Following your intuition.
The Deep Divers and I have been working on tuning into and following our intuition for the last couple weeks. Last night we explored and reflected on our 'art language.' We looked through our journals and looked specifically for patterns of composition, textures, mark-making, lettering, and other recurring themes.
For instance the composition I discover to be predominant in my journal was a vertical third composition.
Which surprised me because if asked I would have said I like to put my focal point at the bottom right.
Next, keeping in mind what we had discovered, we attempted to create an abstract collage page. It was not easy, in fact there was much sighing and 'I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.' Suggesting, 'follow your intuition' even with the guidelines of previous patterns is a very vague exercise.
It's a very wide open idea, to make a page with no direction or picture in mind.
After I finished gluing my papers down I discovered I had done it all upside down in my journal!..no worries I thought, and turned my journal right way up and finished the page with lettering.
When I looked at my page this morning however it just didn't sit right, in fact, I found it quite unsettling.
It felt wrong-like there's a fundamental wrongness there. The wrongness, caused by me accidentally doing the page upside down, carries beyond the composition. Even after I turned my book right way up, my composition was still using the vertical third 'rule' so I thought it would still work perfectly. It was an abstract after all, there were no upside down images..it should have been fine any way it was turned.
Yet it was not.
What I'm realizing here is that there is more at play than just the composition of vertical third.
The piece just plain feels upside down.
There's two things I learned from this exercise.
1) There's is learning in the discomfort of that wrongness-I think it's my intuition that tells me that.
2) That even without an image it's upside down. Which is kind of fascinating.