What is a Sculptor’s Most Important Tool – May/June 2008

Would that be the seven-inch angle grinder with diamond tipped blade? Or that finely honed chisel, or the hammer that balances in your hand just so? Some might name the human body as a sculptor’s most important tool.

I think it is the mind. Our minds are responsible for creating and designing the best sculpture. Often we take it for granted. Do we ever think to clean, maintain and exercise our minds like we do our tools? This article is meant to introduce the concepts necessary to use and maintain that tool – the mind. And by so doing we can expand our creativity and discover new shapes to convey new meanings.

Creativity is a bit like riding a bike: we can all do it (to some degree), but it’s hard to explain exactly how we do it. Perhaps this is because creativity is more “inspiration” than logic. This difference comes to us from our first bipedal ancestors millions of years ago. As we became upright, the hands became free to specialize for different needs. Most humans used their right hands to sequentially throw rocks and spears. Sequential logic began to slowly expand in the left hemisphere of the brain, the half that controls the right half of the body. Later, the development of language and ultimately writing caused a further increase in left hemisphere use as people began to communicate their thoughts in logical, linear or “train” of thought that mirrors the sequential movement of throwing things. Over the last fifty thousand years, the left hemisphere has become the dominant sphere. Most of our lives today are consumed with following rules, categorizing things, keeping track of time, communicating with other people and maintaining daily routines.

Not that left-brain dominance is bad in and of itself. In fact it is dominant because it creates more value in society and has been rewarded with greater wealth and reproduction rights over the millennia. However, what we have lost is the connection with our intuition and our ability to spontaneously cross-associate ideas together with our senses; a process we call creativity. The left hemisphere manages order, while the right hemisphere manages chaos. Deep within our thinking selves is the ability to deal both with order in a structured, stable environment and, also with disorder in a rapidly changing environment. Perhaps this is the clue needed for unlocking the right side of the brain and helping you become a better artist.

Some of us get a jump-start by being right hemisphere dominant or left-handed. Left-handed people have been shown to be more creative presumably because they are not as entrenched in their left hemispheric logic. For the rest of us, there are a series of books and articles teaching us how to think with the right hemisphere. One of the best is titled “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” This book attempts to teach you to draw not by thinking and categorizing with the left hemisphere, but by really studying shapes as if you had never seen them before. Sometimes simply drawing a common object upside down can force you to really study it – because it no longer fits into any of the preordained categories that the left hemisphere uses to simplify life. Shapes no longer conveniently fit into the memory banks of the left hemisphere thereby forcing the right hemisphere to take over. Objects drawn using this technique benefit from no longer appearing to resemble bad cartoons and apples are no longer all plain red delicious with a certain shape. Disturbing the “status quo” of the mind shifts the dominance from one hemisphere to the other.

Another technique that has been used to shut down the left hemisphere from railroading involves challenging your mind to solve new problems that have no logical answer. What is the texture of each color? What shapes best represent each of the Seasons? What color is each of the emotions? Suddenly bereft of the security of prior knowledge to draw on, the right hemisphere is forced to take the unsteady helm and steer you into the unknown. Cross-linking your senses is not as difficult as it might seem.

Some lucky people have a condition called Synesthesia. This ability directly links different senses together. For instance, some people actually smell a different smell when they see different colors or “see” different shapes that represent various sounds like music. This type of crossover may be a mixed blessing to those who have the condition, but for others of us, consciously crossing over may give us a chance to explore the unlimited capacity of the right hemisphere to free-associate.

But, is it enough to just take existing objects and copy them better or even create new associations with different senses? The ability to capture grand concepts or perhaps even create new concepts to convey through symbolism is the highest aspiration of an artist. For example Michelangelo’s David would never have reached the pinnacle of artistic expression if Michelangelo had not been able to reduce the new self-confidence man felt at the beginning of the renaissance into a single gaze of a young man. Clearly conveying such a complex concept as the shifting percepts of an entire civilization with the simple gaze of a statue deserves the recognition it has received over the years. How do we common folk gain insight, capture a new feeling or stretch the imagination?

One answer might be: violate the rules. Create new disorder in your life; step out of the bubble cocoon that is your daily life. Stimulate all your senses and feelings. Simply by taking a new route to work can force you to awaken from the slumber of your left-hemisphere. Exercise your mind by learning as much as you can about as many different subjects as possible. Learn a new language, take tai chi, learn scuba, study diatoms, go to a fabric store and really look at the pattern of the fabrics, study Etruscan art or Roman fibulae, go to the library and randomly select books to read.

In other words, what is needed is a new awareness to see not only with our eyes, but also with our minds. We need to first expand our toolkit of shapes, colors, patterns and textures and then expand our experiences to have something to communicate to others. After this mental tune-up, it’s up to your right hemisphere to come up with a unique method of expression. Knowing yourself without really understanding how you know is just a fact we live with, but it doesn’t stop us from riding a bike and it shouldn’t block us from expressing ourselves non-verbally through art.å