After reading Michael Golec’s essay, I wondered about the balance between instinct and learning. On one hand, as Golec mentions in his essay, learning in any form can be detrimental to instinct and he even wonders if “we possess any less instinct than our forbearers” because of our education.
On the other hand, learning and instinct could be sometimes complementary. When I look a the work of illustrators and other artists or any other source of inspiration, I often notice that some elements come back later and somehow get combined in different ways to create a new concept or idea. It is true that it is not always automatic and one has to focus on, maybe not forgetting, but blurring the details of what we have seen, so that something else can emerge. In that sense, I agree with Golec’s statement that “a designer’s innovation (future) is predicated on the interplay of pre-memory (instinct), memory (past), and the rules of the assignment (present)”.
The difficulty is to achieve this balance between instinct and learning and instinct is not always encouraged as we grow up.
I researched the work of the suggested artists. When I looked at the work of Hilma af Klint, Joan Miro, Anni Albers or Kurt Schwitters in particular, I could see how there was an element of instinct in their work and I wondered how they had this ability to let their creativity flow. Hilma af Klint was very interested in spirituality and maybe that was the way she could let go. As for Joan Miro, I found one quote very interesting in wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mir%C3%B3): “He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike”. It does feel like he let his instinct play in a childlike manner and yet, at the same time, created exceptionally balanced compositions.
When I did more research on automatic drawing, I started to understand how it might be possible to learn how to let go to a certain extent so that the instinct can take charge of the creative process.
In a YouTube video, the artist Tim Gula demonstrates how automatic drawing works. He explains how the cartoonist Jean Giraud (pseudonim : Moebius) used this technique for inspiration (www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYGFwGhHnA).
The illustrator Araki Koman explains in an interview the different stages of automatic drawing and how it helps the creative process (https://creativemindclass.com/magazine/automatic-drawings/#:~:text=The%20automatic%20drawing%20creative%20process%20is%20a%20technique%20used%20by,paper%20can%20help%20the%20flow). She describes 4 stages: the preparation (that consist in finding “a quiet space, setting an intention, and letting go of any expectations or preconceptions”), the creation, the editing and the verification. Another demonstration of automatic drawing helped me to understand the process even better (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLNzDB4_tsc).
While watching these videos, I tried for a few minutes at a time to follow the same process. I could see how after a while, it would be possible to be more spontaneous and stop thinking of exactly what I was trying to represent in my drawings.
I also enjoyed looking at artists creating poems where words form different shapes although I was less directly inspired by it.
Catherine Roux Degree in Illustration 