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Creating with the Sublime |
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Creating with the Sublime |
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All creative work is inspired by vehement emotion. Vehement emotion exists on the highest end of the scale; like hate being the higher end on the scale of "liking." Whether you think your work includes an expression of emotion or not - it does. The use of any kind of symbol - color, form, sound or even words (for letters are symbols and sounds) invokes the involvement of the right side of the brain. The right side of the brain is the repository for emotional history. Emotional history consists of events tied to emotions, and the event (and therefore the emotion) is remembered through symbol, not logical thought. Anytime you use a symbol it evokes the emotions the right side of your brain has tied to it. Anytime you use a symbol, you tap into the emotions that the right side of the brain of your audience has tied to it. The initial idea behind any work lies in a response to something; this is how we gain our motivation. Remember, your motivation is tied to your emotions. You may be five times removed from understanding your emotional motivation and feel that there is little or none, but there is quite a bit involved. Vehement emotions exist at the crest of a wave that is built upon smaller emotions that rise from a sea where all of your emotions float. Emotions do not come and go, but are a constant presence within you. You feel all the emotions at all times only at certain times, you feel some - more. This is due to the left and right side of your brain constantly processing the world and your reactions to it. Even in sleep, even in a dark and silent room, you are emotionally responding to stimulus. Depending on the order in which these emotions rise is the vehemence you get at the top. As much as we say that there is a linear scale of emotions with a low and high end, all emotions are intertwined and simultaneously triggered. If you begin to understand the emotional inspiration of your work then you can begin to understand what subtler emotions are stacking up to produce it. Whether or not your work expresses the vehemence, you can now work with the subtler emotions so that your work will resonate with a kind of truth and validity for others. Responding vs Reacting When we react to a new situation, we are acting upon pure emotions that have been influenced by our past history and experience and do not provide us with the means to make a judgment based upon the needs of the present situation. We are driven by emotions. Emotions, which are the province of our right brains, are the source for all of our motivations. If someone sustains damage to their right brain, they lose the capacity to do anything of their own volition. Getting dressed, getting out of bed become things they have to be instructed to do. The emotions of the right brain are where we make our connections between events and can generate motivational energy that is expressed through the organized and logical actions of our left-brain dominated life. Whether or not it seems like it, everyone around you is a mass of immediate and constantly changing emotional reactions - this is the nature of the human mind. That is why reacting to things can be so disruptive because our emotional minds do not rationally think through consequences. They are responding based upon our historical experiences. Your emotional reaction comes first. Babies, with no language and or even focus, will respond, even if they are hungry, to an expression of love and comfort over food. Emotion comes before thought. Thought comes after because it requires language and process to be enacted, and both of these are learned habits. Emotions like themselves. They want to live on forever. This is the basic theory of emotions. 1. There are only a few basic emotions: anger, sorrow, joy, surprise, fear, disgust, guilt/shame, and interest. All of the others are learned, and are a combination of the basic emotions. 2. There are several complex emotions, such as Love, Hate and Grief that contain layers of the basic emotions. How the layers are put together determines the complex emotion that arises on top. 3. Emotions are self-perpetuating. Once an emotion starts, it keeps restarting itself. 4. Emotions come and go in prominence like waves, but they are always present to some degree. The Emotional Wave Think of an ocean that is calm. In the water are all the basic emotions constantly moving and changing position. This is a good metaphor for how we react to life. When something happens and the water is disturbed or influenced, the basic emotions begins to layer, to build a wave - the very top of the wave will have the overall complex emotion or vehement emotion. We tend to recognize the complex emotions without acknowledging the layers of basic emotions that are underneath them. As an Artist, you can increase the power of your work and begin to connect with your audience in a way that will transcend their experience of your work in the moment (hearing or reading a poem, seeing a painting), and stay with them after they have left its presence; if you begin to focus on building towards a complex emotion rather than just stating the one. Intuitively, your audience will understand what is coming when you use symbol and metaphor to create a specific layering of basic emotions. While they will recognize a complex emotion that is presented to them, the audience will relate on a personal level to it only if you allow the wave to build up within them as well. Just presenting a complex emotion (like grief) with no corresponding buildup will emotionally touch your audience - for just as long as it takes them to see or hear your piece. After, they will lose the emotional memory. Often you do not even have to state the complex emotion, the audience will fill in the blank with knowledge of the emotion that comes from their experience, rather than passively witness your depiction of a vehement emotion. Everything that you choose to include in your piece will trigger a basic emotion in the viewer. Through careful consideration of what is incorporated in your piece you can create something of extreme emotional power. Example I had the good fortune of teaching a man once who showed me these beautiful poems he had written. When I was done reading them, I told him that I couldn't quite figure out why, but they made me feel sad - melancholy; although there was nothing in the poem that was really that sad. He told me that a lot of people responded that way and even he could not figure out why. It was not his intention. So, we sat and looked at quite a few of the poems when one thing jumped out at me. In each of the poems he referenced a Sparrow or similar small bird. Now, a Sparrow in many Western cultures has always been the symbol of the dead wanting to communicate. By inadvertently choosing a symbol that carried the basic emotion of loss (and hinted at several complex emotions), the writer had set up an emotional reaction of sorrow in the reader without intending that effect. Symbols, imagery, color and arrangement all carry powerful universal and historical emotional meanings. Many of which we are unaware of consciously, but deeply aware of on a subconscious level. As an Artist, you are charged with becoming aware of these half-forgotten meanings and using them to create work that can communicate on profoundly deep levels to the rest of the community. The Artist in the community has always carried the responsibility of translating or communicating ideas to a population that is illiterate in some fashion. In this day and age, many people are "emotionally illiterate," but only on a conscious level. Led by Art, they can reconnect to their own understanding and awareness of the depth of the experience of life. Exercise Think for a bit about the nature of your work. What emotions do you commonly use? What symbols and metaphors do you assign to these emotions? Now, looking at your choices, would you say that you are relying on a presentation of a complex emotion to communicate the feeling or, are you building the emotion from a layering of basic emotions? Choose something you have finished in the past and think through how you would change the words, imagery or arrangement to better convey the emotion. Go online and research universal or common imagery and symbols. This will begin to show you how your audience may misinterpret the symbols you may choose because of their personal meaning. It is a good idea to do some investigation into the cultural meaning of imagery and symbols as well. Dream interpretation books are a great place to begin to build an understanding of how metaphor is used by the unconscious to instigate emotion. Think about a new piece you are going to work on, how could you best construct it to have the most emotional impact? Note: Colors have emotional meaning as well. Look up information on the meaning of candles, colors and flowers to begin to understand the unconscious emotional communication created by the use of color. The same is true of shape and sound, they all trigger emotional response - some by touching memory and others, like sound, by creating a physiological response that triggers an emotional connection. |