Do you consciously look at the world through your lens as an artist? In other words, do you stop to consider how you are seeing things and make a conscious effort to look at the world without bias or expectations and with intention?
Doing this takes vigilance and practice, but most importantly, it takes awareness of the issues that stop you from seeing the world as it really is or what it could be.
In this episode, Sage outlines how the brain interprets visual information, discussing the way it can sabotage the needs of the artist and how you can circumvent it’s short hand and skewed way of handling visual information in order to see what you need to see and find the kind of ideas and inspiration that will give focus to your work and feed your muse.
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Transcript
Ep016 23-0324 Artistic Sight – Transcript
It’s being conscious of these expectations working at bypassing them. That allows us to visually engage in our creativity, either realistically or fantastically, or maybe even something in between. Hello all my wonderful creative friends. Thank you for. Joining me for the sage. Arts podcast I’m sage your host. I’m rather on my own today. Well, except I have you. Right. So I want to invite you in. Come have a seat. We’ve got lots of juicy stuff to talk about. Today, if you’re at all a note taker, do grab yourself a pen and paper. If your hands and eyes are otherwise occupied, save the note taking for later and as a matter of fact, I’ll tell you how to get a transcription of the episodes towards and if you want some type. Of content or. You can sign up for my weekly newsletter. It gives you show release reminders. And bonus material when those are available, they also have direct links to a page with the. Actions each week and it can be flagged for a reminder to and if so, that you want to. Turn to sign up for that using the link in. The show notes or at the. Sagearts.com under the notices item at the top or look for an 8 News and notices button on the home page. Alright, the subject, we are going to talk about today is the art of site. In other words, the difference between our everyday seeing abilities and. What we do are two. Quickly so come in. Have a seat. There’s a comfy couch corner. Just a corner of. A couch. Here the dogs have not taken it over yet, so it’s yours for the taking. Jump on in if you’re in the studio listening to this, Congrats on getting down to work on stuff. I love the idea that people are out there listening and allowing me to be a part of your creative day. Before we get into the subject matter, let me do a shout out very special on this episode because I was on the other side of the mic so to. I was interviewed on the Handmade Mentor podcast hosted by Vanessa SPHD. I think her last name is actually O’Neil, but she goes by that short moniker. I love the pH. D on the end. Makes her sound kind of unassuming and accomplished all at the same time. Pretty awesome. But yeah, Vanessa interviews all types of creatives, a lot of multi crafters like myself. And she just kind of digs into what we do and what. Makes us tick. So if you want to hear what I sound like when I have no. Notes in front of. Me. Listen to Vanessa’s latest episode of The Handmade Mentor. It’s a little different. There’s lots of umms and long pauses. But it’s real, you. So you can find the handmade mentor by doing a search on any podcast player, or go to her website at the handmade mentor.com. I just want to thank Vanessa for the opportunity. And for having. Such a fun discussion and for asking me some really hard questions that really made me think. And if you find what I share or she shares, or anyone who shares with a labor of love project like these. You give back when you can. If what I do helps you, giving back can be done in the show notes there’s links there or on the homepage of the sagearts.com where a little Scroll down that homepage you’ll find. Buy me a coffee and PayPal donation. Buttons. You can also grab yourself stickers or a book at 10th news arts.com that’s 10th, spelled out TENTH musearts.com. Your support and your notes and all the things that you do to let me know that what I’m doing is hitting the right buttons for you. This helps keeps us crazy people going. Now on to you and your eyeballs. Sort of eyeballs are the least of the aspect of sight that we need to be concerned with. Although having them operating correctly. Is usually a good thing, but strangely enough you do not need to have good eyesight to have artistic. Right. Here’s a bit of related trivia. Degas painted some of his most influential and best known works of art. Well, nearly blind from macular degeneration. Yeah, being an artist doesn’t mean you have to see. Will you just have to have the passion and willingness to seek out your vision so you can share it with other people? And that’s kind of the core of. What we’re going to talk about today. The question you might want to keep in mind as you listen is do you consciously look at the world through your lens as an artist? In other words, do you stop to consider how you are seeing things and make a conscious effort to look with intention? Let’s start by defining what it