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Missoni and the seduction of the creative process |
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Imagination is more important than knowledge Pictorial art, music, literature and architecture, just like every other human activity, are the fruits of the organization of our mind. As the Tuscan genius Leonardo da Vinci understood when he wrote “Painting is a mental process”, cerebral activity provides the source for artists, philosophers and scientists imaginations. Centuries have gone by but we are still unable to understand exactly what ‘being creative’ actually means.
Nevertheless, thanks to modern research techniques, we can today explore certain principles of that perceptive activity which gives rise to the liveliness of the imagination. With these first nuggets of understanding of the extraordinary complexity of human nature, it is worthwhile reflecting upon the work of artists and designers and, in this case, the Missonis.
I have examined with particular interest the Missonis’ artistic output and have realised that the relationship between their work and the brain’s creative powers have perhaps never been properly described. And so I was delighted to be given the chance to write a few reflections, of a neurobiological nature, and regard this as an excellent chance to bring together two apparently quite distant worlds, those of Art and Neuroscience.
More specifically, this paper forms part of an active debate and extensive research into what is known as neuro-aesthetics, an attempt to better understand the nature of man and the secrets of the mind through an exchange of opinions and experience between scientists and artists.
Art and the brain The artist portrays the passions, emotions and pleasures of the spirit.
He or she translates a love of beautiful things into shape and colour and allows the beauty of
Art – to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – to give “joy to the soul through the senses”.
And yet feelings of love, hate, even the very ability to create or appreciate art,
reflect the brain’s own very specific properties and laws. Hence, as Hippocrates had already understood,
it is in no way reductive to link human genius and its magical fantasies, scientific and artistic intuition,
with the brain. In the same way, this specific neurobiological approach to the Missonis’ work
should not be construed as an attempt to explain, in scientific terms, our own emotions and perceptions
when faced with their creations, but rather as an aid towards understanding the artist’s work,
which at the same time might tells us something interesting about the brain.
Common perceptions: from shapes to lines What happens in our minds when we look at a Missoni creation? Without any doubt the aesthetic experience varies widely: the artist’s own emotion and the emotions stirred up in the observer’s soul, creativity and perception, these are phenomena which are influenced by a wide range of different factors, such as genetic make-up, personal experience and cultural background.
However, in spite of these differences, we all seem to agree when defining works of exceptional quality as ‘masterpieces’. This occurs when a work of art manages to express that concept and that ideal which we are all able to recognize thanks to the existence of physiological processes common to each member of our species and upon which artistic inventiveness has its foundation. For example, when you look at a work of art or listen to a certain piece of music, when you taste a fine wine, when you wear Missoni, or when you win at sports (Ottavio Missoni would understand this well!), in all these instances we feel particularly stimulated because the brain produces varying amounts of dopamine, a molecule which contributes to feelings of pleasure. Artists engrossed in giving form to their emotions, passions and feelings are in a euphoric state because their brains are similarly suffused with dopamine.
As a rule, art does not faithfully reproduce Nature, but portrays a concept which the brain has generated by selecting the essential information concerning the objects around us and ignoring the superfluous. The work of art, therefore, is a mental representation of the object and its universal properties. This paring-down to the essentials encourages artists to transform complex forms and obtain abstract depictions which do not quite lose the ability to represent reality. For the Missonis, too, the stylization of naturalistic motifs is a representation of this concept and since every brain produces its own representation in a similar way, these depictions are comprehensible to all and thus allow us to communicate emotions.
The search for essential and constant elements has led artists, above all during the 20th Century, to push back the limits of abstraction, using straight lines as the basic motif and drawing out their expressive function in a way that is totally alien to figurative representation. Among such artists one has to mention Piet Mondrian, who created networks of perpendicular lines in order to represent the constant truths and essential constituents of form. In many of the Missoni works on paper and textile we witness straight lines and angles, zigzags and Greek keys which produce a pleasing complexity of line and colour.
Employing a simple and immediate visual language – of coloured stripes – the Missonis have captured many hearts, without ever, in over half a century, submitting to the corrupting influence of time. Maybe the reason for their success was that same stripe which, at first forced upon them by a technical limitation in their knitting machinery, was later to become a conscious style choice.
The success of the Missoni striped creations is not fortuitous, at least not in biological terms, since such works display what many regard as “abstraction of form”. Abstraction is the first stage of perception in the brain. Abstraction is a search for those essential, constant features in what we see and is the first link between the outside world and that depicted in our minds. Where shape is concerned, abstraction begins with the activity of a group of brain cells which respond to straight lines oriented in a particular way Today, these cells are considered to be the basic elements in the perception of all forms and are the cells which are stimulated by certain works, such as Ottavio’s Manhattan.
The Missonis are famous above all for their use of colour, but the stripes themselves have a key influence on the perception of colour. The apparent simplicity of the stripes reflects the universality of the brain’s first steps when processing form and perhaps this is why the Missoni style is so widely loved. Arranged in the right way, these stripes highlight and amplify the importance of colour, freeing it from the limitations and tensions imposed by more complex shapes and allowing the mind to travel quickly in linear fashion. As a result, by means of these stripes, our attention is focused mainly on the colours and this happens for a physiological reason: those brain cells which identify form are not bothered about colour and separate the perception of form from that of colour. (more on request) |
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