Artist's Back to Basics

“Scraping the Spectrum”

There’s a lot more to drawing than the making of marks on the paper. We’ve talked in the past about some of the psychological aspects of the creative urge but no matter how you manage your own brain there are things that come as original equipment that can make artistic creation both easier and harder in different ways (sometimes simultaneously). I have had a deep suspicion all my life that has in the last few years coalesced into a conviction. Every single human being is unique when born and can only become more so as life experience is thrown into the mix but there are certain underlying forces that are always going to try to drive us in certain directions, some which seem to have common threads based on factors we really have no control over as they came genetically pre-programmed and set in stone. The underlying maddening urge to create for the sake of it is what I am interested in here. It must come from somewhere.

Genetically Driven

One example is this thing called the autistic spectrum that has always seemed to hold a mostly negative connotation. It’s an extremely broad and multi-layered thing though this spectrum and I think a lot more of the general population than has ever been recognised or diagnosed are either on

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