means to see. And of course we can start with the physical interaction of the eye with light. Light is what brings the information about the visual world around us. To us, it bounces off of surfaces, comes in through the pupils, hits those cones and rods on the backside of the eyeball, triggering nerves to send this initial raw. Information to. Now that’s pretty straightforward, but that’s like the last straightforward thing we’re going to be discussing today. And this is because the way the brain uses that information is very complex. And I don’t mean the Physiology of how the brain has to operate in order to take it in and feed it to. Our consciousness. I’m. Talking about what the brain actually does with the information. You see, the brain is not an unbiased receiver of information. It’s not a computer that just puts it into a document or. Files it as is. It literally can’t take that info and give it to you unretouched. It would be like reading the ones and zeros that the computer uses in order to collect and organize information. It would make no sense to you, so there’s tons of retouching, refocusing, cropping, recoloring, literally and metaphorically by the brain. Because the brain is an interpreter, and that’s not a straightforward thing. You may have noticed that every time you see a book that’s been translated, there is a byline for the translator because. One translator isn’t going to come up with the same thing. Another translator will. So it’s almost like the work has been redone by the translator and that’s because there isn’t an unwavering word for word equivalent between any 2 languages. So the translator has to make choices about how to best represent each thought in that book. In this new language with what the language has available. And sometimes there’s just simply not a real equivalence. Or the translated into language doesn’t have the same vocabulary for certain subjects, and the brain does the same thing. There aren’t 141 equivalences between what we see and the language our brains use to understand it. I’m sure you’ve been at some point or another stumped for the words to describe something that you’re seeing the language or languages available to us are the primary resource for interpretation for our brains. So the limitations that our languages have also are limitations for our brains. In other words, our brains often take what we see and translate it. Into words in our minds, in an effort to help our consciousness, to understand what we’re. It’s why you need to be careful with the words you used, particularly your inner language to yourself, because the language you use sets the brain up for the way it interprets our world. So for instance. If you talk negatively about something, your brain will interpret it visually as negative as well, even when things would appear positive if you had not known this thing before. That’s kind of another subject, but here’s a big hint. Talk positively to yourself about the work that you’re doing, and you’ll more likely see the success in it before the disappointments. It’s just a good way to stay positive about your work and keep yourself. OK, back to the brain, the brain. It has limitations because of language, because language inherently has limitations. It’s also limited by our understanding of various concepts. Our personal knowledge base, our emotions, our social and cultural biases, and most importantly, to artists. Our expectations which are gained. Through our experiences as well as the other things just mentioned. So remember the idea of expectations as a limiting factor because it’s going to keep coming up in this conversation. As you can imagine, these considerations and limitations. Are a lot. For the brain to juggle and work through and use when interpreting what the eyeballs bring to the brain. So the brain sends the information to your consciousness in a kind of shorthand. You know when you’re looking at a crowd of people and someone you know really well can be standing right there in front of you and you. Don’t see them till they kind of wave at you. That’s because our brains don’t send everything. We see to. Our consciousness, it can’t. It’s just too much information. But that means that we are missing things all the time, and not only that, what information it does send to you is often simplified or an abbreviation of that thing it’s looking. This is a big part of the reason why eyewitnesses have a hard time identifying something that they clearly saw because the brain didn’t send them every detail. Now it could be there kind of deeper in the unconsciousness and it could come out later, but your consciousness and memory that is stored from that consciousness is going to lack a lot of information. Now this can be a problem for artists at times, although it can have some advantages. Maybe as well we’ll go into that a little bit later in this. Another thing that limits what we see and the. Way we interpret what? Is visually before us. Is a hierarchy of importance. We don’t always notice the details because our minds may want to for various reasons, just focus on the whole scene or we don’t see the big picture because we’re distracted by a singular thing within the