Thoughts on the Creative Process

Opening the Lee Gass Sculpture Gallery in Vancouver provides an ideal opportunity (an excuse, really) to write about the creative process, about sculpture and sculpting, about art in general, and about creativity. In this and following articles, I will explore these issues in various ways, and at some point I will invite others to contribute.

In my former life as a university professor, the question "Where do ideas come from?" was central to everything that I did, both in my research and my teaching. Now, as a full-time practicing sculptor, this question is the very basis of my work. Because creativity and innovation are so important to our culture, it seems worthwhile to explore them with others.

Here I will describe the evolution of a series of sculptures that began on a camping trip with my kids on the Yalakom River, north of Lillooet, in autumn 1983. It rained like crazy all the time we were out and everything was muddy, but we kept a nice fire going outside our tent and had a great time. Since I was soaked to the bone anyway it seemed like a good time to wade in the river looking for rocks. A nice hunk of green serpentine appealed to me for its rich colour and overall shape, and I brought it home.

During quiet times on the drive back to Vancouver, several ideas kept swirling through my mind. The rock itself increasingly fascinated me. Some people see faces and elephants in clouds, and I see things in rocks. Psychologists tell us that the clouds and rocks are like projection screens, where we "see" aspects of our inner lives in imagination.

Everyone does this to some extent, but some of us make our living doing it. In a way, I've lived my life as a projectionist.

Though it was still just a rock, the serpentine somehow suggested the circular-arrow "reload" ikon on the toolbar of computer browsers. Browsers had not yet been invented, but I was familiar with the symbol, which my Chilean biologist colleague Humberto Maturana uses to indicate the autopoietic, or self-creating, nature of living systems. This led me to contemplate the mathematical notion of recursion, which was important to me at the time in my research into animal intelligence. The concept of recursion refers to recurring, self-referential processes that modify themselves each time they occur.

Successive applications build on each other, "recursively". Falling in love and falling in hate are two examples in which once they begin, everything that happens reinforces them; unless something intervenes from outside to change things, they accelerate toward an inevitable conclusion. The thrill of discovery is similarly explosive, and this is one of the greatest personal benefits for me in research, teaching, and sculpting. The smooth, automatic regulation of our body temperature is a very different kind of example of recursive processes.

Within a few weeks, I had completed the small serpentine sculpture Recursion. For the next 25 years, the idea of recursion became ever more important to me in my work and in my life. I fell in love, experienced the daily growth of our relationship, and gave Recursion to Lucretia to symbolize that. I continued to explore the role of intelligence in the economy of nature. I discovered more and more powerful ways to help students build on their knowledge to learn at accelerating rates. And I dreamed of returning to the theme of recursion in sculpting, at a larger scale than before.

Sometimes these dreams were waking fantasies of myself sculpting or visions of the finished sculpture. Sometimes they were dreams in the night - - Recursion and related shapes tumbled in space while I experienced on an emotional level example after example of the concept in action. I usually emerged from these experiences with some new insight about the real world - - about a research problem, about how people learn, or about some individual student who was struggling with difficult material. Nearly always, I emerged with a stronger resolve to create another sculpture based on the theme of recursion.

The time came in late summer 2008. A 5-foot column of red Persian travertine had been standing at the corner of my studio for a couple of years. I had looked at it every day, and suddenly I "saw" myself carving another, bigger Recursion from a piece of it. I photographed the original from every side, enlarged the photographs to the scale of the column, transferred the outlines to the travertine, and roughed out the piece. In developing the form, I modified it considerably to explicitly suggest the "reload" ikon and to develop a deeply concave face to complement the broad convex surface of the other side. I completed Red Recursion in late September, and it is now on display in the Lee Gass Sculpture Gallery.

While creating Red Recursion, I was already imagining developing the form further using the rest of the travertine column. I began with a 3-D computer model that I digitized from the serpentine original, and transformed it in two ways. First, I "stretched" it upwards to nearly twice its height, without significantly changing its other dimensions. To my eye, the elongation reduced the feeling of self-reference and recursion that I started with, although the design was still circular in exactly the same sense. This shift moved Red Recursion II into the family of forms that characterize my Anima series and the sense of nurturing that some of them afford. In particular, see Heart of Anima (Anima VI), which is on display in the Lee Gass Gallery. Still in the computer, I produced a mirror-image replica of the stretched model, then made large prints of both models and used them to rough out two new sculptures in travertine, both of which are still in progress.

This series of sculptures illustrates two ways ideas come to me, both of which have been important in my life: forms remind me of thoughts and feelings, and thoughts and feelings remind me of forms. These things are closely linked for me because I experience forms not just as shapes or two-dimensional profiles but as three-dimensional landscapes and move across them in my imagination. I zoom them up literally to landscape scale and imagine traveling over them, as if riding a motorcycle at high speed in the mountains. Under these imaginary conditions, I can actually feel forms kinesthetically, in every part of my body. I zoom them down to the size of sculptures and imagine moving my hands over them in all directions, and of course this is exactly what I have to do to carve them.

Such wonderful things that can happen when I pick up a rock.

**Visit the Lee Gass Sculpture Gallery
4393 St. George St.
Vancouver

For a public exhibition of sculptures and photographs
by Lee Gass
Saturday Dec. 6
Sunday Dec. 7
12 – 5 pm
Call 604-879-2346 for more information