Been mulling something over a bit… I’ve always had a “problem” where I find it difficult to actually talk about my art. I can talk about the process and the technical details, sure, but articulating why I created something has always been really hard. My teachers used to get on my case about it (”You have to take responsibility for your work!!” they said when I couldn’t explain why I chose to paint something the way I did). It’s not like I don’t know why I created something – I have a lot of thoughts about it, it just isn’t something I can put concretely into words easily for others. And after reading and talking about it a bit with others, I think maybe… it’s not so much that I’m inherently stupid like I’ve often thought, it’s just that maybe all that visual creativity stuff is mostly a right brain thing, whereas verbal skills are more of a left brain thing, and translating the right brain to the left brain can be a bit of a challenge for a lot of people. And that might explain why, in regards to my art, I have these complex feelings about what I want to make, how I want to make it, and what looks right, all in intuitive and nonverbal ways, but when it comes to verbalizing that I often am left going, “Uhh… I dunno, it just felt right?” And this is exciting because it means that verbalizing all that right-brain stuff is something that I can practice and get better at. It doesn’t mean I’m dumb, it just means my brain is doing what brains do. Instead of just going “oh well, I can’t do this, because I’m too dumb,” and then stop trying, I can actually make more effort to work on verbalizing things and maybe get better at it over time.
Does anyone else run into this issue, where it’s sometimes tricky to honestly explain artistic/creative decisions?
A version of – absolutely! What I find is that I go through periods where the words don’t come and it’s all visual (I’m a photographer and sometimes I sketch) and then there are times when my outlet is in the written language. It’s exceedingly rare when I can put both together in close time proximity.
Tumblr Exodus 