scene. So when you’re at, say, an art fair, for instance, you may arrive and look at the whole scene. Streets are lined with tents. The avenues are filled with meandering groups of people. Lots of color, just a busy, bustling scene before you that tells you that. The fair is. Probably a good one, and there’s probably lots to see and do, and you can get excited about diving in. Now from your view, there wasn’t any one thing that was important at that moment, but rather the overall feel of the scene before you because you want to know whether you’re likely to enjoy it and how much time you might want to spend there. Or conversely, you go into one of the booths at this fair and you see, say, a sculpture that really speaks to you so. You step closer and you examine it, and now you’re not seeing the other people in the booth, certainly not outside the booth, not even maybe the rest of the artwork. Our focus becomes narrow because the thing of most importance is a singular item, and the brain starts ignoring all the other things around. There is a hierarchy of importance in most everything we see. The least important is so ignored. We may never remember. It was there. At all and very small but important details can stick with us for the rest of our lives because we give it so much importance, or because it was so new and. Interesting, our brain does this evaluation constantly and mostly unconsciously. We evolved to forever be looking for danger, which is partly why we see the bad before the good stuff. Right. As an artist. You hope to be able to do this intentionally consciously, but we don’t always recognize what is truly important for us, for our type of intention, for our art, because we aren’t being artistically mindful or we are distracted. And there’s just so many things that we can be distracted by. One of the biggest things we are distracted by is. Something that doesn’t meet our expectations or is new to us this Harkins back to the awareness of potential danger. We need to assess something new or unexpected as to what it means for our safety, our security, our well-being. But that means that the things which seem to fulfill our expectations are often ignored, and this is the area that begins to be. Problematic for artists. It’s being conscious of these expectations working at bypassing them, giving the familiar the same consideration as new or unexpected things that allows us to visually. Engage in our creativity, either realistically or fantastically, or maybe even something in between. I’ll explain about that in a little bit. Now this is not to say that new things won’t get our news all excited. They absolutely do. Good what I refer. To is finding things new in things that are familiar because it’s a rare thing that anything you run into is 100% new to us and we really can gain a lot from seeing everything clearly and with new vision. First, let’s talk about seeing realistically, I’ve taught my share of people how to draw. And it’s usually been because someone has told me they can’t draw, which I find to be pretty untrue for pretty much everyone. And every person in this world that can hold a pencil with any level of control can draw, and realistically it’s not a talent of the hand. It’s not some special gift of creativity. It’s literally in how you see things, and if you get past your expectations, you can draw what’s in front of you in a realistic fashion. So when you ask someone to, say, draw a human. Head they’re probably immediately going. To start thinking of something round right and if you have spent any time drawing or sculpting or whatnot at human head, you know it’s pretty much anything but round. It’s got lines and angles. There are some curves in it. There is a round cap to it, but it’s got all kinds of different shapes in it. That said. Don’t you find it interesting that a circle with two dots in the top half and a curve in the bottom half can be seen as a face as a :)? Right. This is kind of an extreme shortcut of our understanding of what a face can look like, and it’s pretty much what a brain does. It’s just one example of how our brains will interpret information in a very simple way, as a kind of shorthand for conveying the visuals around us. Now, if you’ve taken drawing or painting or any other classes. Where you are trying to replicate something out of the real world, you’ve probably run into some of this already, but seeing things as they are and interpreting things in all the various aspects they have to offer goes far beyond being able to see that ahead is. Not round for one, there is the influence of our experiences and knowledge. For instance, we’ve all interacted. With a bowl. Bowls are round. They’re hollow on the inside and usually sit with that opening facing up. That’s what we know of a bowl. So if you’re asked to draw a bowl on a table that’s sitting, say, just below. High level what you already know of bulls is going to be a large part of the interpretation of what you’re seeing. But that means that when you go to try to draw, say, the. Rim of the bowl. You’re going to want to make it a circle, because that’s what you know about bowl rims. They’re basically circles, right? But the view of that. Bull