Transcript 6_MoreNotesFromTheCreativeProcess_Intro

More Notes from The Creative
Process, Brewster Ghiselin, ed.
FYS 100
Creative Discovery in Digital Art Forms
Spring 2007
Burg
• PP. 22-23, Henri Poincaré
• The source of mathematical creation ought
to be a subject of interest.
• Why are some people not good at math,
when it is just a matter of the basic logic
that all human’s possess?
• Many people can’t do original work in
math, many can’t very well remember the
math they learn. But the most surprising
thing is that many can’t understand
mathematical reasoning when it is
explained to them.
• PP. 23
• How can we make mistakes in math when
it is just an application of logic that we all
possess? Because of lapses of memory.
• We move from premises to conclusions,
but we remember our premises poorly
when there is a long string of such
premises and conclusions in a proof.
• Correctly keeping your whole train of
thought in your mind is like remembering a
long series of cards played when you’re
playing card.
• P. 24
• But mathematical reasoning isn’t just memory.
Poincaré has the whole scheme of a proof in his
mind, so he doesn’t make a misstep along the
way because there’s a scheme into the string of
premises and conclusions must fall.
• If you have a really good memory, you can
remember someone else’s mathematical
reasoning and re-create it, but you have to have
mathematical intuition to be the original creator
of the reasoning.
• To be a mathematical creator, you can’t just
combine things that are known. You have to
have some intuition about which of these things
is signficant enough to prove (since there are an
infinite number of things that you could prove).
• P. 25
• A mathematician doesn’t consider all the
possible combinations of premises to
decide what is worth proving. He or she
has an intuition that filters these out before
the conscious process begins.
• Poincaré drank some coffee and then lay
down to sleep. In a half-asleep, halfawake state he came up with a proof of a
class of Fuchsian functions (which he
previously believed could not exist).
• P. 26
• Poincaré describes to moments, both when he
was traveling, when he came to a provable
conclusion concerning the functions he was
studying. These epiphanies came to him when
he wasn’t consciously working on the problem.
• P. 27
• His point is that after you’ve worked on a
problem consciously for a while, and then you
take a break from it to do something else, your
unconscious mind takes over working on the
problem. Then, later, when you come back to
the problem, you may have a solution that they
didn’t have before.
• The unconscious work has to be preceded and
followed by conscious work.
• P. 27
• The conscious work may have seemed
fruitless, but it was not. You’ve arranged
the material, filtered out useless things.
• Sometimes the solutions you come up with
in your conscious state may be incorrect,
but often they are correct.
• P. 28
• Theorems can be proved by a machine,
but it’s difficult it not impossible to give the
machine an intuition of what is worth
proving.
• P. 28
• It isn’t that the unconscious (i.e., subliminal)
reasoning is superior to the conscious (or vice
versa). They play different roles.
• If the unconscious mind makes all possible
combinations of premises and conclusions, why
don’t all of these jump out to the conscious
mind? Only the significant ones emerge to
consciousness.
• It seems that the unconscious mind has some
“emotional sensibility” with regard to
mathematics – a sense of mathematical beauty.
• P. 29
• The useful combinations are the most beautiful
to the human mind. They suggest a
mathematical law.
• P. 30
• Does the unconscious mind consider all the
infinite combination of things known to be true
(in a certain domain) in order to prove a new
thing? No. The conscious mind has done a
filtering and arranging process.
• Poincaré compares the conscious work of the
mathematician to a process of choosing which
atoms to put into motion in a space so that they
might collide to produce a useful molecule.
• P. 31
• After the unconscious mind finds the right
basic elements to bring together, the
conscious mind must do the hard work of
writing out the step-by-step process that
brings about the rigorously-proven
conclusion.
• PP. 32-33, Albert Einstein
• Einstein says that his reasoning is not done in
words. After coming to a scientific conclusion,
he has to find the words, sometimes with
difficulty.
• PP. 34-35, Mozart
• Mozart says his compositions come to him
wholistically. He has the full composition in his
mind. Then he just has to go to the work of
writing it down.
• Mozart thinks that the qualities that make up his
musical style are just a result of things born into
him, like the size of his nose.
• PP. 36-37, Roger Sessions
• Music goes deeper than individual
emotion. “It reproduces for us the most
intimate essence, the tempo and and the
energy, of our spiritual being; our
tranquility and our restlessness, our
animation and our discouragement, our
vitality and our weakness – all, in fact, of
the fine shades of dynamic variation of our
inner life. It reproduces these far more
directly and more specifically than is
possible through any other medium of
human communication.”
