The Four Elements of Creativity. (2)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

WATER


J.M.W.Turner "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up" 1838


Ann Hamilton was quoted in the New York Times as saying something to this effect;
"You can't really force great ideas to happen. The best you can do is float yourself in a situation that is conducive to thinking, and wait for great ideas to surface"

My favorite step in the process of painting is in the middle, when the painting is neither the start of a blank canvas nor my efforts' end result. It’s when the canvas is full of paint and color, but still coming and undefined as yet. I stretch my mind across the picture plane along with the paint that has been spread across the canvas. Suspended there, we move in and rise out of the plane, waiting for the forms to emerge, the hues to take hold, the ideas to surface. This is the medium in which I float myself in.

There are many mediums that I could choose to float in; electronic, dialectic, religious, alcoholic....? Some mediums I swim in more eloquently than others, as in painting when I effortlessly do a backstroke from my many years of practice. At this moment, however, I am suspended in a pool of words. I doggy paddle here.

Perhaps our need to float in any given medium comes from a need to experience what cannot, or should not, be defined? Water has no form of its own; it continuously adopts the shape of whatever contains it. Suspending ourselves in a medium becomes the form in which we think in, and the medium often does the thinking for us. In this way, the thinking, though cogitative, is never objective. Does a fish know if he's in water?