Fear: The Enemy of Creativity?

 

A strange thing happened once during the Roman Empire, writes Kenneth Clark in "Civilization." Rome was in its crazed expansionist phase, with hoards of soldiers pouring across the globe and usurping everything in their path. Nothing could stop them.

But word had gotten out that the Germanic forest-dwelling tribes north of the Danube were fearsome and not to be trifled with. Physically larger and more intimidating than their Southern counterparts, they inspired fear among the Roman troops. So the Romans devised a plan to turn the tables; they brought lions along. Lions? Everyone's scared of lions, right? They'd release the lions at the outset of battle and surely their foe would turn tail and flee.

 "Are you gonna release the Hounds? or the Bees?

Or the hounds with bees in their mouths so every time they bark they shoot bees at you?"

- Homer Simpson

The only problem was that the tribes north of the Danube had never seen a lion before so they didn't know that they were supposed to be scared. When the lions came roaring at them they just shrugged their shoulders and killed what they thought were a bunch of huge dogs.

I love this story because it illustrates the extent to which fear inhibits success, or rather; absence of fear can be the key to success. To put it another way:

Ignorance is the Mother of Adventure

Vikings were said to be afraid of only one thing: being burned alive. Life was simpler then. Sometimes I wake up with a horrible dread that seems to bury everything in a grey fog that won't lift, and I'm not even a particularly anxious person. "I'm not  original, I'm a fraud," and all that. Fear of success is just as destructive as fear of failure. Henry Rollins expresses this existential angst better than most:

"How many times have you sat alone in a coffee house and stared into the liquid black abyss of your coffee cup to see the blasted reflection of your own mortal futility staring back at you as you sit still while being jettisoned towards the end of your life?"

I find a strange comfort knowing that even great artists have been subject to the darkness. Monet once wrote to a friend, saying; "I know well enough in advance that you'll find my paintings perfect. I know that if they are exhibited they'll be a great success, but I couldn't be more indifferent to it since I know they are bad, I'm certain of it."

"Sometimes life seems dark and without hope. 

At times like these, it's important to remember that it's just a perfectly natural consequence of being realistic."

- The Onion

What to do? Authors on the connection between Fear and Creativity:

So, what is Creativity? Amy Tan maintains that Creativity is the inability to repress associations. That feels like a definition to me so I'm going to put it in bold:

Creativity is the inability to repress associations.

I like this because it demystifies the creative process and suggests that it's like cell division; it's just something that goes on out there despite us, and that we simply have to open our eyes and tap into it in order to take advantage.

"Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert did a warm and personal TED talk where she spoke about the potentially crippling self-doubt that can arise, and suggested ways of getting around it. For Gilbert, creating distance between the work of her hand and the ego/person that created it is the key to quieting the anxious voices in her head. She cites the Ancient Greeks, who believed that Creativity was a gift from a "divine attendant spirit" - or daemon - "from some distant and unknowable source." It's a psychological construct that protects the artist from the results of their own work. If our work sucks, we can blame the daemons.

"Everything Is a Remix", a (free) great short film about Creativity by Kirby Ferguson, makes the case for the intrinsic association between all good ideas, implying that the act of artistic creation begins when we embrace those pre-existing associations. Creativity is simply a word we use to describe when we transform and combine those connections into a new hybrid. Steve Jobs would probably agree.

The idea that, as artists, we are simply placing a small pebble on top of a mountain created by others may be the first step towards putting our fear in it's place. It takes some of the pressure off.

“I used to make original snowmen, but it was time consuming, hard work. So I said, heck, this is crazy! Now I crank out crude imitations of what's already popular! It takes no time or thought, and most people don't care about the difference, anyway! And what good is originality if you can't crank it out?” says Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Waterson.

He's joking, but he makes a good point. If it's all been done before, then what are we so afraid of?

Ferguson illustrates that creativity is not as mysterious as we might think.

In "Art and Fear" authors David Bayles and Ted Orland  reassure us that "art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially—statistically speaking—there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place."