• P. 37
• Music can also derive its meaning from its
association with other artistic elements –
e.g., dance, film, or narrative (storytelling). But this is not essential.
• Music is a language and artistic form of its
own. It doesn’t have to tell a story in a
literal way in order to have meaning. The
notes, composition, chords, harmonies,
etc., speak in their own language without
having to be associated with anything
else.
• P. 38
• A composer begins with an idea, but it is a
musical idea – a musical theme or motif.
• Inspiration is the impulse that sets the
creation in motion.
• The vision of the whole is called the
conception. It is an extension of the logic
of the original inspiration.
• Inspiration is related to style. Conception
is related to form.
• P. 39
• After inspiration and conception comes
execution.
• Not all of the creative process is conscious.
• Art is an activity of our inner nature that
transcends that nature, adding meaning and
artistic form.
• P. 41, Harold Shapero
• You can’t function creatively in music until you’ve
acquired some raw material through the music
you’ve heard – your tonal memory.
• P. 42
• Some people think that if you study music too
much, you compromise your ability to be
creative and original. But Shapero doesn’t think
this is so at all.
• Beethoven came up with the idea for a
composition in a dream. This shows the
influence of the unconscious in musical creation.
• P. 43
• Melody is an essential part of musical syntax. If
you study the possibilities of melodic phrasing, it
will give greater “sharpness of contour” to the
things your creative unconscious comes up with.
• PP. 43-44
• Shapero describes the value of studying
some simple musical forms like the
scherzo or minuet. A good exercise is to
copy down the soprano lines of the melody
and try to come up with an
accompaniment.
• Daily practice and study creates a bridge
between the conscious and creative
unconscious.
• Shapiro compares daily practice in music
to prayer and ritual in religion.
• PP. 44-45
• As you absorb the subtle techniques of the
masters, you’ll discover your own artistic
style and creativity.
• Shapiro describes the atonal music of
Schonberg and Hindemith as conflicting
with the natural functions of the human
mind.
• If a musical system doesn’t lead to
inspiration and creativity, then it is
“unnatural.”
• PP. 46-47, Van Gogh
• Van Gogh didn’t work from memory. He worked
from nature and live models.
• He reworked many of his paintings several times.
He notes that he had “real intention and purpose.”
• PP. 48-49, Christian Zervos (conversation with
Picasso)
• Picasso says that he puts in his art the things that
he likes – ordering it “according to his passions.”
• A picture is a sum of destructions. You start it, and
then you take things out, deconstructing it. But the
initial vision always remains.
• The picture is not wholly thought out beforehand.
You have to be “mobile” in how you let it develop.
• P. 50
• Sometimes Picasso would lay his colors
out beforehand. When the picture was
done, all those colors would be there, but
in different places than he originally
imagined.
• If you think you’ve discovered something
fine in a picture you’ve created, destroy it
and create it again.
• There is no abstract art. It’s always based
on something real.
• P. 51
• “The artist is the receptacle of emotions
come from no matter where: from the
earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a
cobweb. This is why one must not
discriminate between things.”
• “When we invented cubism, we had no
intention of inventing anything.”
• “The painter passes through states of
fullness and emptying. That is the whole
secret of art.”
• PP. 52-53
• “The academic teaching about beauty is false.”
• “It is not what the artist does that counts, but
what he is.”
• We shouldn’t try to explain paintings anymore
than we try to explain why the song of a bird is
beautiful.
• Many people paint “in the manner of” some
other painter, but few of them are original.
• Picasso lives for art, but he thinks the way we
institutionalize it in museums doesn’t respond to
the real spirit in it.
• PP. 54-55, Yasuo Kuniyoshi
• When he when to Europe in the 1920’s, he was
impressed with how artists painted from real life
(outdoors).
• He started doing this, first creating the scene
from reality, then going back to his studio to
paint the rest from imagination, until he got the
real feeling of it.
• He never paints over something – always
scrapes it off and starts again.
• When you solve a painting problem (like painting
dark colors in dark lighting), it becomes part of
your artistic repertoire.
• PP. 56-57, Julian Levi
• Levi’s art is a process of integrating what he has
learned with his “childlike simple perception.”
• Every artist has a favorite subject that he likes to
depict. To Levi it is the sea, the shore, and the
human face.
• He tried to get objective knowledge of things
relating to the sea coast, so that he could put
this into his painting (e.g., fishing, boats, etc.)
• Artists also have forms and designs that they
prefer. This is part of their style.
• The task of the artist is to communicate “the
emotional content or exaltation of life.”