Interfaces of human emotions
Painting is a creative activity that you can look upon from different angles. You can practice art like a construction worker builds a house. Foundations, framework, roof tiles, decoration, knowledge and skills. The painting you create will depend on the degree of practical skills you have gathered over the years: color theory, composition rules, perspective and so on. In a way, you paint brain to canvas.
Or you can paint guts to canvas. Leave aside the rules and the skills and let the canvas decide. Sounds stupid but is far more complexe as it might seem.
What looks like accidental color patches put one next to another without any system, is actually the result of a cognitive process at least as complexe as logical rule following.
The composition builds up slowly, almost organically, but without logical framework. Every new paint stroke is directly linked to what is already present on the canvas. Many elements are involved simultaneously: dark and light zones, contrasts, warm and cold colors. They all matter. Details and the global picture are equally important and obviously interconnected.
But if the global aspect of the composition is the goal to achieve, it’s the details that decide how it will look at the end.
The catalyzers of every new decision are interfaces. It’s by modifying the interfaces between colors, shades or forms, that the composition wakes up or falls to sleep. Sometimes, it’s enough to darken or to light up a specific area in order to change the dialogue of the different elements on a given interface. Sometimes, it’s by creating new interfaces that the process evolves. But every time there’s a genuine emotional puzzle involved.
Darkening one area rather than the other, covering it, scratching or smearing it, is each time a heartbreaking decision. It means sacrificing one for the other and in the same time running the risk to ruin the whole thing.
By using your emotional intelligence, rather than your logical brain functions, painting not only is not easier, but it’s probably a more complexe and richer experience than academic style artwork. The skills involved are completely different. Theoretical issues have no place in this dialogue. Only your will to go beyond apprehension, to follow your intuition wherever it may lead you, is relevant. And it’s on these same interfaces that human interactions happen. Isn’t every encounter, every communication, every relation following these same procedures? Will I say the right words? Can I trust him/her? Shall I stay stay or rather leave? Is the decision I take the good one?
Every aspect of our adults’ life is spinning around these questions. So in a way, emotional painting is nothing else than life oriented cognitive training.
And just as in real life, many times, the decisions you make bring good surprises or have negative outcomes.
But the most precious lesson it offers is that there’s always a way to make up for errors and to change a bad decision into a good result in the end.
Painting can also teach you that every global picture is made of tiny details that may all have their importance, but it’s no use to cling to any one of these details too strong. Letting go is often the good decision and the best way to move on to something more exciting. And of course it teaches you to take a mindful care of the interfaces.