"In the artist, fears not only continue to exist, they exist side by side with the desires that complement them, perhaps drive them, certainly feed them. Naive passion, which promotes work done in ignorance of obstacles, becomes — with courage — informed passion, which promotes work done in full acceptance of those obstacles.” 

Let's get a little perspective here...

In "The War of Art", Steven Pressfield takes it a step further and suggests that Fear is actually an essential part of the process of creation, and that it has much to teach us.

"Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”

Twyla Tharp puts it a little more succintly in "The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use It for Life", saying that "there’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.”

We've all got our excuses for not doing stuff...

"My specialty is Autumn landscapes, but unfortunately I only feel the urge to create in Spring".

And no, Ethan never said that. I Just made it it up because I wanted to make a point about insecurity disguised as pretension. In the end it all amounts to the same thing: ego getting in the way again.

McNiff's "Trust The Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go"  teaches us how to surrender our egos to the creative process. "There is a magic to this process that cannot be controlled by the ego. Somehow it always finds the way to the place where you need to be, and a destination you never could have known in advance."

"The empty space is the great horror and stimulant of creation. But there is also something predictable in the way the fear and apathy encountered at the beginning are accountable for feelings of elation at the end. These intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control, but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.”

When asked for advice on painting, Claude Monet told people not to fear mistakes. The discipline of art requires constant experimentation, wherein errors are harbingers of original ideas because they introduce new directions for expression. The mistake is outside the intended course of action, and it may present something that we never saw before, something unexpected and contradictory, something that may be put to use.”

Jonah Lehrer's best-selling book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works", also speaks about the conflict between the inhibiting/motivating power of fear.

Some people need a stress-free, relaxing environment in order for insight to arise, and some others need its opposite, plunging themselves into stressful energetic environments. Either way, there's a strange tension between surrendering to an unknowable outcome while at the same time constraining ourselves within an artistic form (a sonnet, haiku, or the four sides of a blank canvas) that gives rise to innovation.

He goes into a fascinating story about Bob Dylan writing "Like a Rolling Stone," and what a pivotal moment it was in Rock and Roll as well as for Dylan's career. In a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan reflected on the sudden impact of this breakthrough on his music: "Last Spring, I guess I was going to quit singing," he said. "The way things were going, it was a very draggy situation... But "Like a Rolling Stone" changed it all. I mean, here was something that I myself could dig."

Sometimes I think all we need to do is to throw open the windows and take a deep breath, or just roll down a hill. Anyway, I hope I've given some food for thought, or maybe a book or two for your reading list.

 

Hand-Carved Wooden Relief Ornament

My brother Peter is one of the most talented people I know, so I was thrilled when he asked me to draw some ornamental details for a library he is working on. We started out together painting commercial murals around Ireland, but he has since re-invented himself as a first-rate bespoke furniture designer and cabinetmaker.

The drawing above is for a section of torus molding that will be carved by hand, so my drawing had to read as a practical road-map for the carver. 

Furniture in his showroom designed and created by Peter Christopher Carroll

Here's a drawing from the architect showing the rough layout of the library units. I can't wait to start working on the central ornamental element and those capitals. Details to follow.

Andrea Pozzo, Anamorphism and Illusionistic Ceiling Painting

At first glance it's hard to grasp what all the fuss is about. Puffy clouds and putti? Yawn. Looks like art by another dead guy. But it's an odd feeling the moment you realize you've been truly fooled. All those 3-D street-drawings forwarded by my aunt left me numb to the fact that anamorphism is hard to do well. There's something about watching reality on a computer that makes it seem a little, I don't know, unreal.

The painted ceiling at San Ignazio, by Andrea Pozzo, 1685

The truth is: there is not a single painter alive who is fit to sniff Andrea Pozzo's pants. There, I said it. The depth of his knowledge is breath-taking, to say nothing of his incredible talent as a painter. I'm not saying he was the greatest - I don't think he was - just that we're all rubbish by comparison. But the good news is that we can learn from him because he wrote a lot of it down.

