of written music," he said by telephone, "the
whole concept of the unconscious is problematic, because in order to do almost anything, we have to be
fully alert and agile. That doesn't mean we're not receptive to ideas in an intuitive way. It just may be that
what we think of as intuition is actually our brain working much faster than we can track it."
That's one way of getting at the fascinating paradox of any artistic endeavor. Only by mastering certain
rigorous skills and navigating a highly conscious sequence of decisions can an artist hope to unlock the
deep chambers of human experience that make the end results matter. It's in this delicate negotiation of
craft and inspiration, conscious choices and the summons of the unconscious, that art finds its form and
communicative power.
Artists are probably as various and distinctive as their fingerprints in the ways they have of understanding
and trying to channel that process. "When I begin a piece," said painter Naomie Kremer, "I don't really
know where I'm going to end up. And I don't want to know. The interest is in the journey and the surprise."
Kremer, whose work is on view through June 30 at San Francisco's Modernism gallery, said her paintings
are "triggered" by a photograph, poetry, even "a flash that I was redoing or reliving an experience that
Monet or Kandinsky or the Cubists had."
Working in small strokes on a very large canvas is one technique Kremer uses to "release the sense of
control over my field of vision. Your peripheral vision is completely enveloped. It's like entering a
landscape. Once you're inside it, you can start looking around. All the associations come from within the
work, rather from outside."
For former Smuin Ballet dancer Celia Fushille-Burke, conscious technical mastery always comes first when
she's learning a new piece. "Once I know what I'm doing, I always have a story running," she said. "If it's a
romantic pas de deux, it might be about meeting my lover or a party I've just left. You don't know what
might affect you -- a film or a piece of music or some devastating news you've just heard. None of this is
willed. It just happens."
Fushille-Burke, who has taken on the company's artistic leadership following founder Michael Smuin's
death in April, said that research on certain roles that are distant from her own character and personality
"feeds my subconscious." That was the case in "Cyrano" and "The Blue Angel." When it comes to the
dancing itself, something else takes over -- "this indescribable element, a spontaneous smooth feeling
where you're just transformed. You feel drawn by something. You forget the audience. And you never
have to ask your partner if he feels it, too, because you know he does."
That kind of unspoken connection, Fushille-Burke added, can sometimes run dangerously deep. During a
run of "Frankie and Johnny," her stage partner began having problems in his marriage while
Fushille-Burke herself fell prey to sexually intimate dreams that left her in tears when she woke. "I don't
normally remember my dreams," she said. "The whole thing was really getting to me."
Playwright Michelle Carter's intuitive faith in her own unconscious is borne out by her experience at the
writing desk. "Whenever I try to be very deliberate and sensible and plot things out," she said, "that's
almost always when I'm writing badly." That, Carter mused, might explain why she's never been an
every-day writer or been very productive at artist colonies. She's fond of citing mathematician Henri
Poincaré, who extols the "subliminal self," with its "simple absence of discipline" and "disorder born of
chance."
The "arc" of a poem sometimes comes to Hass in a kind of unbidden premonition. "It's as if I knew ahead of
time what the next stretch of river was going to be like," he said, "that I was going to round a bend and find
it broad and smooth or suddenly broken into different channels that would come together again in rapids."
Hass finds a touchstone in the writings of psychologist James Hillman, who describes "psychological
creativity" as an artist "living into his myth (that) is pre-patterned by tradition."
Many artists -- and people in other occupations, for that matter -- speak of trusting their gut instincts and
learning not to second-guess themselves. "You can definitely over-intellectualize the process," said stage
director Kent Nicholson. Short rehearsal periods may be a challenge, he said, "but they also can get the
actors trusting each other in a quicker, almost reflexive way." Kremer said that when her work is going well,
she feels "sucked in on an almost physical level and not intellectually looking at what I'm doing at all."
For others, like the Kronos Quartet's violinist David Harrington, access to the unconscious has at once an
almost tactile reality and a free-floating ambiguity. In several conversations, one by telephone from Naples,
Italy, Harrington spun out a free-associative train of thought on Chinese and Iraqi music, Henryk Górecki's
String Quartet No. 3 (recently recorded by Kronos), a Finnish stringed instrument he'd just heard, the
"shape" of musical notes and "music as this mysterious human substance that no one fully possesses."
Harrington went on to discuss the death of his son, which happened in 1995. "It was almost unbearable for
me to play concerts," Harrington remembered, "because I felt like people were hearing me in a way that
was so raw. The friction of the bow hair on the string felt extremely painful to me. At the same time, I
couldn't hear my inner sound anymore. The only thing I could do was listen and try to be there and hope it
would come back. Eventually it did, but it wasn't the same sound. Other people could hear it even when I
couldn't. That became the guiding sound for the rest of my life, my musical truth. That's my son as well."
However they discover and nurture it, or have it thrust upon them by external circumstances, artists
engage in an open-ended, unpredictable dance with their own unconscious natures. It happens on a stage
that is at best murkily lit. Once clearly grasped, the movement of the unconscious becomes deliberate,
conscious and perhaps even drainingly self-conscious.
Choreographer Martha Graham spoke of a "blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more
alive than the others." Songwriter Harold Arlen sat prayerfully at his piano in hopes that the "unsought"
musical phrase would come to him by some mysterious means. The novelist Edith Wharton took a more
practical view. While her characters emerged "in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness,"
as she put it, that process was "always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention."
However fundamental it may be to the creation of great art and the profound connections we feel to it, the
unconscious has always been an elusive, culture-bound subject. In the Enlightenment of the 18th century,
consciousness and rational thought prevailed, only to be swept aside in the Romantic era. Exalted by
Freud's and Jung's influences in the early 20th century, the ethos of the unconscious subsequently gave
way to the objectivity and rigors of behaviorism. Now, in our more layered, post-Freudian and post-Modern
age, introspection has grown more complex.
"Over the past 50 years the unconscious has made a comeback," writes Joseph Newirth in "Between
Emotion and Cognition: The Generative Unconscious." The once "brilliant and illuminating torch of
consciousness," he contends, will "very likely appear increasingly insignificant as exploration of the
unconscious continues." That exploration advances on many fronts, from brain chemistry research to
modern opera, sleep and dream studies to movie houses, new drug therapies to music festivals.
Now, as ever, artists remain on the forefront. They may view the unconscious, as Bresnick does, as a
sequence of lightning-fast choices operating below our conscious thresholds. Or it may be, as it is to
Harrington, a deep well filled with personal experience and sensory detail. It may be unlocked in learned
strategies for painting, writing or dancing. In the end, the most eloquent testimony of artists about the
unconscious comes from what they create in that essential, dimly lit chasm of their humanity. That's where
we find the meaning of what they do, and sometimes find ourselves as well.
-- Tuesday: What happens to us when art connects to the unconscious.
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com. Arts and Culture Critic Steven Winn conducted the
interviews and research for this two-part feature over a period of months.
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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