The Groove Issue 137 - Why You Must Explore Your Unconscious if You Want to Be Creative
WHY YOU MUST EXPLORE YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IF YOU WANT TO BE CREATIVE
For the longest time people have been preoccupied with dissecting the minds of creative geniuses and how they arrived at their greatest breakthroughs. Heck, I wrote an entire book about it and continue exploring the topic, finding revelations and pieces of information that make the task both fascinating and endless.
One of the most complicated areas of understanding is that of the unconscious mind. The one that controls 95 percent of your life: the majority of the decisions we make, the actions we take, our emotions and behaviors that lie beyond conscious awareness. (Freud originally labeled this part as “subconscious” and later used the term “unconscious” interchangeably with the former).
When the French poet and critic André Breton, strongly influenced by Freud's studies of dreams and what they revealed about the unconscious mind, published the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, he aimed to free a group of artists' imaginations from conscious control by encouraging automatic, uncensored, free imagery that merged fantasy with reality.
The longest living surrealist was American artist Dorothea Tanning, born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910. What started as a childlike curiosity and escapism by reading many fantastical Gothic and Romantic novels from her local library, coupled with an honest exploration of her deepest desires, turned into a full-fledged rich practice that spanned paintings, etchings, illustrations, ballet costumes, sculptures, books and poems along her wondrous 101-year-old life.
Follow Your Mind Impulses
Dorothea Tanning in her studio in Sedona, Arizona photographed by Lee Miller in 1946.
We are all equipped with good intuition, another part of the unconscious that isn’t fully understood by science but proves that individuals can make successful decisions without deliberate analytical thought or previous known experience in the situation.
Tanning found little value in the art classes she was taking in Chicago and three weeks after enrollment, her intuition told her to drop out and soon thereafter to move to New York. She got work in Manhattan as a commercial artist and continued exploring those parts of her that she couldn’t fully comprehend - either because they came from stored experiences many years back or because they related to repressed parts of herself.
In 1936, a year after her arrival, when she saw the Museum of Modern Art's groundbreaking “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” exhibition, it came as a shock of recognition, she recalls: “Everything I did was from the imagination. I never painted bowls of fruit or Mom and Pop. And I saw in the exhibition that here were people doing things like me.”
This was a Eureka moment, as she would elaborate: “I was impressed by its daring in addressing the tangles of the subconscious -- trawling the psyche to find its secrets, to glorify its deviance. I felt the urge to jump into the same lake - - where, by the way, I had already waded before I met any of them. Anyway, jump I did.”
Tanning was working as a fashion ad designer for Macy’s and the art director was so blown away by her creativity, the depth of her imagination and what she conceived in her work that he introduced her to Julian Levy, the gallerist responsible for showing Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in New York.
Not only did Levy give Tanning her first solo show at his gallery in 1944, but he also introduced her to her idols, the surrealists in that MoMA show, and to her future husband, German artist Max Ernst.
Without forcing anything, Tanning was following her unconscious mind. There were no logical reasons to paint what she painted or go to the places she was going to. She just needed to do it because it’s what was bubbling up in her mind. No censoring, no questioning, just automatically following.
Unfortunately, we don’t listen to our intuition as much as we should. Barring anything illegal or dangerous, how many business and art ideas get shelved because they occurred as impulses that didn’t make much sense at the beginning? The worst part of this usually comes when we see someone else do with success what we silently dismissed as “crazy”.
There Is More Than Meets the Eye
Birthday, 1942, oil on canvas. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Our subconscious mind communicates in images, feelings, and metaphors, focusing on emotion rather than logic or reason.
I bet you’ve pondered this question many times: why do you self-sabotage yourself? Or why are you unable to fulfill certain goals despite having everything in your conscious capabilities to do so? An honest and profound look at the events and desires that live buried in your unconscious may give some answers to that.
Tanning said it succinctly when asked what had she tried to communicate as an artist: “I'd be satisfied with having suggested that there is more than meets the eye.”
That’s because there is.
Anything Ordinary Is Uninteresting
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, oil on canvas. Collection of the Tate, London.
With a 75-year-long career, Tanning had the presence of mind to evolve and change and explore many different interests. Somehow it all felt connected and part of what her husband called “the domain of the marvelous is her native country.”
During the mid-1950s, her work radically morphed, and her images became increasingly fragmented and prismatic, like disembodied parts floating on her canvases.
Later in her life, she didn’t love to be called a Surrealist but acknowledged the impact of what the philosophies and practices of searching deep within had created in her life. “Everyone should not only respect, but explore their subconscious, which is, after all, what the Surrealists were determined to do -to enrich life that way.”
She referred to this desire to evolve and explore: “Anything that is ordinary and frequent is uninteresting to me, so I have to go in a solitary and risky direction. If it strikes you as being enigmatic, well, I suppose that's what I wanted it to do.”
Weird, enigmatic, unfamiliar… words that you may hear with a bit of trepidation.
The thing is, what’s weird now probably won’t be ten years from today. Think about others who went this route and created successful businesses: like Elsa Schiaparelli and her fantastical designs, whose atelier opened in 1927, then was bought by the Italian businessman Diego dell Valle in 2007 and resurrected with great fanfare in 2019 by Texas designer Daniel Roseberry. Or Cirque du Soleil, the brainchild of Guy Laliberté, the entrepreneur who dreamt a circus without animals, instead relying on dancers, contortionists and acts based on the strangest narratives of the dreamworld.
Beyond new wave tendencies, self-help blabbery or woo-woo stuff, facing the things that move us, intrigue us, haunt us, shame us or embarrass us from our childhood and letting them go with whatever methods work: self-hypnosis, journaling, therapy, tapping or meditation can be the liberating and the missing piece to accessing parts of us that we haven’t either healed or fully explored.
Or maybe just making them palpable through automatic writing - filling out 3 pieces of unlined whitepaper with whatever words and ideas we can generate as soon as you wake up.
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TEDX TALK
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