rim sitting just below eye level in A2 dimensional space is not a continuous circle. It’s not even an Oval. It’s not even continuous. It’s actually two separate curved lines, one that curves up and over 1 the curves down and over. They both have the same beginning and end points, but where they meet is basically an angled. But because what you know of bowls has nothing to do with angles, it’s hard to see that unless you ask yourself and basically circumvent your brain shorthand, what the shapes of those lines actually are creating what is actually seen from your viewpoint. This circumvention is really key to seeing artistically now. It doesn’t always mean that you see things. How they actually are? Like I said, this bit of conversation is about seeing realistically, but there’s another way of seeing, right? You absolutely need to circumvent your brains shorthand approach to information to see realistically, so you can tell your hand. What it needs to do to properly represent what is actually before you, and yes, this can be rather hard, but it’s also very exciting to get yourself past those expectations and see things as if they are brand new to you. This brings us to the concept that what we see for the most part is actually incomplete, incorrect, or sometimes. A straight out lie. Because our brains interpret through what we know and have experience with. Two people can see the same thing and describe it completely differently because they have different knowledge and they have different experiences. It’s all about that interpretation thing that your brain. A big part. Of it is that the brain is making choices about what is most important to you. Also, it’s choosing what should be remembered, which isn’t always about importance, but more commonly about the unexpected and the new. This is often wrapped up in our emotions and our state of mind at the time. So artistically you need. In many instances and awareness of your emotions and your mindset in order to really see what’s going on in front of you and to draw the inspiration that you need for your artwork, from what you’re seeing, the idea is that if you understand your emotions and your mindset, you can start to see what the important things really are in the scene. In addition to all that, we would also benefit from being conscious about whether we are scanning what’s in front. Of us or if. We are being mindful, being present, being in touch with all of the things that I’m talking about, being attentive and discerning of the scenes and the objects that are before us in every day. Types of sight of seeing. We generally take shallow glances with a cursory eye, usually because our surroundings are super familiar to us, or we’re tired or bored, or deep in thought, right? But if you’re trying to look artistically, you really don’t want to be cursory. You want to spend some time with what you’re looking at, look deep and take in as much detail as you can. This can happen automatically when our curiosity is awakened or we are in a flow state. I mean, maybe you’ve noticed sometimes when you’re working on your art. If you get really into it, you start seeing every little detail in those flow moments because hyperawareness of those small things, even the most minimal texture, the edges, the movements of the lines that weren’t intentional, that you didn’t see before, really start to come out because there’s nothing else distracting. When you, when you’re really in the moment and this happens to me all the time when I’m out with my camera and one of the reasons I have to admit I don’t like going out shooting with other people, I get lost looking for those details, looking for those stories. But because I’m always concerned about how. Other people are doing. It’s hard for me to actually get into flow and just be in the moment. Where I can really discern all the detail. That’s around me. And that’s another reason why you want to be conscious of your emotions and your mindset. If my emotions are feeding into my social anxiety, which is something I’ve always struggled with or my mindset is otherwise concerned with the comfort of others, and whether they might be getting annoyed with me because. I’m taking so long. Stopping at every texture and tree or whatever. It’s going to be hard. For me to engage in an artistic way of seeing because it’s hard enough to get around all those expectations buried in the brain, those shortcuts the brain naturally takes on top of juggling concerns. About the people are. So if I’m going to be successfully circumventing all these hurdles that the brain is already putting in front of me, it takes a tremendous amount of focus and preferably it should be undisturbed. Focus now. That doesn’t mean that you personally, you can’t see creatively and have distractions around, but that’s something you would need to discover for yourself. The extent to which you can have distractions. And be able to focus if you can set aside self consciousness the thoughts about what your market might want to see all those kinds of things. If you can look without those concerns, pushing their way in and getting between you and what you’re observing, then you’re going to find it so much amazing inspiration