During
my senior year at college I took an art (drawing) class as one of my electives.
I preferred to look at and create portraits of people, animals and even scenery;
“modern art” was not my thing. However, one of the class projects entailed
using more abstract techniques such as lines, angles, shapes and bold splashes
of color so that the specific object I drew would be virtually unrecognizable. The
instructor even took the class on a field trip to check out a modern-art
display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The excursion was
meant to inspire the class and get everyone thinking not just about the
specific techniques the artist used to create his or her masterpiece. In addition,
we were supposed to consider the meaning or interpretation of a few specific
pieces that “spoke” to us.
I
admit that I felt a little panicked and completely out of my element during
most of this excursion. (Did I mention that modern art was not my thing?) I spent
a lot of time staring, squinting and moving around different paintings trying
to figure out what I was supposed to “get” out of them. What was I looking at? What
was I supposed to see? I made notes
about artistic techniques I recognized from the class. I did quick sketches of
what I was looking at and scribbled questions to myself beside the
illustrations. Nothing so far was really speaking to me; none of these works
even made any sense to me. Time was ticking away and the field trip was almost
over. Finally, I did the only thing I could think of: I put aside all of my
expectations and preconceptions about what I should be seeing so I could just observe
the details in front of my eyes. There would be plenty of time to assess and
analyze everything, later. So, I looked.
My
eyes were opened that day. The second I stopped trying to categorize everything
I saw, I could see and appreciate the tiny details of artistic technique—the slightest
feathering of a brush stroke at the end of a line; was this intentional or
accidental?—that I might never have noticed. I considered the angles and
geometric shapes, shade and lightening of the color, in terms of how I might or
could create a similar effect in my next project. And then I was able to
wonder: What could or would these effects mean for the image I was trying to
represent?
One of my
friends has a favorite expression that I have started to use a lot, too: “Isn’t
it interesting…” As in, isn’t it interesting
how someone with physical suggestibility hears a question directly and
literally but will make a statement that is full of metaphor and inference?
Or, isn’t it interesting how two people
with the same self-improvement goal can have completely different triggers for
the unwanted behavior? Looking back, that field trip was the first time I was
intentionally, consciously noticing and appreciating interesting and unique aspects
of an otherwise-familiar situation. I looked at lines, smudges and shapes drawn
in charcoal pencil. I regarded splashes of watercolor paint, or heavy lines and
smudges of acrylic paint smeared onto canvas screens and sheets of metal. And then,
somehow, all of this information (message units) coalesced into some kind of recognizable
image in my subconscious mind. Suddenly, many individual pictures came together
to create a story in my mind.
Isn’t that
interesting?
Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in
Southern California. She graduated with honors from the
Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about
Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
© 2014
