nonsite

How do I make the aesthetic decisions about my artworks?

I think I make my decisions based on my learned values- I feel this colour is better than that one. These decisions are in part informed by my intuitive ‘knowing’ that this is ‘right’ and a better choice or solution than something else. I choose a specific colour, or refine the curve of a form or choose one image over another based on my intuition and a lifetime of knowledge.

Michael Polanyi helped clarify tacit knowing as an area of knowledge. He thought that creative acts are charged with strong personal feelings, intuitions or ‘tacit’ forms of knowing.

He argues that that “the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as ‘passions’. They might well be aimed at discovering ‘truth’, but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As he wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’.  Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something. Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery.”

These ideas makes sense to me when I reflect on how I make decisions on the drawings and paintings that I make and how I decide to keep one over another. I make a certain decisions that feel ‘right’.