weave your own color magic

Like painters and designers, weavers know about the tricks colors can play in juxtaposition.  Some artisans and painters have made the journey into color their entire practice.  It’s a journey with no end!

If you’re curious to try creating visual magic for yourself, a simple weaving is a great place to start.  Why?  Because a weaving doesn’t have to portray anything, so we can by-pass the inner critic who likes to tell us how our work isn’t ‘right’ – ever.

Take a large sheet of strong colored cardboard. Pick a color you like, not too dark or too light.  One color only.

Placing it in the portrait position, cut strips in the card 1.5cm wide without cutting completely through at the top and bottom.  No ribbons, the sheet stays intact.  Use a craft knife.  These strips will be the warp.

Find or make strips of fine wood or heavy card for the weft.  Strips from a bamboo blind work well.

Paint the strips with white undercoat and allow to dry.  Then apply colored paint (acrylic) randomly along each stick.  Don’t use too many colors at first. 

Weave the weft strips in and out of the cut-out card strips – one over, one under, or in whatever pattern you like.

Notice the way the colors dance when juxtaposed.  Think about how you could choreograph that dance by placing the colors on the weft sticks in strategic places.  Try deliberately causing odd perceptual effects in the tone and hue of the card color – similar to what we’ve seen in the last two postings.

I’m sure wonderingmind will be up and away with a host of what-ifs and ideas to explore.  Here’s a detail from one of Sherri Smith’s hand-dyed and plaited hangings, just to supercharge the creative juices …

Sherri Smith, Cogs (detail)

color is a true magician

The ‘blue’ and the ‘green’ hues in the believe it or not image were one color posing to perception as two – because their neighboring hues affected the way the brain ‘read’ their wavelengths of energy.  The way the eye/brain actually reads things as they juxtapose and relate to their contextual influences as well as the projections from our memory is endlessly fascinating.  It isn’t difficult to imagine how significant this effect is for artisans who work with color in any way.

Color is a true magician.  In this image we are tricked into believing its tonal qualities appear to be different.  It’s called ‘the spreading effect.’

image source – Art and Illusion by E H Gombrich

One tone of red and one of blue are the only colors used.  No one has been able to explain why, when those hues are juxtaposed with black or white they appear to be different tones.  It seems that “we see the whole pattern as one and attribute its total brightness or darkness to its elements.” (*)  We don’t see the ‘ground’ as an isolated spread of color, and we can only accept that the colors are really unbroken stripes of a single tone by tracing a path along the strip. 

(*) Gombrich, E. H. (1988) Art and Illusion (Oxford: Phaidon)

This example of just how stitched-together our version of reality really is, comes from the e-book
believing is seeing… the amazing artifice of perception
Artifice is the clever use of tricks and devices. (Collins Dictionary)

It’s one of nine free e-books in the series: empty canvas: wondering mind

You can download them at the wonderingmind website

believe it or not …

… the blue and the green are one and the same color!

source – cuneytozdas.com

finding your passion

Imagine my delight to hear Sir Ken Robinson interviewed by Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report this week.  Sir Ken is described as an ‘education and creativity expert’ and was knighted for his contributions in these fields. He has written a book called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. Some kind of morphic resonance is going on – it was only a few days ago that I was blogging on about how difficult it seems to be to find one’s unique and loved work … see walking the way of wonder

Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

I’ve interviewed a lot of people for the book, and, you know, there was a time when Paul McCartney, so to speak, was not Paul McCartney.  You know, it isn’t that all these people were born as celebrities; they achieved some celebrity because of pursuing their own particular talent and their passion.  And I do think we all have that in us, yeah.  The people achieve their best when they firstly tune into their natural aptitudes – and lots of people I have interviewed aren’t musicians, they’re mathematicians, they’re business leaders, they’re teachers, they’re broadcasters, you know, they’ve found this thing that the completely get.  But the second thing is that they love it.  And if you can find that – a talent and a passion – well that’s to say you never work again.  And it is true, I think, that our current education systems are simply not designed to help people do that.  In fact an awful lot of people go through education and never discover anything they’re good at at all.

… we’re all born with tremendous creative confidence and abilities.  Young children are full of great ideas and possibilities.  But that tends to be suppressed as we get older. And it happens in part through this culture of standardised testing that I think is now a blight on the whole of education.

But the second thing is that we all think and learn differently.  I mean, some people are highly visual;  you know, some think best when they’re moving;  some think best when they’re listening;  some people respond well to words, some people don’t.  And getting the best from kids in schools is about understanding the way they think, as well as what it is they’re supposed to be thinking about.  And I think that’s also why some people get through the whole of their education and don’t discover themselves at all.