in the world. Around you. Now let’s talk about fantastical site. This is where your brains expectations, emotional consideration, shortcuts and the like have some possibility of being helpful now. Not always, but it can be as detrimental in this particular type of scene, but that’s part of something. You also have to work out. Fantastical site. Is about looking beyond the realism to the potential. Of the thing. Around you for example, I remember the first hike I took in Zion National Park and it took me past this kind of Cliff side, really short Cliff side where there was all these holes of all different sizes and shapes in the wall just all over the place. But there were so many of them, and they seemed kind of purposeful. Now, if I had engaged my scientific mind at the time, I probably would thought about the different types of rock or minerals that have been in the Cliff. And all the ways Mother Nature might have worn them down. Or maybe certain animals. Would have dug these. I don’t know how they are formed, but my mind went to very condos. Like flying fairies? Little fairies. I just thought if fairies had actually been. Real that this. Totally would have been prime condo property for fairies, you know, penthouse towards the top of the Cliff. The older ferries towards the bottom because they probably don’t like to fly, just like we don’t like stairs. As we get older, you know that kind of thing. I just thought to be. A wonderful community for this fantastic view of this beautiful. Mark, where the fairies are just doing. Their thing? Living. Their lives and I started making up all these stories about this fairy condo community. So instead of seeing what these holes actually were, and in reality none of them were very deep, so it would have been much of a condo. But I let my mind go off in a direction that created something that doesn’t exist from the things that. Was seen. I remember taking those images back and trying to figure out if I could replicate them in some kind of scene in some of the drawings I was doing at the time. I don’t think I ended up using them, but I always remember how my mind just went off and got lost in this whole story I was writing based on this thing I was seeing that obviously wasn’t a fairy condo, but I decided to see it that way. And that’s the same thing as getting lost in the details of reality, trying to see things for what they really are. But it’s kind of going in the opposite direction. Both types of seeing come from a curiosity and a fascination with the world that is shown to you, and that is probably the most encapsulating statement about artistic sight, artistic vision. It’s about curiosity. It’s about your personal fascination with the world. You see, so much so that it wants to take you deeper and explore now. Because I’ve said this before, art is about curiosity. It’s about exploration. It’s about discovery and seeing new things with an artistic view. I won’t go into that further. But I do want to point out that your artistic site is kind of the leader of your artistic expedition, and so you do want to hone that. You want to have a good leader, right? So there are kind of two ends of this spectrum that you kind of want to consider. I like to think of them as Mr. Magoo or Sherlock Holmes now. If you don’t know who Mr. Magoo is, look it up. He’s hilarious. He was this old cartoon character that was visually impaired and he would find things along the way and then decide what it would be for him, basically mistaking things for something else, which is where the humor came in. But he’s also not encumbered by all the things I just talked about that the brain does. It does obviously feel expectations for him that if he finds something before him that has a face and hands with five fingers, then he assumes it’s a person. When it turns out it’s a chimpanzee or a mannequin or something, but basically he’s interacting with the reality and actually interpreting it differently. So it’s just a fun metaphor for the fantastical part of the artistic site, at least for me. And then there’s. The Sherlock Holmes side, which is realistic site, really seeing every detail for what it is and then seeing the implications of. It and that actually brings us to kind of the final point I want to talk about in terms of laying the groundwork for your artistic site. We can see things realistically, or we can make up what things could potentially be. But this won’t have much relevance to ourselves or our art if we don’t understand what this means to us, how it can feed the intention of our art. And if you’re confused about all this intention stuff, I would very much encourage you to go back to the first episode of this podcast, which is all about intention. But basically intention is the why. Behind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say, the math that leads you through creating a piece or creating your. Here now understanding the relevance of what you’re seeing can help you identify what it is about an object or a place or person that awakens your curiosity, that tickles your artistic spirit, your muse right. Let’s say you visit a beach in a far away country. Chances are the color of the waters, maybe