patternsthatconnect

Hi Stephen

At last! I finished my postcard and got it in the post to you. Hopefully you have it by now.

Interrupt/continue, postcard, 6"x4"

It took a long time to complete, mostly thinking time, looking at what I had done and deciding whether to

1. throw it away and start again
2. continue, or
3. stop, it is finished.

In NLP lingo it’s a TOTE (Test, Operate, Test, Exit)

I threw a lot of versions away and the “deciding whether to” took ages!

I have just seen the event Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky – NLP for Artists and Performers, with Judith Lowe, advertised for 01 May 2012, posing the question “What is creativity and how do artists effectively manage their unique creative gifts and states?” exploring how to develop and enhance creative expression, free up creative ‘blocks’ and manage the  process of bringing something new and aesthetic into the world that will resonate meaningfully with others.

What are the secrets of successful artists?
Where do they get their inspiration from?
How do they work and keep learning and growing their skills?
How do they manage the highs and lows?
How do they stay sane (ish)?

Of course, it has more general appliction than the arts alone, as it is about meeting new challenges and ‘thinking outside of the box’, so it is appropriate for coaches, leaders, trainers, parents, managers and anyone who wants to create new approaches to problems of any kind.

It is about improvising and creatively collaborating with others to produce worthwhile new structures, perspectives and experiences.

It sounds great and I want to go. I wonder if I can creatively find a way to be there, at University of London Union Building, Malet Street, WC1H, 7pm – 9pm, £15 if pre-booked or £20 on the door.

All welcome.

When I stepped back to look at this little painting I was working on (or is it a drawing?)…

Ghost, April 2012, ink on paper, 3"x3"

…I was reminded of a term I heard Mali Morris use in relation to one of her paintings, when she referred to a colour “ghosting through”. I like the use of the word ‘ghost’ as a verb.

By the way this one is actual size, (well it is on my screen anyway).

I didn’t intend for it to have an Easter reference but it could easily be read into it. Come to think of it I would like to see a 9′x9′ version of it in a public space, a church building. You wouldn’t be able to avoid the (unintended) iconography then!

NLPers are fond of reciting that Gregory Bateson derived saying “the meaning of the communication is the response you get, rather than the message you intended”.

Recently Rachael Pinks blogged about art blogging in a post entitled Why Artists Need a Blog, and Angela Sefton at Blackbox Art Studios reblogged it, the content itself a reblog from an AN blog originally published in June 2009. Some artists like to blog and then to blog about blogging.

It's turtles all the way down

…because blogging really can open up new avenues for study, learning and inspiration. Choosing to ‘abide by the rules’ when it comes to using images I spend quite a lot of time seeking images or permission to use images and I ‘meet’ lots of people as a result (even though my wife refers to them as my imaginary friends). Most of the time I get very generous responses to my requests, and I often learn things about the artworks and related issues that I would never learn otherwise.

The blog also opens up opportunities for collaboration. I exchanged art postcards recently with a few fellow art bloggers (BTW sorry Stephen, yours is still in production! I keep destroying them, nearly there now.) Stephen B. Macinnis has some interesting collaborations going on and I liked this recent trail: an idea he proposed that was taken up by another artist/blogger who blogged about the results and then he reblogged it. I am reminded of an NLP workshop activity that Robert Dilts does sometimes, where in pairs one person makes a gesture or move and the other person copies it adding something else, then the first person incorporates the new gesture/movement and adds to it, going back and forth in this way until quite a complicated ‘dance’ develops… and much laughter.

Walking towards Model Studies the Thomas Demand exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, and having forgotten whose work was on show, I felt sure that I was walking towards an exhibition of abstract paintings.

In fact, they are large photographs of small architectural models. The scale tends to flatten out the space and to produce large areas of lightly modulated colour, hence the resemblance to American abstract paintings of the 50s and 60s. When you get a bit closer the space in the photos becomes more apparent, it reminds me of the space in a cubist paintings now. I can imagine the artist bending a craning to get into the tiny models attempting to experience it for himself, in a way similar to the cubist modelling of space, as experienced in time.

Demand is known for his photographs of life-size models, made by him, of architectural interiors like the Oval Office, paper models which are destroyed after being photographed. In these new works the models he photographed were made by the architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994), and discovered by Demand in the archives of the Getty Research Institute when he was artist-in residence there.

In this short video clip he talks to Alex Farquharson, the Director of Nottingham Contemporary, about how he found these models and about his interest in the status of the model: far from being a diminution of reality modelling is our way of perceiving the world and communicating our experience of it to others. (In NLP we think of models and modelling in a similar way. We make models of how people do what they do well so that we can teach it to others.) It occurred to me that these photographs, themselves 2 dimensional models, document the process of modelling. They show us something of how in modelling we alter scale, freeze time, distort space in order to ‘understand’.

When I wrote about George Shaw’s painting The New Houses, the other day, I suggested that it is a meta painting in two senses: 1) It is a painting within which there are three other paintings, and 2) It is, in my view, a painting about the process of painting.

George Shaw The New Houses 2011 BALTIC presents Turner Prize 2011 © BALTIC & the artist Photo: Colin Davison FILENAME: SHAW

I was using the prefix meta a lot like we do in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) where it usually means “on”, “above” or “beyond” and includes “about”. For example a meta model is a model of a model and a meta comment is a comment on a comment: “now that’s an interesting comment”. We could continue to add meta comments: “now that comment about the other comment being interesting was also interesting” etc etc. This painting has a similar structure.

