Coal Miners Report

Going deep with the creative…

Last weeks essay stirred up a little storm. If you haven’t read it maybe check it out before diving into this one.

The world beneath the world

Something in me shifted with that cardboard project. I had always considered me a creative, not an artist. My curiosity lies with the how. Figuring out this strange place. And the one thing I thought I sort of got had betrayed me. Creativity.

I recognised the lingering unease in me with the popular light and bright version of this raw power. But the more I learned the deeper the doubt. I wasn’t creative at all. Maybe nobody was.

What? No! This couldn’t be true. Unacceptable. Unthinkable. But still, the thought remained. The voice stepping in when new insights moved me further towards this dark place. Because if it was true, things were much bleaker than I had hoped.

Then all things presented as creative were misrepresentations. Creative teams were bullocks. Thinking outside the box just packaging. All those happy creative activities and materials; fat excuses to do stuff nothing short of rearranging old shit.

I wasn’t convinced yet. But I was dead set on finding out. Me and my creativity shop.

How to give 500 workshops and still not get it…

I led instore workshops every Saturday. And have done this for more than ten years. I don’t like repetition so each of these roughly five hundred sessions was a one off. Well prepared improv. Me trying to find out some aspect of art, or making. Trying out techniques, experimenting with tools, paints and participants. The quest for the ultimate format of teaching creativity.

It doesn’t work like that. The skills I taught are not creative. Not really. They were fascinating and at least I learned a lot. But mostly they are tricks.

While I never claimed to be an expert in anything, I did have the audacity to pick up many subjects and areas. The beginners perspective is extremely valuable. Learning is reciprocal.

Mining for joy

That’s why, as one example, I had a fantastic long Saturday on portraiture with a lady, halfway her eighties and far more experienced than me. I could bring her new insights because of my relative ignorance and odd perspective. She was the only ‘student’ that day and the model didn’t show up. So I sat and was moved to tears and laughter by her stories. Never be too sure about who is teaching who.

The first years I did basic stuff. Mixing colours. Linocutting. Stretching a canvas. But pretty soon I started messing around with more experimental formats. Shadow one week, and Light the next. A speed dating parcours with twenty different drawing techniques. Painting clouds en plein air. Reverse storyboarding from cinematic clips.

I did an intense five week series on flow. I tried combining urban sketching with meditation. And you can feel it coming. The spiritual was unavoidable. I tried hard not to go there. To stick with the material. Stay grounded in the stuff of life. But I was pulled in deeper and deeper. The soil is the underworld.

Something had noticed me being persistent. Asking me repeatedly, are you sure you want to find out? I said yes three times. Or however many. I wasn’t ready. Learn I did anyway.

But let’s not skip ahead. Composition was first. You know, the golden rule and vague stuff like that. Aspect ratio’s. Symmetry. Balance. Tension. Harmony. Try querying those and not get knee-deep into practical philosophy.

And practical philosophy equals the spiritual quest of finding out. In my world anyway.

Symmetry.

That’s the one that kicked my butt. And the journey would take me a decade. I’m not even sure it has finished. In some way it lead me here, to this dialogue with you.

I always did lots of research for each lesson. And symmetry took me by surprise. In painting, symmetry is often considered the most boring of choices. It is tensionless. It divides the space in half. Equal halves. One the mirror of the other. Yawn.

But the face of symmetry smiled knowingly. This was only the gateway leading me into the symmetric garden. It is everywhere. In every discipline. From maths, dance and music, architecture, chemistry, astronomy, physics, biology to yes…. the visual arts. Our bodies are butterflies. Our brain is a symmetric masterpiece. Symmetry is God and the devil. Good and evil and the coincidence of opposites. This subject was yinning and yanging the hell out of me.

Why? Because it gave me a glimpse of what I didn’t get about creativity. It pushed my reboot buttons. Control alt delete.

The workshop on symmetry developed rapidly towards something resembling a shamanic journey. Yuck.

Yuck? No, not really. I was building a city again, but now I knew not to expect the kind of results you can plan for. What started as a two hour instruction on visual composition grew into a week long immersive course called inner world exploration.

Here’s how symmetry opens the door to the other realm while revealing a lot on why we find ourselves in the place we are now.

A detail from DaVinci’s stunning notebooks. Notice the mirrored writing. This could also be by Michelangelo; the character in my book TCOTNK. One of his sketches for the dragon gate he and Charlotte initiate in Season 1

Most people write with their right hand. Using the finer muscles and a small part of the brain. We write linear, from left to right. DaVinci could mirror his handwriting and he did in his notebooks. I think he knew. Maybe stumbled upon it by accident?