even the color of the sand, are different than what you’ve seen before. There may be rock. Informations that are new to you, the people and what they’re wearing and what they’re doing may be different than what you’ve experienced. Before now you can be in awe and feel immensely inspired by that beach. When you get. Back to your studio. What is it that you will pick out of that experience that will help you recreate that feeling? Now, most people in my experience want to recreate the whole scene. It’s the same with taking photographs. And they’re there. People love the wide angle lenses because they can get a whole scene in there. It makes them feel like they’re. Capturing all of it. However, if you’re familiar with really talented photographers, they often zero in on one. Aspect or crop? Out what might be considered major parts of a scene to most people. But that’s because with an artistic eye, they’ve been able to breakdown what’s in front of them to determine what the actual aspects are. That mean the most to them that they want to share with their viewers, and that’s something you would do as well breaking down what’s in front of you to determine what are the actual aspects of what you’re seeing that. Mean the most to you that will, within the limitations of your medium and your art form, be able to express what you want to share. About it. So let’s say that foreign Coast gives you a wonderful sense of harmony and peace, and that’s really at the core of what you wanna share. If so, maybe you don’t include all the people you see all the chairs, umbrellas, beach, child, whatnot. Maybe you go and sit on one of the rock formations and watch the eddying water around the crags and pinnacles of rocks peeking up above the water. Maybe the way the water flows in is so mesmerizing that you realize that the steady ebb and flow represents a balance, a tranquility, a constancy that maybe you’ve been searching for in your personal life or your life. Work balance so. Speaks you if this is the kind of effect the space is having on you and you’re not aware of it, you might go home, paint a coastal scene that reminds you of this place and feel like it’s not anything close to what you’re. Trying to say. But if you go back and you paint the eddies of water, if you create even an abstract pattern that reflects that. The flow that you. Saw you may very well find that you’ve captured the most memorable part of your experience in a true and intense way. Other people may not realize that these patterns represent experience on a coastal vacation, but then you realize that isn’t what you’re trying to share at that point. Is it you’re trying to share the tranquility and the balance and that feeling that you got from watching it? That’s what part of seeing really is, is realizing what it is that you’re trying to share. You weren’t trying to share the beach, you were trying to share the feeling that you had while you were there. So that last part. Probably will seem like it has more to do with identifying what it is that you want to say than. Actually seeing, but that is part of the process of seeing things for what they really are, because you are part of the scene every single time and how you feel and what it means to you is a big part of the visuals that you’re taking in. Remember, the brain interprets through your emotions and your experiences and things that are important to you. And So what you’re going to see what you’re going to take in and what you’re going to take back into your studio is going to be, in part, identifying what those things are for you, not just what your brain is interpreting and giving to you. The trick is digging through all that information that’s before you and finding the information and inspiration that will feed your particular muse. Let’s now move on to the practice, the kind of how to stuff. Let’s talk specifically about ways to see as an artist. Now these points I’m going to give you are not all inclusive. They’re not gonna cover everything. They will be a great place to start or we’ll remind you of things you’ve already known but may have let slip. First of all, to see artistically. You want to try to see with the. Eyes of a child, like everything is brand new. You know, have you ever been away from the house for a long time like a couple weeks or a month and you come? Home and everything. Looks kind of odd. It’s because your brain hasn’t interacted with that space for a while, so it’s getting kind of reacquainted. And during that time. Your experience can be pretty childlike. I know I tend to come home and get really fascinated with our Acacia. Wood floors are kind of dramatic and there’s also this squiggly texture in the copper range hood over our kitchen island. I don’t know why those things always always like stand out to me when I walk in the house, and yet I see them every day normally, but I don’t take them in right. They just become too familiar in my brain. There’s them now you can circumvent this to some extent by simply asking yourself what you see and get super detailed about it, like you’re explaining it to someone who can’t see. You can also go around with the camera and try to find small interesting things instead