… the one thing we have as human beings is this extraordinary power of imagination and creativity and the ability to solve problems as well as to deal with ones that we’ve just created.  So, this isn’t some whimsical idea.
~ Sir Ken Robinson

Read the whole transcription here

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

the problem of the disappearing artist

For decades I sought ‘the artist within’ and the source of ‘my creativity’.  I worried about my lack of formal art education.  I worked at healing my ‘creative spirit’.  I researched everything I could find written about the phenomenon we call creativity – what fosters it, what blocks it, what it IS.
 
And for decades I was puzzled by the ineffable state that bloomed when – somehow – ‘I-as-artist’ disappeared and something wholly mysterious seemed to flow in with results that would amaze and humble me.  What was going on?
 
I watched this carefully and rather warily – trying not to jump to conclusions grasped from outside my own experience.  It was like chewing on a rubbery gob-stopping life-koan that couldn’t be swallowed or spat out:  If I wasn’t making the decisions involved in a work, what was?
 
When ripeness was ripe the puzzle resolved itself in its own way.  What happened?

I woke up to the obvious, like waking up after a weird dream: Within full sensory immersion in the now-moment there is no awareness of a separate self.  There is just creative intelligence in action, sensing, assessing, making.  Not ‘my’ creativity (although it seems we must speak of it that way).  Not ‘not-mine’, either.

Resolving this riddle had nothing to do with any effort on my part.  On the contrary: I learned early-on that mental scrutiny ensured the absence of the mystery.  Over time, my wonderings quite naturally focused more and more on simply being present, simply resting there and resisting the reflex to move into analysis and speculation.

This was a real challenge for me because I have one of those brains that functions equally effectively in analytical and intuitive modes, swinging seamlessly from one to the other. Yet while it seemed that analytical activities were necessary to generate energy for the task, there came a point when they had to subside and leave space for something else to enter.  And they don’t simply subside on demand!

We are expertly trained in reflexive analysis and speculation, which usually results in our following tracks already laid down by others.  We conform.  We want to be accepted, to gain approval.  The creative questions that are unique to our field of experience and predisposition are buried, silent.  The immeasurable and indefinable movement of creativity remains impotent.

Mind that is free to court the creative questions which Life itself provides is natural mind.  Why aren’t we steered towards this free, unconditioned mind?  Why does our education fail to encourage us to unearth the questions that really matter to us? Should that not be the primary concern of our educators?

Questions like these laid out my path as an artisan and an educator.

the via creativa pages can be read in full on the wonderingmind website

walking the way of wonder

 ‘Zum Erstaunen bin ich da’
 I am here to wonder
 Goethe

The way that the flowering of questions held in a heart determines the life-path of the questioner has always interested me.  On my own creative path (thus far) there seem to have been five broad ‘chapters’.  The occasional via creativa posts are excerpts from these chapters, written as I searched for the questions that put the creative fire beneath each of those passages.  What was I wondering about?  And what was filling me with wonder?
 
It’s now clear to me that curiosity and wonderment act like automatic invitations to the great mystery we call Creation.  (Their presence doesn’t guarantee it’ll show up, but if it does, they’ll be there for sure.) I, as ‘maker’, function as its instrument; my hands are its ‘hands’, my questioning mind is the catalyst for its expression.
 
I wasn’t born with this wisdom.  Its ripening was slow and sometimes magical, gracious.  More often it was appallingly challenging.  These days it seems increasingly problematic for people of any age to find the work they are tailor-made to do – and to love doing. Perhaps my story will make it easier for others to accept and walk their own unique via creativa.

The via creativa pages can be read in full on the wonderingmind website

Frederick Franck’s to-do list

The Promise of Painting post reminded me of Frederick Franck’s to-do list.  He called it his 10 Commandments:  

These Ten Commandments on seeing/drawing were revealed to me on a mountain, but also in a meadow, on a beach and even in the subway.  For their revelation did not come all at once, but in installments, as it were, over the years, and always while I was busy drawing, and invariably on holy ground.  But that may be because, while drawing, all ground is holy: unseparated from the Whole. 

1  You shall draw everything and every day 

2  You shall not wait for inspiration, for it comes not while you wait but while you work

3  You shall forget all you think you know and, even more, all you have been taught

4  You shall not adore your good drawings and promptly forget your bad ones

5  You shall not draw with exhibitions in mind, nor to please any critic but yourself

6  You shall trust none but your own eye, and make your hand follow it

7  You shall consider the mouse you draw as more important than the contents of all the museums in the world, for

8  You shall love the ten thousand things with all your heart and a blade of grass as yourself

9  Let each drawing be your first:  A celebration of the eye awakened

10  You shall not worry about “being of your time”, for you are your time 

And it is brief

Frederick Franck, The Awakened Eye

Dove 

Find more info about Frederick Franck at the awakened eye