The artistic process as seen by a scientist My training is in the sciences and engineering, but I also have a great background in the arts. I am a photographer, I like to sketch and I have been trying my hand at watercolors. Years ago I read The Art of Genes by Enrico Coen. Instead […]
Empathy – another definition When I wrote about empathy in a previous posts (Empathy Take 1, Empathy Take 2, Empathy and Sympathy, Emotion & Empathy Circuitry in Infants), I was concentrating on the relationship between people. I found this interesting definition of empathy in Fiona Gray in her article, The Synthesis of Empathy, Abstraction and […]
Recapitulation Since the beginning of this month, I have concentrated on expressing my feelings in ways other than filtering them through my intellectual channels. I began by watercoloring a pen and ink drawing of my older autistic, profoundly retarded, nonverbal brother with whom I have never been able to communicate in the 60+ years we […]
I’m going to need some help here. Here’s the set up: The only kind of painting that I have done in recent memory is watercolor. I am a real neophyte at it. Concurrently, I am reading about Cézanne, who worked with great effort and emphasis on composing his paintings, eliminating details that did not speak […]
Yesterday, I spoke about expressionism in terms of large sweeping movements of the body, such as those a dancer would make. Yesterday I also thought that it might be just a little oxymoronic to consider a small format painting as expressionistic. I admit that I may have been a little hasty in making that determination. […]
Of expressionism, Wikipedia says, “Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.” [1] Writ large? There are many ways to express meaning and emotions, […]
I’ve had some classes in drawing. I’ve read up on perspective and I’ve practiced drawing scenes in front of me. I find that I must continually check to see whether I have properly estimated the area on my two-dimensional paper to match the corresponding view of the three-dimensional scene in front of me. With practice, […]
Vivid dreams I have vivid dreams pretty frequently. I’m not sure with what they are correlated. They could be related what is happening around me: a book I am reading, a movie I watched or a feeling with which I am wrestling. For a long period of time, I would wake up shortly after my […]
I shifted directions in my blog, at least for now. Now, I am in pursuit of creativity, my own. I have been pretty good about verbal descriptions of my feelings, investigating possible reasons for the way I feel, using all my powers of observation, reasoning and analysis of trace evidence (yes, I’ve been watching more […]
I resisted for most of the day. No, ‘resisted’ is not the right word. It is better to say I was confounded. Yesterday I mentioned that I put all kinds of roadblocks in my way before I begin being creative. I procrastinate by trying to read up on my subject – in this case, watercolor […]
