Synesthesia

In Wikipedia it says that Synesthesia is a “neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensoryor cognitive pathway.”
Basically as I understand it, this means that people are able to see sound as colour and also as wiki says, see letters and numbers as colour as well. This usually found in people that are on psychedelic drugs, or after a stroke, people who have suffered with the conseqeunce of becoming blind and deaf.
The synethesia is also refered to as a “neurological condition”. To me this makes it sound terrible but as I’m lead to beleive it does not interfere with normal daily function but thats where I dissagree, because all though it does not effect people in a bad way it can be an advantage.
It cant help but make me think that it would give them problems at school as they would have conversations with people but experience it in a totally different way but be to young to know why.
Teachers at my primary school thought that I was difficult to handle because I had a short attention span to other pupils. Really it all boiled down to me imagining something out the window or drawing a picture on my maths book.
Maybe if I had the problem of wanting to think things up all the time then maybe they had that problem too if not worse. They imagine colours without even trying, it just comes naturally. But the system of school and education does not understand this way thinking.
Some of the known composers and musicians have been said to have this condition. Which is why their sound is so different and unconventional to that of your everyday composer and musician.
I cant imagine how that would feel to be able to see music in your mind. The music would not be composed in a conventional way but as colour and then translated into sound. That to me is, life making people creative. This unusual ability to experience music on a visual level should be an embraced form. But the way in which the world is today it is hard for such a person to excel in life. Other than through base subjects such Maths, English and Science.
I wonder if a person could learn that ability?
People have created images of pulsing lines and swirls that are to show the flow of colour like that of the screen on Windows Media Player but to actually put a colour to a specific note takes this to a different level.
Pink Floyd have attempted on many occasion to portray sound through moving colour. In their concerts you lay on the ground as flying images of colour and light fly over you. Another example of this use of combining sound and colour comes from a composer called Duke Ellington who was able to turn Timbre into colour.
An interesting use of music and art was David Hockney who used music to paint stage scenes but strangely never used the method in any of his other works.
I also like to paint while listening to music and in my Art Foundation I tryed to paint music and the emotion I percieved from it. It was an interesting experiment and I ended up with some fantastic use of line and colour. It was a series of 10 paintings ranging from music such as R’n’B to Heavy Metal Rock.
From this I think I will check to see if my cousin has it when I get home at christmas. Hey if he does he could be the next amazing musician of our time lol.
Till next time cya!

Speed Painting and Creativity

This was my first attempt at the speed painting that we set up and although I feel I may of miss interpret the word given, I'm happy with this attempt.

The word we were given was Omnipresent and it was 45 Min's long. I automatically thought of omnipotent and thought of the all seeing eye out of Lord of the Rings. But I was mainly focused on the use of tools and not so much the drawing itself. I think as I do more of these speed paintings, I will be able to start and look at better composition and detail.

I have started to grasp the ability of using the opacity on the brushes to show nice shades of colour that overlap without the use of multiply as sometimes this can cause you some problems.

I think that it is really working my brain not only on improving skills but also how creative I can be on my ideas for the image. As I said on my previous blog I can only continue as I have. Just keep drawing and be creative as much as possible.

It is fun to see how other people take the word and the different images that arise. I think that the sessions of speed painting should continue and that people should keep an account of their own work on their blog or in a specific file on their computer so as to be able to give themselves feedback and catalogue their progress.

This was a picture which I did in the same way but I had not got the confidence with the tools to make this as I had planned but it still portrays my idea.

I'm waiting to become more competent with photoshop so as I can do a final piece for Chris's projects. This was an idea for a final piece that was from the organic project.

I'm working at the moment on a solution to a problem I have hit on the mechanical project. I cant get past an idea I had as I like the idea but cant see it as a 3D object. I'm stuck drawing the same thing over and over but not progressing it to anywhere.

I feel I may be able to try a solution to the problem after having a conversation with Joel. I decided that maybe I would benefit from making it out of clay or Plasticine as when I tryed to explain how I saw it I used my hands and described individual components.

After I finish building it in 3D, If it is successful I will Photograph it and work over the image in photoshop till I learn the shape and know how to move it on to the next stage.

Till next time cya!