Prying open his original volume of writings on architecture in perspective, bound in debossed pigskin, and peering at the arcane knowledge in Latin and German is like a looking-glass to another world. We're left, like peasants staring up at the ancient ruins of the Greeks, to suspect that aliens must have had a hand in this, because no mere human could possibly have conceived and created something of such greatness.

Figure 1

Andrea Pozzo painted his most famous work, the illusionistic trompe l'oeil ceiling of San Ignazio, in 1685. He waited 21 years until 1706, just three years before he died, to publish his methods for creating this dizzying trickery. His book was instantly, and hugely popular. There's no show-boating; he simply and clearly begins with the most basic linear perspective, and proceeds to step through the process with more and more complicated geometry.

But how did he counter the distortion to his artwork by the curvature of the vault at San Ignazio? If he just painted his flat design onto a curved ceiling, it would look hopelessly distorted and unconvincing from below.

Here's the simple version.

Pozzo prepared for his mural by first creating full architectural elevations

He then applied linear perspective to create the look of walls soaring above us.

We know that Pozzo was very partial to the Single Point Perspective theory. He wrote all about it. As far as painted representations of depth were concerned, he believed that Single Point Perspective gave a visceral 3-D experience that could not be beaten.

Linear Perspective in action [photo source]

To create his masterful illusion, he began by constructing - as an architect would - the elevations for the building, but in Pozzo's case he was imagining a building that would probably never be built. He meticulously designed the construction as if it actually existed in space, to the point where he could literally build it if he wanted to. In the case of the cupola of San Ignazio, he even offered to build the real thing. His illusion would add an additional three floors of height to the main ceiling.

Once he had his elevations drawn up, he applied the rules of linear perspective and came up with a drawing of how the building would look if viewed from directly below [Fig. 1]

Figure 2

Next he simply laid a grid over his entire drawing. He now had a map of how the ceiling would be painted if it were flat. The only problem was that the ceiling at San Ignazio is not flat, it's a hemispherical barrel vault. To counter the curvature, he had to use a little anamorphic projection. What he needed to do was to make his grid appear to be correct at a height that corresponds with the top of the actual wall, right below the curved vault. To do that, he imagined a grid (the red grid in Fig. 2) at the height of what would be a flat ceiling (if it existed).

I placed our viewer at a the center of the room [A], but we could decide to place him anywhere. As long as the position is known, the effect will work. Pozzo worked out his perspective illusion the same way, and marked the optimum viewing position with a brass plaque on the floor.

Figure 3

Anamorphism is a detailed subject, and I'm only skimming the surface here. The steps we are taking here will correct the distortion on the x axis, and create lines that appear straight even though they're painted on a curve. In the case of San Ignazio, I believe Pozzo only corrected for the x axis, not the y. 

For now, let's take a look at a cross-section of our room with the barrel vault [Fig. 3], which should of course be drawn to scale. Lines radiating from eye level travel through the red points on our grid and hit the curved vault. These are our new grid points. 

Figure 4

If Pozzo had also corrected the y axis it'd have looked something like Figure 4, but I don't believe he did. You can see that if we did that, our new grid points (green) on the y axis would start to creep down the end walls of the church. This would cause it's own problem not worth solving (or maybe I'm just feeling lazy). Instead, why not simply retain our original points on the y axis and let distance do the trick? Like this...

Figure 5

If we maintain the original grid on the y axis (as in Figure 5), and project our points through to the curved ceiling on the x axis, then when we stand in the middle of the room we'll get a convincing trompe l'oeil effect of a ceiling receding more-or-less correctly in space.

Our new grid would look something like Figure 6, with the red dot marking a position vertically above us. As the squares of the grid move further towards the top and bottom (the lower sides of the vault) they become stretched. The squares towards the enter of the grid (the apex of the vault) appear 'more square'.

