CompuServe Messages

Edison invented the lightbulb, not with sketches or standing back and cogitating (inspiration) but by building 15,000 lightbulbs of different materials and marketing the one that burned the best. Josiah Wedgewood re-invented white porcelain without the secret of the Chinese (that's why the English call their dishes "China") by trying something like 473 different formulae. You can see his notebooks in the Wedgewood museum. It's easier to re-invent something, you can guess what the folks you're copying are starting with by talking to sailors. His black glaze took another decade or two. This is invention-to-order. Not tap tap here, tap tap there, but build a prototype, and another, another, or make a batch of different glazes and fire them, and another, until you get one you like. Jazz, sculpture, literature, are _nothing_ like that. When Edison tries a new filament, he does not know until he turns on the electricity whether it's going to finally be the one. When Tolstoy writes a paragraph, he is _not_ exploring the unknown. I believe, but don't know how to prove, that the difficulty non-artists have with realizing the images in their minds is that the image is "really" much less defined than they think it is. What one learns in art school in addition to draftsmanship is how to fool the viewer into seeing richness and detail in a painting by suggestion, so that the picture is completed in the viewer's mind. Gosh, I sound like an Infocom ad. If you have never experimented with the grid method of copying a photograph used by the photorealists, you may be surprised at how well you can do on your first effort. If you had the knack for holding in your imagination the image you wish to copy the way you can hold a grid over a photograph, you could "copy" the mental image in the same way. But you'd also have a visual imagination that worked differently from your eyes, since your eyes do not see much more than a little disk of the field of view in full focus, while you'd be making a painting that would be all in focus wherever you look. That's rare.