Thinking like an Artist: Translating Ideas into Form
This series of posts celebrates the 80th anniversary of The Museum of Modern Art’s formal commitment to museum education. Paula Crown is Chairperson of MoMA’s Trustee Committee on Education.
As a child I wasn’t preoccupied with calling myself an artist or what art materials were and were not. I explored with the curiosity of a scientist and the boldness of youth. I would carve designs into my father’s Beethoven record collection, seeing the needle of his turntable as my drawing tool and the vinyl as my canvas. I painted bold patterns on our walls, expanding my drawings into the world around me. I look back on these moments as an essential time where I learned how to explore and to be comfortable following my intuition. I’m sure my father is relieved that I moved on from destroying his property, but those fundamental lessons remain with me. The difficulty of retaining an open and alert outlook toward the world into adulthood makes the role of the artist a uniquely important one. Creators are society’s bastions of empathy and instigators of new perspectives. Sight is our most important sense; it allows us to communicate in images and symbols. With this expanded language we are able to think in abstractions and feel things that we cannot clearly say. Within arts institutions and the larger art market, the majority of value is placed upon the objects that artists produce, but it’s the thought process of the artist that will always be essential to the future. Creative empathy is an imperative artistic, social, and political skill that can be practiced. Our future will be shaped by those who learn to unlock the adaptability and collaborative thinking of makers. Here is my advice.
Honor your interests.
“You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” –Mark Twain
Be visually curious. You aren’t bound by others’ definitions of creativity. Art has never been defined by the constraints of materials, techniques, or technology. Making things is an everyday human impulse. Exploring the world through materials and ideas is the human quest for knowledge, and you are a part of it. Listen to your work, to your instincts, and to the world. Be a receptor for all the frequencies around you. You can find your voice in having all your senses “a-tiptoe.” You have an extraordinary, unique place in the world. Making your art lets you consider it. For me, drawing was a key that unlocked the world. It is a way of thinking and processing information that melds my brain and my hand, letting me find profound experience in the unexpected moments of focus while making.
Find your community.
“Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Being an artist requires generosity of spirit, the willingness to see, hear, and feel. Art is not an ornament. It’s a language. It can create a space to share and transcend boundaries. Your interests and your voice won’t resonate with everyone, so invest in those who support your voice and your mission. Keep your wise counsel close. Find collaborators, mentors, and critics. Keep yourself open to those who can contribute to your life in new ways. Not every influence or meaningful critic will be someone in the arts; bring a great range of experience into your life. Learn from and appreciate the expertise that your peers hold in a variety of fields. Art creates our community and expands our world as we explore perceptions, emotions, fantasy, and feelings. We recreate the artist’s process in empathetic ways. Through expression and exploration we collectively process our inner states. Your community is your critical audience and your support structure, but it’s also filled with people you may never meet. The arts create connections and open up dialogues that we may begin but not finish ourselves. To participate in the arts is to build space for communities to grow.
Be present.
“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” –Émile Zola
An artist uses the material language of the world as art evolves with society. We must be the flaneurs of our time, seeing what goes unnoticed, collecting the overlooked, and provoking the future with our questions. Art and science provide us with the tools to manage and understand our surroundings, our culture. But we shouldn’t forget the abilities that we have cultivated in ourselves. Our lives are overwhelmed with digital excess and technologies that can dull our senses. To see, hear, and feel our experience in the world with criticality and nuance is what makes us human. When we are drowning in material and the ephemeral content of our lives we have to ask, how do we fight back? How can we find our bearings physically in the world if we only live in the virtual? We have to find the courage to build a tangible and visceral life, not only a digital legacy. My work navigates internal and external landscapes and seeks to locate our literal and figurative bearings.
Embrace uncertainty.
“The more original a human being is, the deeper is his anxiety.” –Søren Kierkegaard
There is always a moment between the impulse and the action that embodies possibility. Paul Celan referred to a “breath turn,” the space between inhaling and exhaling. Marcel Duchamp referred to the “infrathin” and John Keats wrote of “negative capability.” This is liminal space in which there will be moments of clarity and periods of struggle, there will be times when no one offers any guidance or affirmation. You must continue to stand in the storm and embrace a state of ambiguity. The artist must navigate change in their work and in their soul. We must remember in this uncertainty that each of us has a unique perspective with something to say. Our aspiration should be to be ourselves and to interrogate our own natures, cultivating and appreciating our distinct abstract intelligence. The revelation of art comes out of the incomplete work at the threshold of the unknown. That is the moment when you must trust that your brain is assembling the fragments, and that the moments you are digesting and learning from today are the keys to your future clarity.
Take action.
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” –Thomas Edison
Live courageously. It is now that the artist must resolve to take action. The studio, the protected sanctuary of making, must turn outward, to manifest your vision. You must join the conversation to move forward. Taking a stance, sharing your work, or even simply bringing an idea into reality can be daunting but it is necessary to the social language of art. After honing your senses and absorbing the moment, you must act. The action, even a simple pencil line, is an act of preservation, a physical record of your experience. Act, otherwise the moment is lost.
Reframe Failure.
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” –Winston Churchill
I challenge you not to look to your failures with disappointment, but to see both success and failure as data. This data is knowledge (in)formation. To think like an artist is to dedicate practice to remaining connected to the intuitive spirit of exploration. Fully engage in your life’s work and have discipline in your mind and passion. Practicing creativity can be an exhilarating risk. As artists we have to stand at the edges of the map of our culture and push outward.
These stances on creative thinking embrace risk and an element of the unknown. They require courage and a resilient passion for looking. In our world focused on product and economy, there should be a place left for transformation, where creativity is fostered and boundaries and destinations fall away. As the chair of MoMA’s committee on education, I have seen that dynamic exposure to the arts and makers can have profound effects on our community. In the future this model of creative empathy will be integral to problem solving and to building a collaborative thinking structure for developing solutions that can’t be achieved alone.
