• With springtime beginning to burst wide open in our area, I've freshened up a post from 2017. Enjoy. What are you thinking while you are painting? Ideally, while painting we wouldn't be thinking at all. Instead, we'd be in the zone or what I prefer calling, the creative current. We all know that state of being when all thought is suspended, and the thing just happens. That's when we do our best work! THE PROS KNOW, AND CHILDREN KNOW, TOO! Baseball pitchers know it well. When their focus is on the ball with intent but no thought, the ball goes where it's meant to go. Children, too, are especially good at this. We were all children at one time or another, but along the way we got conditioned to valuing thinking over being. The irony of this is that to learn, we must think and continue to think until we've mastered what we are learning. And here's where the kicker comes in: once learning is mastered, creating becomes a matter of attention and intention. When we can learn to focus our attention on our intention without excessive thinking, we can enter that creative current
easily. One way to approach painting without thought is to train ourselves to focus our attention on one visual characteristic of our subject--what value is doing or what color is doing or what direction is doing, etc. If our thoughts start to wander towards trying to make it look like the subject, or anywhere other than that characteristic, then we can catch that thought and bring it back home to our
intention. There is something about that kind of discipline that helps to transition us to no-thinking while painting, even though it might take a period of time. Here's a little study I did from money plants in my back yard. Take your attention away from everything but the colors of the various shadows--shallow, deep and moderate--because those were where my attention was. My intention was to find those shadow's colors. Study of shadow colors in moneyplant and its foliage--12" x 14" Here are some photos of my subject If our thoughts are on what it is, then we're likely to ignore whatever it was that drew us to a subject. If we can change our thoughts to what it is doing, we will make discoveries we didn't notice to begin with. And when this pattern gets on a roll,
we'll move from thinking into the zone of creative current without even noticing. Enjoy a delightful thoughless weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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