Child's Play

I have chosen to talk about the mind of a child because I find them very interesting. My interest lies within the way they explain something or interpret certain comments they hear.
People forget that a child has the potential to learn at a fast rate due to the fact that they are going through an important stage of their life. As this is something they still have a part of from being a baby, for example this is the reason a baby can learn to speak its first word or watch enough people walking to imitate it. A child does this on a different but simular level. They try to do more complicating challenges like problem solving and drawing there thoughts.
This brings me to a qoute i found: “Kids can't always tell us what's on their minds.”
My cousin is 5 and he drew a picture of ..... well I still dont know but I asked him and he told me he had drawn his headache, which was why he had used blue. I asked him why blue and he replied with a shrug of his shoulders and went off to watch Sponge Bob Squarepants. (which is one of the weirdest and funniest childrens programmes ever)
I sat and thought about it for a while and I asked my auntie what she thought and she said it was him expressing how it makes him feel and I thought how creative it was to do that from such a young age.
The picture of this blue thing wasnt a thing it was an emotion. A piece of art that his mind just thought up.
I believe that if the mind of a child as young as 5 years of age can produce a creative piece of art work on a headache alone. Then maybe there is something adults are missing and need to embrace more in there daily lives.
After talking to Powell about this idea, we discussed how the mind changes with age and also the differences between men and women. It may sound a bit sexist but men and women are totally different in how they think about things.
An example of this was when was watching a film about romance comedy (Knocked up) and when I laughed at the jokes made by the male star, my girlfriend would just sit there and looked puzzled and vise versa when the female part got angry. I would not know why.
I think on a personal level life would be much easier if we did know what each other were thinking but deffinately not as interesting. Lol
Going back to this simple use of colour that my cousin used. If we could simply just express ourselves creatively using methods such as art and colour every day of our lives then I believe that we may be able to hold on to a part of this child like creativity that is in a part of us all. The problem with age is that as we become older we become set in our ways and dont experiment as much. Thats why the Speed Painting session that we have organised for ourselves may help us to keep our creative minds active and also help us to achieve a higher standard of work on photoshop.
After looking at what Tom O’Brien had achieved with his speed paintings over the summer, I was inspired to try it myself. His drawings showed great improvement after only a handful of them.
So in conclusion I need to go and do some more drawing and when I finish that DO SOME MORE!
Till next time cya!

Welcome to the second year.

Well here we are again for round two of the blogging except for this time it will be more in depth to a certain subject. For this first part of the year we will be focusing our energy on the disscusion of creativity. Yeah I know we already did that but with it only being a week or so last year their was'nt much time to cover the many aspects of such an enormous subject. In fact its so vague that I have had trouble wondering where to start so I decided to just talk about school and education and how that has an effect on the creativity of the world. After watching the video with michael powell on the subject of education I really started to realise that I was'nt the only person that felt missunderstood in school.
I was always told that I would never be able to keep a job or do anything if I did not concentrate in class. Which I could never understand why they said that because I could always concentrate well at work. I was getting payed LOL!!! stupid schools dont understand the logic of being able to do things of which we enjoy and have intrest. My intrest at the time was where my money for the next game would come from, not in where the decimal point should go in this equation.
The idea of schools and university's not considering an art related course as being as important as that of math's and english is fustrating and emoral. As without these outbursts of imaginative inervation we would not have the world and the technology we have today. This stems to games, films, architecture and music. These are every day things that people take for granted, take these elements away and you left with unimaginative robots that do the the same thing day in day out and live to learn the same things and do the same jobs. Boring!!!! This may be ok for the individual but it is not for me,I want more than just doing a buisness course and wearing a snazzy suit.
So then it begs the question "What is creativity?"
I let this stew around in my head for a while and I finally think I would like to describe it as a "mental process of which you use your imagination to think up or create both mentally or physically an idea of which has been something else or a collection of things. For example it could be anything from a conversation or thought to a telephone box and a bump to the head."
In other words creativity is everything and the way I see it, you can be creative in science as you could create compounds with elements and extract salt from sea water using instruments and techniques of which thought of and experimented with.
You can be creative in english as people write wonderful poetry or script write plays or short story's. Along with reading novels that have wonderful illustrations using usually some sort of ink(artist did them!).
You can even be creative in maths as there are methods of remembering your times tables through songs and patterns that are extremely creative.
So then why is an art course that by my reckoning is by far the most creative of the school subjects not considered to be a needed subject as much as that of the others.
If you look at primary school for instance, children in reception are taught all the types of skills they need through the way of play and experimentation. As they then progress through the years they gradually lose this ability to learn things through experimenting and playing with ideas. They do this through no fault of there own but through the fault of the schools system to control and mold children into uncreative drones of society. It may sound morbid but in retrospect it is a very realistic interpretation of the present day todate.
I will be researching creativity further and posting links to websites that I found and consider relevant to the subject of creativity.
Till next time cya !!!