A painting of a painting of a painting or four squares of four squares of four squares

I have been posting about metamodernsm lately and I note that the metamodernists (Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen) use the prefix meta to mean something slightly different than in my usage above. In explanation, they quote the online etymology dictionary on meta:

prefix meaning 1. “after, behind,” 2. “changed, altered,” 3. “higher, beyond,” from Gk. meta (prep.) “in the midst of, in common with, by means of, in pursuit or quest of,” from PIE *me- “in the middle” (cf. Goth.miþ, O.E. mið “with, together with, among;” see mid). Notion of “changing places with” probably led to senses “change of place, order, or nature,”

and they emphasise “the movement with and between what we are doing and what we might be doing and what we might have been doing” and downplay the “reflective stance, a repeated rumination about what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it”, which I think has been more common.

For them it signifies oscillation or a constant repositioning

Meta- does not refer to one particular system of thought or specific structure of feeling. It infers a plurality of them, and repositions itself with and between them. It is many, but also one. Encompassing, yet fragmented. Now, yet then. Here, but also there.

In relation to the modern and the postmodern, metamodernism is historically beyond whilst also oscillating between those two positions.

Does Analysing Stunt Creativity?.

Rachael Pinks asks an important question and comments on the relationship between what in NLP and Self Relations we might refer to as ‘cognitive mind’ and ‘somatic mind’.

It could be argued that technology separates cognitive thinking and somatic doing, attempting to mediate them by inserting ‘controlling’. Capitalism arranges them hierarchically, with thinking at the top, doing at the bottom and controlling in the middle.  ‘thinkers’ have power and wealth, whilst ‘doers’ generally lack both.

I want to say that art integrates thinking and doing, though I am aware that it is not always the case, take conceptual art for example, are not thinking and doing often separated along exactly the same lines as in capitalist production?

At the Blackpool Sequence Dance Festival 2011, in the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens, attempting to learn brand new sequence dances, with a large group of people, I found it very difficult. It was wonderful and I loved it, especially as others took pity on us and helped us out, yet I really struggled to pick up 16 bars of steps in half an hour.

I could see many people, 20 years my senior and more, finding it quite easy to do what seemed an almost impossible task to me. What was it that made us different?

Maybe we could put it down to learning styles: this is not my favoured way of learning, I would rather read instructions first or have them explained to me in an environment where I could ask lots of questions, and then slowly piece the whole together part by part. I also seemed to suffer from ‘performance pressure’ that may have been absent in a smaller group or on my own.

It was possibly David Kolb that introduced the notion of learning styles, along the lines of: learning has a cycle of four stages and though all stages are required we may have a preference for a certain stage more than others. I have the impression that Honey and Mumford‘s learning styles are more or less the same as Kolb’s, but with more accessible labels, so we have Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist styles. One implication of the theory is that we learn best when our own style is adequately catered for, Activists and Pragmatists preferring to learn by doing, Reflectors and Theorists favouring a more thinking approach etc. Learning professionals closer to NLP might use the distinctions Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic as learning styles.

But isn’t this somewhat limiting? “I don’t learn that way” “It’s not my learning style” could easily become an excuse to prevent further learning. Isn’t it rather that what is needed is learning at a higher level?

Gregory Bateson proposed that there are levels of learning, where Learning 0 is an habitual automatic response to a given stimulus, Learning 1 is a trial and error process of adaptation to the given environment, Learning 2 is a process of corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choices are made at level 1, and Learning 3 (which rarely, if ever occurs) is about our whole process of forming, exchanging and losing level 2 habits.

Learning how to learn in the situation I described above would be Learning 2, which would then mean that on future occasions I could participate more successfully in the trial and error process of learning the new dances in the large group in only half an hour. One way to do this would be to model the strategies of other dancers/learners, which would I suggest also be a more sophisticated use of NLP.

One of the language patterns we pay attention to in NLP applications is complex equivalence, i.e. This is the same as that, X = Y. For example in the statement “she is so rude, she never says hello” the complex equivalence would be: being rude = not saying hello.
I have noticed a complex equivalence often expressed in relation to the kind of painting I am doing, where “professional” (sometimes “well executed”) is the same as “neat” or “staying within the lines”.

It is almost as if the more the work looks like it could have been machine-produced, the better it is.

When I posted this new one, entitled Wakefield Bridge, on Rise Art I wrote:

When I visited the Hepworth, Wakefield a few months ago I was impressed by three little paintings that were hung almost side by side: a Piet Mondrian, a Winifred Nicholson and a John Piper, all of them using a lot of white. In my experiments with colour and opticality I am becoming increasingly appreciative of the ‘rest’ it gives to the eye, and with that the opportunity for after images to appear. Here I am also tightening up the straightness of the lines. it breaks my own rules really but it is becoming necessary to take the work more into hard-edge edge territory. You can probably see that I am still resisting it here a little bit.

Co-creator of NLP, John Grinder* distinguishes between f1 and f2 filters in our sensory perception. We perceive the world out there through our five senses. He calls the point of perception First Access (FA). And right there at FA there is a filtering process going on. We generalise, distort and delete information entirely unconsciously before we are even aware of what we are perceiving. These pre-linguistic filters he refers to as f1 filters.

I have become interested in what abstract art can show us about f1 filters, i.e. the way we construct colour (even when it is not physically there), or the way that a colour looks different depending on the context.

And then there is a second set of perceptual filters. Have you noticed that we sometimes use the word ‘perception’ to mean ‘interpretation’ or ‘opinion’? Here we are dealing with the linguistically mediated filters that Grinder calls f2 filters. I think it would be correct to assign colour symbolism to the f2 set of filters.

When I read this next image as a cross, as in Christian iconography, those linguistically mediated or f2 filters are at work…

…and also in the colour symbolism: even if it weren’t a cross the silver and gold colours communicate something different than say if they were black, brown or red.

*John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair write about the epistemology of NLP in their excellent book Whispering in the Wind .