Figure 6

In Fig. 6 you can see original dimensions along the y axis are preserved, but that we've distorted the grid along the x axis. All that's left to do now is to apply the visual information from our original gridded drawing to our new grid, square for square. Mark your ceiling with the new grid, and start painting.

Figure 7

I said that our solution is "more-or-less" correct because the reality is that a gigantic grid floating way above our heads is subject to distortion that makes it appear like the grid in Figure 7.

Here, Point A represents a point directly over our heads. You can see that the squares directly around the center are the least distorted. That's because they're on a plane that's perpendicular to our line of vision. As the grid recedes equally in all directions, it gets progressively more and more distorted by distance and a skewed picture plane.

This can be corrected for, and the good news is it's not that hard. If it was, we wouldn't have so many 3-D chalk drawings flooding our Inbox.

Figure 8: Altare di S Luigi Gonzaga, by Andrea Pozzo [source]

You can easily see what I mean in reality in Figure 8, where the camera's wide angle lens preserved the same optical distortion. Pozzo's ceiling appears to bubble down towards us in the center.

If we were to shrink and lower that big red grid along our sight line so that it floated closer over our heads, our artwork would appear to distort less. We could continue to shrink and bring that grid even closer to our eyes, and each time the skewed distortion would lessen. 3-D chalk artists position their grid so close that it's on the same plane as their 'eye' (the camera). If there is no distance at all between the eye and the grid, then the 'surface as surface' disappears completely, and the illusion is complete.

This is the secret to their creating those illusions in chalk of standing on the edge of a yawning crevasse or whatever.

Figure 9

This topic is really too big to go into fully in a blog post. You're going to have to wait for the workshop for that. I feel like I'm skipping around and not really explaining fully enough to be useful. Steps 1 through 6 above apply to the problem posed by Pozzo's ceiling in particular, and are not applicable to every situation of Anamorphism.

But to create a true anamorphic illusion, you have to imagine that you are floating inside the center of a very large transparent sphere. All around the inside of that sphere are equally spaced little dots that form a grid. We perceive the world through this grid. Using this idea, a perceptually truer projection correcting the curve of the vault is represented by Figure 9. See the difference between that and Figure 3?

Hmm, I see that I'm getting off topic and that this post is getting too long and I didn't even get to how he did the cupola yet. It's Sunday morning and I haven't even had my coffee yet.

By the way, you can download a full PDF of Andrea Pozzo's book (Latin and English version) "Rules and Examples of Perspective proper for Painters and Architects" here.

An early experiment in Anamorphism I did in exchange for membership at my local climbing gym

Adoration of the Lamb, by Jan Van Eyck

'Adoration of the Lamb', by Jan Van Eyck, is the lower central panel from his Ghent Altarpiece

Hailed as "the first evolved landscape in European painting" by Kenneth Clark, 'Adoration of the Lamb' by Jan Van Eyck is a masterpiece that reveals much about the spirit of the day in late medieval Europe. There was a distinctly sweaty-lipped drive to tame the wanton strumpet of Nature at every turn, and we can see it reflected here in the landscape behind the lamb.

There's nothing less Godly than an untidy wilderness

The Church at the top of the hill, overlooking its kingdom

"Looking at the Tuscan landscape with its terraces of vines and olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when it was all forest and swamp - shapeless, formless; and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilization".

Check out the detail in the embossed damask pattern

"Since Giorgione first mythologized Arcadia by showing us naked women in an idealized landscape, we have been captured by the comforting illusion that nature is a mirror of human perfection."

The "pastoral fallacy" had inspired Theocritus and Virgil (who seems to have made an appearance in this panel dressed in white), and might have it's roots even further back: Pre-Historic man is said to have been subject to a vision of paradise genetically encoded as "The Savannah Hypothesis". It's a fascinating theory that suggests that we respond to this kind of landscape because it most closely resembles our old hunting grounds as knuckle-dragging simians.

