Visual Intelligence activated!
Visual intelligence is an expressive intelligence, it is a visual language. First part is seeing the expression of the outside world, second part is seeing the expression of my inside world and third is creating an expression of my own.
Today I was exploring zentangling in the art session. The facilitator give us 5 mins to bring some fabric lying around in our house. I went around bringing in a couple of items. After the initial share, she asked us to look at those patterns and then draw parts of it or pick an element and repeat it. I initially got stumped, I wasn’t prepared for this. I had picked up what looked exquisite to my eyes not really noticing the intricate patterns or thinking that I would have to reproduce some part of it.
After the initial surprise, my visual intelligence kicked in. I chose one fabric and looked closely to observe the pattern. I began to notice my eyes break down the beautiful and complex pattern into lines, curves, dots, leaves etc. Then it brought up feelings of “Can I do it? Will it be good enough? It looks so complex and I am no artist. Why did I pick up this fabric?” And the list went on …. And I let the thoughts flow just observing them without judgement. Finally, my eyes landed on one pattern and my pencil touched the page and I drew the first line. “That wasn’t too bad.” came another thought… and I drew another line, the next curve, the dot and then repeated it at times and sometimes not. I quickly realized that I could not or rather did not want to copy the design, so I let my mind lose and went with the flow. I did this for 15 minutes. Now my lines began to tell me if they wanted to be repeated or not, the next curve chose to come, and I felt I was in a flow just creating. This is when I realized that my visual intelligence was fully activated.
The first part was me just seeing the external fabric patterns, the second part was to go through my own internal thought patterns and finally I created an expression which I can call my own, unique to myself!
This experience brought to life the 3 elements of visual intelligence — See & Observe the outside, Be ready to play with your internal patterns and create a meaningful expression.
It is also important to let go of the result and shift attention to just activating the faculties of seeing, imagination and visualization.
Last but not the least, we need to stop telling ourselves that art work needs to fit into a label of good or bad; perfect or not or we need to be a good artist in order to explore visual intelligence. The next time your child shows their art work to you and asks the innocent question “How is this?” notice the words that are coming out of your mouth. Could it be that you are implying that the art work needs to be ‘perfect’ and are unintentionally developing an inner voice in that child about their art and that they might grow into adults whose inner voice tells them ‘You are not good at art.’ or ‘You are not an artist’.
How many of us claim that we are not good at art and so never explore it?
Do we want that for our child?
Thoughts, feedback?