of big scenes. Give yourself some parameters like only photograph things that are less than two inches wide. Or only things that are on the ground, something like that, something that? Is not your usual view. Of things to kind of shake things. You also want to look at things with intention. If you’re familiar with Claude Monet’s work, you probably know that he never painted anything. Just once, he painted his scenes over and over and over again. Not because he was trying to perfect the image, but because if he went out at a different time of day or a different time of the year. He knew the scene would look. Different because the light changes throughout the day and throughout the year as well as through different kinds of weather. He was rather obsessive about this and he would actually carry around multiple canvases, all marked with the place and the time that he was painting on them so that he could return to the same place around the same time, at the same time of year, to continue working on them. So in reality, he wasn’t painting his. Garden or even? The lilies there, or the cathedral of the Bridges? Or the haystacks? He was painting the light. He was painting the colors, the light created on the objects before him. So his intention was to capture the varying quality of light. And you can do the same kind of thing, identify the thing or things that captivate you and try to consciously find them out in the. World like I know my obsession is with textures, particularly textures of deterioration. So when I go out, especially when I do my macro photography or when I’m working with polymer or even when I’m painting. I like to. Fill my well with examples I see out in the world like rusty metals, fallen leaves decaying. Good. That kind of. Because I photograph, I’m often taking pictures of these textures, but if you go out and you find these things, you can sketch them or write about them, or just tell somebody about them. But if you can make them significant in some way beyond the moment that you found them, you’ll remember them and. It’ll be easier for. You to take them into the studio and use them. Now your kind of inspiration. Might be more specific than what I’m talking about, or simpler. It just is whatever it needs to be for you. You might love flowers or babies or faeries, whatever it is.
Identify the visual fascination and go out and look for those things in the world or for the things. That would build. Those kinds of images. For you. You could also. Go out and imagine what you want to see. Like we were talking about with fantastical site. You may have seen the reels that I put on Instagram. The ones I did to kind of go along with the feed Your Muse episode, episode 14, one of them was from the creator at the Haleakala National Park in Maui. This place looks like it’s on Mars, so. When I was up there. I would just like imagine I was standing on Mars and then I just start to notice things like how quiet it was, how brisk the air was, how there was a complete lack of scent, which was kind of trippy. I know those things aren’t visual, but they feed into the kind of recreation that I might want to bring back to the studio and. Experience and transfer into my art and the truth is, I probably wouldn’t have noticed what I liked so much about this space if I didn’t let my imagination run. Wow, seeing what it could be helps you see what it is and aspects will come forward that you might have overlooked because it didn’t mean much to you when you’re just seeing the reality of it. But it’s everything to the fantasy of. It and if you. Work in fantasy? Then you can find those things out in the real world. That can be the seeds for your imagination to. Create new worlds. Or new types of people, or to be speculative about our future or whatever it is that you want to create, to share with people. You can also force your brain to see things it would not otherwise acknowledge. You may have noticed if you buy. A car suddenly you see. That car everywhere. Where before you thought it was kind of. A rare thing now I. Bought a Honda minivan during the pandemic. You know, the kids are gone. I buy a a soccer mom van so I could. Turn into a camper van. It’s kind of funny. I’ve seen them around, of course, but I hadn’t realized quite how many. But after I bought one, suddenly they’re everywhere and I can’t find my van in a parking lot cause there’s so many Gray Honda minivans. So now I put all these stickers all over it so I could actually. The van. But The thing is, I had no idea. There’s so many vans around because I was not paying attention. So you can use this to your advantage. You can pick something you want to be more attentive about and give yourself specifics to find, like kind of an artsy where’s Waldo? Right. So it’ll give you this heightened awareness. That will actually force. Your brain to feed you that information. When those kinds of things around like I do ICM photography now and I see so much more contrast and line in the world around me because that’s what I need to find for the type of IC that I do, I didn’t see nearly so much before I did this kind of thing, but I sure do now. So let’s say color contrast is something that you’re struggling