By Joe Ortiz
While giving a lecture to an audience of followers, Zen teacher Baba Ram Das noticed an elderly woman in the crowd nodding her head in agreement to each of his points about meditation and mystical experiences. Later, he went up to the woman and asked her why she was so enthusiastic about his talk. And she said, “I knit.”
Joe Ortiz
Insights sparked from intense concentration on a task or craft can come from anywhere. Even from a craft like knitting.
Knitters have learned from experience to make a “swatch” before they knit a sweater. This miniature sample of the finished garment helps knitters see in advance how the interplay of pattern and color will influence a finished work. What better way for an artist to gain confidence, and inspire numerous adjustments along the way to enhance the final plan?
Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh gave this technique a new twist. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one can view a box of colored yarn that Van Gogh used to weave colors together as a study for a future painting. While most artistic “studies” we see in museums by Old Masters are made in graphite or charcoal, Van Gogh created his version in yarn. Why?
One can imagine that the process allowed him to experiment with the colors he envisioned for the finished painting, which benefited Van Gogh with the ease of reworking various shades of color into different combinations.
This technique may not be as demanding a tool as, say, the rigid form of a sonnet or a haiku to stimulate right-brain activity for poets. But as dedicated knitters will tell you — at least a few times during the process — Van Gogh must have felt the creative tumblers to the lock on his artistic zone clicking in- and out-of-place.
What Does it Teach Us?
Any preparatory craft device we use to kick start a project can help boost our imagination in ways we might never have envisioned before we began.
Such devices can act as triggers to help us jump into a highly productive creative zone. Think back on a time you drew a sketch before laying out your kitchen, for example, and you’ll be reminded of a moment when some — perhaps unrelated detail — flashed into your mind. This is how creativity works. Some structure or limitation coupled with our need to follow its requirements, can cause mental correlations, which lead us to some new flash of insight.
Furthermore — as we might imagine occurred to the woman who surprised Ram Das with her metaphysical revelation — any physical manipulation we make with our hands to distract ourselves from excessive thinking, can also put the mind just off kilter enough to incite a new breakthrough.
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Let me know your thoughts via email: [email protected]. Also, check out my musical memoir, Escaping Queens, which will be staged at Santa Cruz Actors’ Theater this July. For Tickets: www.santacruzactorstheatre.org/tickets.