Don't Be a Slouch

via Life in Style

Friends, I have a new car and it practically drives itself, it is so fancy. (OK, compared to what I'm used to driving anyway!) Now, I'm not going to lie. On the way home from the dealership, I may have called my husband via bluetooth while he was sitting next to me, just because I could. I may also possibly have mentioned during said car ride that the seat warmers were my new reason for living. Later though, as I pulled up in front of the studio and realized that I neither had to turn off the lights, nor remove a car key form the ignition (automatic! keyless!), I couldn't help think guiltily of Mathew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft.

I've mentioned this fantastic book before, so I won't lecture now, but suffice it to say that Crawford is an advocate for hands on experience as the basis for knowledge. In practical terms this means that if we get used to our cars beeping as we back up, we eventually learn to turn off that part of our brain that assesses the distance between our bumper and the other car's. What's the big deal you ask?

We already know that reliance on GPS for navigation tends to decrease our geospatial abilities, and social media is shortening our attention spans. So what? Standing up straight is hard work, and slouching is so much easier, right? Wrong. It's only easier until you realize that you have chronic back pain and a hunchback from a lifetime of failing to put those posture muscles to work...which brings me to my new studio practice.

I've decided to spend a couple hours every week looking only at my subject and not at my canvas while I'm painting. We all have ideas about the way things "should" look, and sometimes those notions preclude us from noticing how they actually look. These visual shortcuts become the crutches we lean on to avoid the hassle of really seeing what's in front of us. So I'm kicking the slouch out of my artistic practice, and putting my seeing muscles back to work. Wish me luck!

Why Computers May Be Taking Over the World, but People Still Make Better Art

Have you heard about the computers running Wall Street these days?  I mean, talk about artificial intelligence replacing human intuition! No need to muddy the world with "emotion and fallible judgment" when all you really need is cold hard data mashed into complex algorithms, right?  Sigh.  Well at least we can still count on the art world to fill our craving for all things random, inspired or chaotic, right?  Maybe.

It seems that order may be the most under-credited pillar of aesthetic success.  Did you know that Jackson Pollack planned a complicated linear framework for Autumn Rhythm?  Or that the Fibonacci Sequence's Golden Spiral is a pattern found in everything from shells and whirlpools to the proportions of the human body and the aesthetically pleasing composition of certain artworks?  How about this mind-blowing fact: If you connect a plate of sand to a sound system, and make it vibrate at a certain harmonic frequencies, it will produce beautiful patterns that would make textile designers green with envy!  (Incidentally, this does not happen if the notes are discordant.) 

Still, I'm inclined to be on the side of Mathew Crawford, author of the killer book, SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT (shout out to the Dugans who thoughtfully gifted it to me) who argues that nothing can replace the "tacit knowledge" of a real live person.  Data is important.  Ordering that data is important.  But the ability to recognize a pattern and to then choose to do something unique with that information is what separates the artists from the computers.

What do you think?