Intellectualizing

Intellectualizing often goes hand-in-hand with manifesto writing: it becomes the self- or critic-constructed filter through which the viewer looks at your art. I see my art as the product of a quiet  meditative process, hence the need for extended periods of solitude and privacy I accord myself to be able to produce it. It cannot necessarily be explained in words. I try to structure my work in such a way that it has many layers. The surface ones may entail a device, a gimmick if you wish, that draws the viewer into the work. Then, before the gimmick loses its hold on the viewer, a second aspect to the work catches the eye, then a third ...and so on. In that way, I can't see why all good artworks, even the most profound ones, can't be accessible (up to a point) to the most unsophisticated viewer. Oswald Chambers remarked that all deep oceans have shallow shores. If there is nowhere any shallowness to be found it could be an indication of a mentally unbalanced personality.


The cerebral per se is therefore something I actually try to bypass in order to access something deeper and more precious - communion with the viewer, sharing of an experience - the realm of the spirit, feeling and intuition, that hard-to-define hard-to-capture non-verbal 'something'. By the time the intellect starts to kick in, most of the work's impact and meaning should, if it is a successful piece in my book, have discharged itself to the viewer.


It has become apparent to me over the years that most people do not actually look at artwork anymore. They look 'past' it, 'around' it, through it to what they perceive to be the more important issue that connects to it namely the status it is thought to impart.


To intellectualize is to perform a post mortem on the experience (which is what critics make a living from, explaining why they love it so much), not to create a necessary precondition for it. That explains why T.S Elliot said to one of  his critics on a certain occasion that he (the critic) understood his work better than he did himself.

When I create I don't analyze, when I analyze I don't create. It just happens ...albeit with years of experience and practice behind me. I am not pretending it comes easily.

Ideas present themselves to me, often instantaneously, as if given from Above. I 'see' it in my mind's eye, and simply set out to execute them. Well, not so simply really. It can be a titanic struggle. One intuitively know beforehand if you are onto something good or not without having to justify it intellectually. Merely  realizing the sometimes daunting initial vision, rather than enriching the work with more intellectual content, is what I find most difficult.


Paul Klee's famous Twittering Machine more or less sums up what is wrong with intellectualizing:

 

Paul Klee. Twittering Machine. 1922