Ramachandran’s Eight Laws of Artistic Experience, and the overview provided in Anjan Chatterjee’s book, The Aesthetic Brain. In contrast, neuroaesthetics is a relatively young field and therefore prone to a flux of new theories and revelations, but a couple of good places to start are V.S. (Both rely to a considerable degree on other disciplines, such as neuroscience and evolutionary biology.) For gestalt psychology, a good place to start is Rudolf Arnheim’s seminal book, Art and Visual Perception, which has been studied and vetted for several decades. When it comes to the science of visual expression, two particularly useful disciplines are Gestalt Psychology and Neuroaesthetics. Training intuition is not just about adding to the knowledge and skills you already possess it is also about ridding yourself of intuitions dispelled by science, regardless of popular beliefs or how self-evident they may seem. Put simply, I recommend highly that you take the time to study what science there is, and not rely blindly on just your gut feel. Intuition founded in science-in evidence-is far more useful than intuition founded in misconceptions or historical errors. To be clear, my goal is not to suggest that intuition should supplant science-on the contrary, I believe that knowing the science is invaluable in guiding intuition (oddly, sometimes in what may initially seem like unintuitive ways). Rather than aim for the patently impossible task of teaching composition, my goal is instead to offer what I found (in pursuing my own work and research) to be good ways to think about composition and to continually improve and refine my own intuition about composition.īefore discussing intuition, however, I’d like to emphasize the importance of science in understanding artistic expression, however limited this understanding may be at this time. In this article I’ll suggest some practical ways to train your aesthetic intuition, to improve your creative abilities, and to broaden your expressive range. Also, not all intuition is necessarily useful, and we should be willing to let go of, and to unlearn, those intuitions that in time prove unhelpful or false. We may evolve, grown, train, and improve our aesthetic intuition with deliberate practice. We should remember, though, that intuition is not a fixed quantity.
Ways of life patreon series#
In the previous two installments in this series I explained why our best tools to approach visual compositions are science and intuition (and not any overly-simplified attempts to reduce the subject of composition to simple rules or templates, which may in fact restrict and hobble an artist’s creative and expressive ranges).Īlthough science, in principle, may offer more decisive guidance for expressive visual composition than intuition, at this point (and likely for the foreseeable future) available science is very limited, leaving us with intuition as the best tool to rely on. I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines. Before proceeding, I recommend first reading Part I and Part II. This article completes my series of essays on visual composition.