You could even make the argument that artificial landscapes from stately homes to our lowly city parks are designed according to this same theory: visible water sources, easily navigable pathways, open vistas and vantage points (for hunting) and reference markers (so we don't get lost) were all necessary for survival for hundreds of thousands of generations.

All photos this article, source: 'Closer To Van Eyck' Project

Detail from lower right panel

Raphael Loggia Ornament

What's the most fun you can have without a King-sized bed and a rubber chicken? Yep, you guessed it: I just spent a day studying an original set of hand-painted engravings from 1770 of Raphael's designs for the painted ornament for the loggia at the Vatican.

It took three of us just to carry the first volume onto the viewing table. This thing looked like the Queen Mary hoving into view. Raphael himself could have delivered it on a unicorn and I'd be no more impressed. It was the most awesome object I've ever seen.

Three volumes, (the first of which measured about 24" x 36"), meticulously engraved, and subsequently painted in vibrant gouache of Raphael's panel, ceiling and pilaster designs for the Vatican in a riotous mixture of earthy fauna, gauzy maidens, beardy gods and grotesque ornament of every imaginable type.

Can somebody please explain the Universe to me, because I'm a little confused: How is it that one of only three complete sets in the world of these spectacular engravings can sell in November of last year for only $25,000, when Damien Hirst can sell horse manure for a million? It makes me so mad. And why am I finding out four months too late? I would have gladly cashed in my daughter's college fund if I'd known.

"The loggia, or colonnaded porch, on the second story of the Apostolic Palace is one of the Vatican’s most remarkable art treasures; its decoration, designed by Raphael (1483—1520) and executed by his workshop in 1517- 1519, epitomizes the spirit of the Italian Renaissance in its synthesis of Christian and classical themes. The thirteen square vaults of Raphael’s loggia each contain four frescoes of scenes from the Bible, from the Creation to the Last Supper." [source] 

Noah's Ark scene from the Vatican loggia...

... and the same scene as depicted in the set of engravings

"These splendid, large-size copperplate engravings, from the suite Le Loggie di Rafaele nel Vaticano (Rome: 1772-77), after the celebrated frescoes by Raphael in the loggia of the Vatican, are scarce, with OCLC recording only two complete copies in libraries worldwide.

"The Raphael Loggia consists of thirteen arches forming a gallery sixty-five meters long and four meters wide. Its construction was begun by architect and painter Donato Bramante in 1512, under Pope Julius II and was completed by Raphael under the reign of Leo X. Raphael began work on the frescoes in 1517.

"The plates, designed by P. Camporesi, G. and L. Savorelli Teseo and engraved by G. Volpato (1733-1803) and G. Ottaviani (1735-1808), depict, in a vibrant color gouache, the pilasters, paneling, ceiling panels and two doorways with floral, figural and architectural motifs. Where human figures in the original frescoes were compromised by weathering and erosion, engravers Volpato and Ottaviani replaced them with elements from the Vatican tapestries designed by Raphael.

"While Raphael's Vatican frescos were admired in their time, they were ultimately overshadowed by the work of Michaelangelo until the Neoclassicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rediscovered the Renaissance, and Raphael earned his place as the era's greatest artist of them all.

""Raphael is categorically the greatest painter of the last millennium, and the Loggia is his most significant legacy," says Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums and esteemed art historian.

"And yet the Loggia is the least known of Raphael's works. Millions of visitors to the Vatican Museums pass by it every year, but cannot go inside. Looking from Saint Peter's Square, it is in the second of the three glassed-in hallways across from the building in which the pope resides. When it was constructed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, it overlooked a garden. The thirteen arches of the Loggia frescoed by Raphael were not enclosed in glass until the nineteenth century. Originally, they were open to the luminous Roman sky, which made their colors even more brilliant" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa Espressonline)."

[source]

It has been notoriously difficult to find any images of Raphael's loggia work - the fact that the loggia are closed to the public and sealed behind glass has not helped - but Abbeville Press has published what looks like a fine book on the subject.