Creating at a Visionary Level by Monica Wilcox

Imagine pulling up a chapter of your own novel to discover you don’t recognize your own work. Yeah, it’s an odd moment. Obviously my creative process went to some intuitive space where outlines become more harmful than helpful…but it works. It always works. It’s the writer’s “zone” and when I come out of it (like a bookworm coming off a literature high) I find myself asking “Am I writing this or was that some kind of funky sci-fi dictation?”

All of us get spotty opportunities to take “creation” into unvisited territory.  As I get older, I find myself stepping “outside the box” as often as I can. Maybe it’s a midlife thing, maybe it’s an artistic thing, but “standard” or “safe” gives me the yawns. The question is always, “What could this BE if I weren’t so damn afraid to do it?”  We all know how difficult it is to visualize something that’s never been seen before, but TRUSTING in it…now that takes hot-blooded courage.  Why do you think we love movies like The Social Network? Why Einstein’s memorabilia sales are greater than any other dead celebrity’s? Why we cringe to think the creator of cocktail umbrellas is a millionaire?

FemCentral is a visionary site. You’re not coming here to find out if Pluto being designated a dwarf planet has blown a huge hole in your horoscope. You’re here because you’re intrigued with the stuff tucked between the stars, peaking from behind the sun, traveling within each and every thought.

Yet, there are some authentic risks to living a visionary life.

Case In Point

When my novel is begging to take a flying leap out of “the box” instead of pushing the panic button, I turn to the life of Jackson Pollock, one of my favorite visionaries. In 2006, No. 5, 1948 became the world’s most expensive painting, selling for $140,000,000. Unfortunately, he never experienced this monetary validation in his lifetime because the rest of us needed a few decades to catch up.

In 1945 Mr. Pollack took his canvas off the easel and tossed it to the floor, bypassing artist brushes for hardened brushes, sticks, trowels, knives and even basting syringes, he gave up artists paint for a paint that runs an awful lot like the stuff you’ve got in storage.  With these tools he developed action painting; dripping and splattering paint across the canvas with the added dimension of seeing and moving around the entire canvas as the paint flowed.  Art created with gravity versus against it; art using the whole body instead of the hand and wrist. This alone should have been a big red flag that something extraordinary was afoot.

Jack the Dripper   

Unfortunately, the public became fascinated with his unconventional technique more than the results.  He was the face of modern art skepticism, “My garage drop cloth has more substance than that.”  TIME magazine featured him in 1956, dubbing him “Jack the Dripper”, which bumped his sales up to two a month at a few hundred dollars each. A 1959 headline in Reynold’s News read, “This is not art — it’s a joke in bad taste.”  It would take 36 years and the eye of a physicist to recognize the depth of Pollock’s “bad joke”.

In 1995 scientists were developing their understanding of fractals — the stuff of physics. Fractals are geometric patterns repeating thousands of times at different magnifications.  They can be found in mathematical theory but why dive that deep when you can find them in your backyard.  Look across the flat horizon of your lawn-the repetitive patterns in this view on a fractal scale would measure a 1. The repetition of the branches on your tree would measure 1.8, where the mass of the weeds and overgrowth behind your shed (literally-the eye sore) would be closer to the upper limit on the fractal scale; which is a 3. The higher the fractal number, the more repetitive the pattern, the more chaotic the image looks to your eye.

It was around this same time that Physicist Richard Taylor noticed that Pollock’s art looked like a work in fractals, so he checked it out and came up with a startling conclusion:

Jackson Pollock was intuitively dripping chaos theory across naked canvas more than 10 years before the theory was even developed. He was testing the limits of what you would find pleasing to look upon; the difference between your “overgrown garden” and Better Homes and Garden. And his artwork only improved as he pushed this limit.

No. 14, painted in 1951, has a fractal dimension of 1.45, while one of his last drip paintings, Blue Poles, boasts a fractal dimension of 1.72.  We now understand that people prefer images with fractals between 1.3 and 1.8: too low and the image fails to grab our attention, too high and it becomes overly chaotic. Turns out, Mr. Pollock, who the public thought was “dripping paint outta his backside” was nothing short of a visionary.

Accepting Truth 

He also struggled with alcoholism his entire adult life, dying in 1956 in a car accident caused while under the influence.  Could his disease have been impacted by his reputation as “The Dripper”? How hard was it to stay honest to his lone vision as the world chuckled at his “art”?  Would you have the wherewithal to pull your creative inspiration into existence, even if it meant the world would look upon it as a “joke in bad taste”?  Was Pollock’s work worth the torment he suffered? Well, it’s worth 140 million to someone.

“You’ve got to deny, ignore, and destroy a hell of a lot to get at truth.” -  Jackson Pollock

I’m sticking with my intuitive writing, even if the book reviews come back as “not worth the trees used to bind this work!”  To catch even a glimpse of anything beyond our norm is nothing short of a Universal gift.  Amazing, life changing, stuff has come to us from visionary minds:  Da Vinci, Darwin, Edison, Earhart, Curie, Hawking. Living a visionary life is a two part process; the SEEING and then the BELIEVING.

So what’s the vision you’re afraid to run with? Maybe you’ve got this crazy idea to teach reading to ADHD children using parrots. Maybe you’ve got an image of a better broom dusting up your dreams. Are you ready to bring it into creation or will you let it slip away?  Who knows what you may end up manifesting or how long it may take for the rest of us to grasp it. Who knows how much we’ll pay just to have one tiny piece of it hanging in our homes.

Recommendation from the Author:  Need a little of Pollock’s visionary energy into your day? Go to http://jacksonpollock.org/ to get your creativity on. You can also try this screen saver: http://electricsheep.org/ It uses fractals, taken from Internet users (don’t ask me to explain it, just run with it) to design these amazing “sheep”.

Read more of Monica’s writing on FemCentral, and at her website, Femme Tales-Truth with Humor.