By Joe Ortiz
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often quoted as saying artists have to learn to “know themselves sufficiently” in order to achieve a state of spontaneity that will reveal their innermost selves. My illustration intends to show a modern version of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. While Leonardo’s classic drawing depicts the perfect man, my rendering displays what Rousseau’s more realistic vision might express: an imperfect man or woman as seen with awkward mechanical appendages that may be regarded as strengths rather than limitations.
Joe Ortiz
By discovering how to use the shortcomings of one’s mind, body, and emotions, artists can learn to manipulate their own unique qualities to best convey their personal creative message. Our own foibles, strengths, and tendencies then become the tools of our expression.
In fact, Rousseau also said that by learning to explain another’s thinker’s contribution to the world of ideas in a convincing manner, it would help artists and writers learn to express their own ideas as well. When artists know full well their own limitations and strive to express them honestly, the results can achieve a new resonance with one’s audience.
Indeed, a full understanding of one’s habits, pitfalls, and how we react in certain situations — rather than perceived as shortcomings — can be turned into the uniqueness of our personal message. As Moshe Feldenkrais wrote in The Potent Self – A Guide to Spontaneity, “The use we make of ourselves is the best we can muster with the means at our command at that moment.”
For beginning artists, understanding and accepting one’s imperfections takes the risk of failure out of the equation — making it easier to embark.
What We Can Learn: Heroic Self-Control
In The Creative Mind and Method, authors Jack and Thatcher Summerfield wrote: “There is a kind of heroic self-control which all the artists possess … [W]hatever is truly creative must come out of the experience of the creator . . . not something he gets second hand. This is what makes it valid. This is artistic honesty.” Most probably, AI wouldn’t be able to achieve this authenticity.
How could it? Unless it were to consume, process, and regurgitate all our writings, emails, texts, phone conversations — and go so far as to invent those very thoughts we have yet to experience and express.
Needless to say, if artists practice objective self-observation, they can trust the images and ideas that come from a particular work as truly their own creation. Our pitfalls, then, are courageously revealed through the veil of our own vulnerability.
And the newly rendered Vitruvian Man (or woman), then becomes a unique, subjective, and authentically-personal expression. Truly our own.
•••
Reader response: I’d love to hear your comments and questions. Email me at [email protected].