with. Go out and learn about color and then go out into the world and look for color contrast. Look for interesting color pairings, take walks and specifically make notes or take pictures of color contrasts that you enjoy. I guarantee you, even when you’re not looking for them for. For the next few days or weeks afterwards, you’re going to see color contrast in cereal boxes, in your cupboard, in the clothes hanging in your closet. And of course, in the artwork you see online, you’ll just simply become. More aware of it? You can also mess with your site to help you develop a more artistic site. You can squint at things and use kind of your fantastical artistic site to imagine what else these things are that you’re looking at is now they’re kind of transformed by squinting. It just forces you to see the objects are scenes very differently, right? You can also look at things upside down. And backwards just a different. If you this is actually something you can do with your own artwork, take it to a mirror and look at it through a mirror and assess the design elements because your brain won’t see what it’s been seeing the whole time you’ve been working on it anymore, and this is especially good for assessing things like composition and balance issues, but it helps with other design concerns as well, and you can do this with the wider world. Just find a way to change your view like hang upside down if you can or lay on the ground and look up at things or climb up and look down at things just that change of view will make you look at things quite differently and you can find some fantastic forms and lines and things doing that. As well and a related approach, take things out of their usual context and put them somewhere new. Oregon somewhere kind of unusual. Say there’s this. Bright red apple sitting on your white countertop and it just looks really amazing and really cool. Take it and put it in like a. Brown basket. Suddenly it’s not. Going to look as red. Then you may realize it’s not the redness or the roundness or the glossy look of the apple that was capturing your eye, but the contrast between the red and the white. And so now you’ll know what’s intrigued you and what you want. To work with. OK, there’s a lot of information, right. I think the one big take away from all this information is that seeing takes vigilance, even though I’ve talked about this throughout my career, I still have to remind myself to stop and actually look and see and think through what I’m seeing and not just take my brains interpretation at face value. Practice does help, but it can also be tiring to be so attentive all the time. So in reality, most of us, even the most attentive artists, probably spend more time letting their brain do its limiting shortcut thing than stopping and seeing, and that’s OK. The poor brain needs a rest, too. Right, but try to go out with purpose with intention on a regular basis daily if possible. And just look at the world through some version of artistic site. Take a walk or a drive, or just wander through your backyard or the attic, or the basement, or whatever kind of place might hold the things that tend to feed your muse. I kind of gave. You a lot of information I. Know so if you’re. A little overwhelmed or don’t feel like you caught everything. Do bookmark this episode and come back to it later. There’s also a. Transcript that you can find for all the episodes they’re on the sagearts.com website, but mind you, it’s transcribed by an AI because real people. Transcription is a little too. Rich for me. So they can be a little bit wonky, but you could. Go through and highlight things to remind you of the things that you heard that you wanted to make note of and revisit. So yeah, go to thesagars.com, click on the episodes part of the navigation bar and then go to the episode that you want and you’ll find the transcription there. That website is also how you contact me so you can send me your thoughts, your ideas, your criticisms, whatever it is that you want, go to the contact page on the stage arts.com website and use the e-mail form or the leave me a message voicemail button. You can also visit with me on social media, on Instagram or Facebook. Both of the accounts are under the Sage Arts. That’s there, and if I’ve opened your eyes, so to speak, you can give back in some small way. I have donation buttons on the website at the sagearts.com. Just Scroll down the homepage a little ways to find the buy me a coffee and PayPal donation buttons. You can also buy yourself some feed the Muse stickers or even buy yourself a beautiful polymer art book like the retrospective. Polymer journeys book you don’t even have to be into polymer. It’s just amazing sculpture, art, jewelry, illustrative and wall art. You can buy the stickers in the books at 10th musearts.com that’s TENTH So 10th Muse art. Dot com. OK, enough of all that do go out now and see what you can see with these newly opened eyes of yours. Keep up with finding your daily stories as well. Immerse yourself in new and novel experiences. Just keep feeding your muse and. Be true to. The weirdness that is so wonderfully you, I’ll catch up with you next time. On the Sage Arts podcast.
