Patterns, practice, pens, pencils and paint! Connection in COVID-quarantine.
In a time where divisions have often felt like gaping fissures and social isolation has taken on new meaning, I have found myself searching for what unites us all so that I can face this hard moment in the spirit of growth and learning. What makes me feel connected to others and what is around me? What uplifts and inspires us collectively? Where does inspiration come from and what can it do for our sense of cohesion and purpose?
Two weeks ago, on a bit of an inspired playful whim, I enrolled in painting and product design classes. In step with our troublesome times, all attendance is occurring remotely in video chat form. It is of course a strange and somewhat limiting setup for three-dimensional subjects. But nonetheless, it’s a better alternative to throwing my hands up in the air and joining the crushing chorus of this feels impossible or not worth it. And to be truthful, despite being unemployed since March and with a 15 month old who recently learned how to walk tearing up the house and commandeering most of my time and attention, there’s no way I would have been able to make it to either of these classes in person on a regular basis anyway.
The first weeks of assignments and exercises have included a lot of freehand sketches. Shapes, the geometries that lie inside complex objects, lines, light and shadow, and most recently, faces. I am learning how to draw quickly with various pens and pencils, blocking out forms before details, seeing these forms and planes and their relationship to each other, working with the natural mechanics of my arms and joints to create visual building blocks that can eventually lead to the creation of original composition, ideation and communication.
This is all so familiar! The distinct parallels to the years of training and daily practice of any musician, to all those scales and technical exercises whose mastery are required to play an instrument well are multiple. But beyond this, the necessary comprehension of natural forms and how they relate to and inform self-expression has been poignant for me.
It is plain as daylight, whenever we choose to really look, that a dazzling array of universal laws unite us in the way we move, feel and communicate. I think of them as harmonious patterns. Waves, spirals, fractals, tessellations, symmetries -- these are the currencies, inspiration and language of nature and art. They permeate our physical beings and the natural world around us. They form the languages with which we express ourselves. From the smallest particles of matter to the infinitely complex structures and functioning of all living organisms, to the colossal galaxy and all that we do not see and cannot know, these patterns give us structure, life, and awe-inspiring inspiration. Art inhabits the mystical intersection of this beautiful certainty, with the ephemeral and subjective experience and expression of humans.
There is a dance, an inextricable bond, between pre-ordained order and the divine enigma of human experience. And it is therefore a massive bedrock for our imaginations, inspiration’s lifeblood. In Big Magic:, a graceful meditation on creativity, Elizabeth Gilbert writes,
“Q: What is Creativity?
A: The relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration.”
So much of these mysteries come from our experience in the natural world. And so much of this experience and our sense of “reality” is shaped by its laws.
Ralph Ammer uses a powerful example of this in his TEDx Talk (How drawing helps you think) where he explains how horizontal and vertical lines in architecture, art and elsewhere give us a sense of stability due to the prominence of the earth’s gravity in our corporeal experience. In other words, the patterns and physical laws of our world give us emotional structure and an expressive syntax. This is shared perception.
In music, this dance unfolds in an especially abstract yet dynamic form. It is a push and pull between the extremes of highly mathematical principles and an intensely intimate human expressive possibility, all unleashed through the manipulation of sound waves belonging to the harmonic series. From the universal relationships in this series, humans have crafted, refined and evolved mind-bogglingly complex works that express the most inner depths of our souls. They escape the narrow confines of spoken language. And yet music is governed by such a highly structured backbone, those naturally occurring relationships between pitches which also allow us to distinguish and recognize each other by our own unique speaking voices.
It is no coincidence that in classical Greek mythology the realm of Apollo includes order together with art, poetry and music. This duality for the ancient Greeks was quite literally the realm of the divine. By learning how to manipulate and sculpt sound, we can express things we cannot speak of. By learning how to use form and lines, we can draw and paint those things we cannot see with our eyes. The study and appreciation of natural laws, forms and patterns, allow us to tap into the beauty and mystery of expression.
I am grateful for and uplifted by this new lens with which to create and the expressive tools that I am gathering. Tuning into my inner world, while looking deeply at and experiencing my outer world has been a lifelong source of grounding reassurance to me. It is especially useful in such a time of uncertainty and suffering. This process is a doorway for stepping out of the endless spiral of thought and concerns with the objective to just connect with intuition and create beauty. In a moment where our society is so sharply divided and so many of us are living with fear, pain, and very real loss, all gestures of harmony, big and small, fuel hope and communication. We all need this now more than ever! We are, after all, a special yet small piece in a cosmic puzzle, more connected than we are divided, and the beneficiaries of the beauty and mystery of an endlessly fascinating and generous planet and universe.