The participants had to write their name from right to left. Most couldn’t flip the shapes. Some excelled in this exercise. The dyslexic ones. Here, the neurotypicals were the disabled.

You may know that drawing is done with a different part of the brain than writing. There are also different body-parts involved. If you move from the tiny musculature to the wrist and part of the arm and start making bigger movements the activity swaps sides inside your head. Next time you see someone drawing or painting with the tiny movements of writing you know they are cheating.

I won’t repeat the whole lesson here, but making those movements even bigger helps more. Activating both body and brain on a broader scale.

From an earlier workshop on doodling I had learned that listening and drawing like that activates a much larger part of your grey matter than each of those activities done separate (resulting in significantly higher retaining of information and not distraction). Now I had all the ingredients for this dish.

Enter symmetry. This is what I noticed in class. I gave them two crayons and a large piece of paper to make full symmetrical shapes with both their hands. It is a bit difficult to get the hang of, so I would put on a song to let them lean into it for a while.

The plan was one song and then move on to the next exercise. But people couldn’t stop that easy. The first few times this happened I was ticking my imaginary watch, we have more to do. The third workshop I just let them. They kept going for twenty, thirty, sometimes forty minutes. And ‘came out’ smiling, all happy. What the fuck?

I started reading up on this. And it’s a thing. Sort of. There is a name¹ and a research project by the CIA². And parts of the effects are known. But why is this still not a THING?

I scaled up the workshop to a full day and the paper to a two by three meter sheet on the floor³. I made a five hour playlist of enticing film-music, trance, meditative and just bloody beautiful tracks. I handed out charcoal, closed the studio doors and turned up the volume.

With full body symmetric movements, involving all faculties, touch, hearing, seeing. Not being able to focus on anything specific while your whole being must be coordinated by your brain you can do nothing but be in the moment and not be in the moment simultaneously. You slip into a friendly trance. The flow state joins the party within ten or twenty minutes.

People went on a full inner journey. A deeply emotional experience of oneness with sound and body and expression. And my five hour playlist wasn’t long enough for some. The longest was nearly seven hours of grounded journeying. After a dance with charcoal you come out like a coalminer. And the results on the floor resemble a soul print of sorts. But this wasn’t about the product. This was about the journey.

I joined my own workshop to discover what I knew already. I am familiar with flow. With both hemispheres being involved. Maybe I learned as a drummer. Maybe my being ambidextrous plays a role. But I know this for sure by now: most people do not know how to get ‘in’. Or only in a small part of their lives. Only now and then. By accident.

That is a shame, to put it mildly. It complicates things needlessly. I have been a drop out because of this. Education in the current form is unable to deal with full brain students. And I think I do know why. Educated whole brain people are people with agency. They do not take orders lightly. They think for themselves. They have low needs for external input and are not easily manipulated.

And I think this lopsided left brain emphasis⁴ on how we approach the world is a big part of the mess we are in.

Next week the other half of this symmetrical story…

The above is the next post in this series

1. Working artistically with both hands simultaneously is called Tribalogy. I don’t like the name. It makes people think of tribes. And is often confused with tribology, which is about gears and friction. Of course I didn’t invent this. But I do think I am on to something very special with this specific recipe. The scale, the intense —and sufficiently loud— music (think shamanic drum), the full body involvement, and the attention drawn away from goal/product toward the inner experience are essential ingredients. As is sticking to full symmetry. Here the shift from Chronos to Kairos happens for real and is universally repeatable. Not limited by age, intelligence or level of education. This is a true practice with enormous consequences. Symmetry has a few more secrets in store…

2. For the rabbit hole types among you: the CIA project ‘The Gateway Experience’ deals with stimulating both hemispheres through guided meditations and sound to get to ‘higher’ states. In some sense this is the opposite of what I am interested in. I know shrooms, lsd and other external help can get you ‘there’ too. But my fascination lies with getting here. Without the kind of dependencies that diminish the soul. The left hemisphere is hunting for the missing part. The whole brain knows it has both wings available to fly….

3. The only paper I could find this big were photo-studio background rolls. Too expensive to use lightheartedly. We used both sides of course.

4. Dr. Iain Mcgilchrist’s book ‘The Master and his emissary’ was the first to address this global ‘disease’ scientifically. If you have felt at odds with the mainstream all your life, here’s one possible explanation.