The Polemics of Visual Thinking:

Eye and I:Creative Intelligence and Perceptual Optics 1

"The enrichment artists receive thoroughout their childhood . . . can contribute to their life-long openness to experience, to the intensity of their vision, and to their ability to test the boundaries of the known and the familar" (John-Steiner: p.92)

I would expand this appraisal of childhood enrichment to include the audience of the artist, and not simply the artist herself. It is necassary to educate the viewing public, as much as it is necessary to foster the artist - they are as interdependant as language and imagery. The painter Fritz Scholder describes this process with the simple statement: "All kids draw, I just continued." (Ibid: p.93). But this choice is problematic with cultural trends leaning towards language as the mode of choice for complex personal expression. "Nowadays to become an artist you have to be part of a seduction," states painter Gene Newman,"Society, at present, does not provide a function for the artist . . ." (Ibid:95) But art remains a central function of visual thinking, and for visual thinkers, of cognition itself. Ben Shahn described the processes of art not as ". . . a spoken idea alone, nor a legend, nor a simple use or intention that forms what I have called the biography of a painting. It is rather the wholeness of thinking and feeling within an individual; it is partly his time and place; it is partly his childhood or even his adult fears and pleasures, and it is very greatly his thinking what he wants to think." (Shahn: p.51)

While giving form to their understanding, artists are extending and enhancing the known contents of the language of vision.