Pedagogy

It’s possible to research your own intuitive choices in order to learn more about your work and yourself. An important component of the creative process is research and analysis of our own work. The art we make can tell us a lot about ourselves. It can show us things about ourselves that we weren’t aware of. Carl Jung the Swiss psychologist who founded analytic psychology who’s work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and art developed the concept of The Shadow. The shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not identify in itself, the Shadow can be understood as the entirety of the unconscious; It’s everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, the shadow is the unknown side of the self. The Shadow can be thought of as those aspects of our personality unknowable and inaccessible to ourselves. Many forms of design and art are a visual representations of the shadow. This is why a systematic analysis of our own work can be so powerful. Analysis of our work reveals the shadow, it can bring to light the previously inaccessible and unknown components of our psyche.

I spend a lot of time in the studio thinking about how ideas affect aesthetics. It’s probably a fairly obvious thing to say but when we’re looking at a piece of art what we are actually looking at is ideas. In my teaching I’ve found that a major sticking point for many students seems to be a tension between logic and intuition (between thinking and feeling). When and in what ways should the creative individual use logic? And when and in what ways should they use intuition? This video offers a potential plan and a potential solution to the problem.