As an artist I live with a visual bias. I am able to make full use of my temperament by responding in a visual form to information gathered through my eyes. I glean the most from my experiences by translating them into a visible medium.
My experiences are not fully combusted until they are decoded, filtered, digested, and re-processed into a visual format. Without this processing, the wisdom to be gained from experiences would not be available to me. A different mode of processing life would simply be alien to me – and restraining my brain's particular mode of digesting life would have denied me access to its nutrients.
I experience a genetic pressure to create. This pressure is a companion I wake up with it each morning and is an impulse over-riding all others. (Well, nearly...) It requires me to respond with the same sense of urgency as any other involuntary biological pressure. I have a mental hunger to create. Visual data enters my mind as a food and painting enables me to digest it.
Painting has transformed my ability to transform raw un-processed data into a visual format. I paint a response to all the information available to me as a consequence of having lived. There is no doubt this translation process requires technical and athletic skills, but there is an equal demand for introspective and perceptive skills.
If this were not so the painting profession would have died with the birth of the camera.
Neither the object being painted nor my visual organs are capable of instructing my hands. My mind needs to interpret the visual information twice – first into a code unique to the mind and then into a set of instructions to my hand. In both instances the raw data is manipulated and massaged by my disposition.
My temperament interjects itself into the act of translation. Temperament interceding on behalf of the individual is one of the features of drawing which accounts for the differences between two artist's renderings of the same object.
However rudimentary my creative skills may have been in my youth, their breadth and influence has expanded over time. It seems like all other mental functions have become subservient to the visual cortex. Because vision has been favored by daily exercising it now dominates all my brain processes; it's the boss of my head. It's as if vision's network of nerves penetrates all the other reasoning centers. Every mode of mental activity must first receive permission to act and if its granted request does not eventually enhance my perceptive skills, I will give that mental servant new guidelines in order to improve its performance.
The visual area of my mind won out through perseverance and reward. By the age of seven I identified a sensation of mental calm associated with the actions involved with drawing – the intense looking, the gradual accumulation of deep familiarity with the form being recorded, the thoroughly engaging concentration required to communicate the appropriate action to the muscles in my hand.
On an intuitive level there was another order of learning going on having more to do with the outside world than with discovering an activity capable of engaging my whole body.
Drawing set the tone of my future relationship with the outside world. It gave me a means of personally relating to the multitude of objects surrounding me. I could take ownership of them by drawing them without having to possess them.
Drawing gave me free access to all the objects of the adult world, defying my utter lack of monetary power.
Drawing refined my awareness of the physical attributes which distinguish one object from another. It also refined my sensibilities toward them and introduced me to a system of relating to a variety of objects - living, moving, inert, and rooted.
I suspect my abiding affection for immobile objects is related to their cooperation with the needs of one who draws. Their natural propensity to remain still is in total agreement with my need for the time to carefully render form. I do not have to test their will or coerce them to sit still. I associate their stillness with my own sensation of mental calm generated by the act of drawing.
This camaraderie established my early affinity for nature - both of us grew; plants got bigger and so would I, they flowered and I would blossom too. Art recorded my development in a self-regulating language system. It was the one area of expression where I was both teacher and student.
I have now been working with a visual language system for around fifty years. On an intuitive level I am extremely familiar with it. Now, I will attempt to describe how a visual mental structure wields its influence and affects other modes of reasoning.
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