To Put It Another Way
Phase one: Reckless Abandon | oil on panel | 24” x 24”
People may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs when they’re doing an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot. This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.
- Stacy Colino for National Geographic
Or to put it another way: Phase One - Reckless Abandon - is painting without your mind in charge so that your inner channel of expression can flow through your hand.
A cautionary note: Other networks come into play as far as modifying, rejecting, or implementing ideas. So it’s unwise to place blind faith in ideas that are generated in the shower or during any other bout of mind wandering.
- Roger Beaty, cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University
Or to put it another way: Phase Two - Critical Analysis - allows your thinking to reveal how the composition can develop the painting beyond reckless abandon.
It’s an interplay or dance between the default mode network and the cognitive control network that allows you to generate a creative idea then implement it effectively.
- Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque
Or to put it another way: Phase Three - Integration - that’s when your emotional connection guides your compositional decision making process to create a painting that reaches resolution - the fourth phase.
Besides leading to greater self-understanding, gaining insights into these aspects of the creative process can help you maximise your brain power in various situations. But keep in mind, Jung points out, “these are early days, and there’s still a lot to learn about how the brain creates.”
To put it another way: scientists could learn a lot about how the brain creates just by going through the four phases of making abstract art!
