ARTISTIC ASPERGERS

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Hi there my name on this site is Nebula,

I am looking to make friends with anyone but in particular visual thinkers and artists.

I am currently doing a pre degree in art and design. I am finding the education system and the artistic process very difficult because I dont like to write about art much and prefer to create from my imagination, visions ect. I dont like the process of development which I belive kills the creative. I belive that the more someone plans the final peice the worse the outcome. Art for me means raw vision and creation.

If you are a struggling artist then join the club. If you can alter reality through vision on and off when it suits then get in touch. I dont care much for word and math. I enjoy painting, drawing, graphics, movie, music making ect.

MSN [email protected] No Idiots, No Chainmail, No BS.

Last edited by nebula on 03 Jan 2006, 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I draw, but it's just something that I do for fun. I don't think that I'm very good, but I've improved a lot since last year. I mainly draw dragons, anime, and monsters.

Welcome!

To be honest, I have to disgaree with you. According to your opinion about development, an awful lot of great art would be crap. Your own difficulties do not define, limit or negate others' capabilities. Just because you struggle with keeping an idea alive while following steps and following through a process doesn't mean someone like Michelangelo did.

I'm actually very different. I like to revise/redo and develop my drawings, painting, writing and music. I see my art as mutable, organic and evolving. I like the development part - to play to an idea, to try it out in different ways, to turn it over and look at it from different angles like a faceted gem, to let the art reveal itself rather than me forcing it to be something. One thing that development does is it forces you to seperate your ego from your art, and to let the art find its own voice. I have no use for terms like "raw" - they're trendy and overused, and they mean nothing to me. All that matters is if the art is true to its essence.

Anyhow, there's a forum devoted to art and music here, which you can gt through via the Forum Index. I started a thread there for visual artists to tell us what they do and there's also a thread (at the top of the forum) for posting your artwork.

Hello Nebula,
Your views on art sound very interesting. Some people think that art is an expression of an imagination, and can be separated from the actual creative process. Others believe that without the mastery of a particular skill in some medium or other, there can be no art. There should be some very interesting conversation threads taking place…

Hello nebula,

And welcome aboard! You do seem to enjoy doing artwork and using your imagination for the same. OTOH I do get the impression you have some limitations to overcome or work on if you're thinking about a full time career.

I dabbled in graphic design and illustration for some time but from what I experienced, being talented is one thing but it's having the knack as a salesperson that will be your trump card. I don't know how adept you are in that department but I do wish you the best of luck. Keep up the good work.

Have you exhibited / sold any of your work? Have you published anything in newspapers or magazines, or newsletters? I hope we can talk more about this line of work.

Hi Nebula. I am doing a minor in art (well, almost a major when counting up the number of art classes I have or will be taking). It's almost a major for me, but I despise art history (the tests I mean, love to study art though) and so I am sticking with the minor.

We've got a couple threads going in the Arts and Crafts forum which you might like. You could even post some of your own work.

Welcome.

I have made a blunders in the previous, I actully work from imagination and visions I don't dislike them. And without development I would get problems. I meant the brain storming stuff, the word to picture process. My recent project was on landscapes, we had to write aload of words and I didnt like it. The project I am doing now I brainstormed about 6 pictures and storyboards in about an hour. I could see the images in my mind and I played out a visual simulation of different situations.

All the technique's and artwork of other artsts are stored in my memory. I was a graphic designer for a year and stood out because I could produce work without simple proofs. I see vivid imagery in my mind and if not I just play until I please my eye. I think of art has asthtetic, I dont like the BS word that can make anyone an artist, anyone who can babble.

That part is how I do it. Can only make it up as I go along, incrementally.
I've been called an artist most of my life, but don't consider myself to "be" anything in particular. Haven't a career, but doing art is an interest that I return to regularly. I wrote a blurb in the arts crafts forum, "who here's a visual artist ?" thread started by Cade. Dunno' how to quote it here, so perhaps it'll be revisited.
I have very narrow interests & talents, mostly two-dimensional small-sized abstract drawings-also draw mazes. Haven't the confidence in my work to do much with it in the world, which means I get accused of squandering my potential by those who like what I create. It's a quandry for me, the concepts & practices that others share of "what art is". I can't buy into those beliefs, yet I am (it seems) one of those art-makers. Baffling.

Hi nebula,

Now I don't normally do very long posts, but in your case I have to speak at length because I think it's important. So take a deep breath...

...I'm doing a BA(Hons) in Animation and I can relate to your problem.
I too am very visual in my thinking and literally think in pictures, shapes and symbols etc.

During my art foundation I really struggled with the "idea developement" side, not because I had no ideas like a lot of people (I always have hundreds), but because the idea, picture, concept or whatever literally popped into my head ready formed. I remember arguing with my tutors who demanded I keep sketchbooks and visual diaries of how my ideas developed. I got round the problem by finishing the piece of art and then retrospectively finding similar art or artists on the web and bulshitting about how they plus some other random factors "led" to my final idea. I would then stick loads of pictures and waffle in my sketchbooks and pass it off as idea developement.

Now as time progressed my tutors began to callenge me, they saw I had a fervent and creative imagination but that I was capable of growing as an artist and wanted me to break free from my "I know already" attitude. "Humour us" they would say wryly, "humble yourself and look at other artists at the beginning of your project and see if they can't "enhance" your original ideas. This proved to be the making of me nebula, as I looked at lots of stuff in books and on the web I began to understand that many artists thought and visualized as I did but saw the original ideas as a seed or starting point and developed it into not only an amazing piece (or series of pieces) of art but sometimes, like Picasso or Duchamp into a whole new genre or art movement.

Developing your art beyond the purely subconcious isn't compromising it or taking anything away from you or your art. if anything it's drawing on the collective subconcious or Superconcious. If hadn't researched and developed my ideas I would have never studied Jung and the subconcious and how the mind truly thinks, remembers and communicates in pictures. Now if you are AS as I guess you are you will have had much less mental conditioning than the regular NT who is reprogrammed to think in words or on a purely concious level. You have a special gift the ability to tap in to the deeper ocean of your visual mind which is ancient and collective. There are stored images and wisdom as old as mankind itself, older even depending how "cosmic" you want to get. Applying the concious thought process to whatever has bobbed to the surface means you can make it accessible to the world at large (i.e less profound NT types) especially if you journal your progress and "journey", visually or otherwise.

"The unconcious process as far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconcious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."
Carl Jung.

"Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconcious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on the image and, in raising it from the deepest unconciousness, he brings it into relation with concious values, thereby transforming it untill it can be accepted by the minds of his contemparies according to their powers."
Carl Jung

The avatar I use is a representation of a subconcious image I had doodled for years when thinking or talking on the phone. I studied African and Asian tribal and ancestral masks, I studied Nordic and Celtic ancestral representation and I thought long and hard about what must be in my unconcious memories as I come from the Angles and the Saxons (Anglosaxon), Celts and Norsemen if you like. I then produced the full sized head based on my simple doodles and enhanced by my research plus a gestation period where I handed it back over to the subconcious for a while. I hope you like the head.

One last thing, since you mentioned changing "reality". Another thing I learnt during this time was about Surrealism. Not the art movement but as a philosophy, Andre Breton said:

"...we may hope that the mysteries which really are not will give way to the great Mystery. I believe of the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its' possession..."

Hugo Ball (a Dadaist) said:

"We should burn all the libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin".

I hope I haven't waffled your head with too many words but I love art and it gets me exited.
Let me know what you think, have I helped or hindered? I like anykind of feedback.

Pixel8