I nurture a dialogue between perception and introspection in order to exercise and further develop my visual muscle – and it now bulges into other areas of thought.
The studio setting enables me to act and introspect simultaneously. The two modes learn to function together like fraternal twins. Artistic tasks are both creative and visual and because so have a creative and visual influence on my choice of introspective topics.
For me, introspective activity takes place in a visual format - it is neither unconscious nor verbal. Conscious thought simply takes longer to emerge in a verbal form because it is originally incubated in a conceptual and visual format. When it does emerge it tends to do so as a shape or is coherent on a visual level - in other words, it resists coming out either verbally or linearly.
This interaction between artistic creativity and introspective creativity generates a bias in my mind toward the contemplation of forms. More of my mind's resources cooperate in the creative effort and make their own specialized contribution to the process. The maize of my mind's visual wires has responded to use by spreading their tentacles into every possible region they can.
Without the toil of artistic action the soil of my mind would never have become loosened enough to accept the penetration of new roots, feeding my visual tap root with nutrients from other regions.
Painting gives this mental activity a deep watering, pulling its influence out the hand and fingers, engaging the whole body in an extended applause for the wonderful gift of sight. Thus I am inclined to forage for visual meaning, seeking an optically biased conceptual condensation of what I see.
This combination of skills is unique to artists and their development intensifies the difficulty of communicating in other media.
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