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While standing at the studio sink, going through my ritual of very occasional brush cleaning, I was thinking about an article sent to me by writer friend Pam on brain plasticity in black-capped chickadees. I rinsed some Turpenoid Natural out of a brush and my thoughts shifted to a recent conversation I had with a neighbor who also paints, and as I scrubbed the brush handle with Lava soap, Betty Edward's writing about the elusive 'Aha' moment reminded me those seemingly random thoughts were not random at all.
 
I live on Tailwater Road, the road that leads to the base of Fresno Dam where water (known as tailwater) is released from Fresno Reservoir back into the Milk River to continue its journey across the plains of northern Montana. There are only four houses on Tailwater Road, five including the Bureau of Reclamation office, which isn't really a house, so I only have four neighbors, all of us about two plus miles from our mailboxes on the highway.
 
It turns out that one of my neighbors is also a painter, a Bob Ross style painter. He might even be a certified Ross painter. Occasionally he has asked me to help with a painting or two. He's a copy-a-photo-mostly-animals-painter, not my forte, so my comments would always be something like, "You need to look more, Bob." (In an actual coincidence, his first name is the same as his virtual mentor Bob Ross.) "This is all about learning to see the important information." Then I would point out any obvious problems with values and colors. He would ask me what value on the value scale and how to mix a color, and very carefully write down my responses and off he would go. But this year, after attending the local art show where Bob-my-neighbor always has an exhibit, I was surprised by the sudden shift in his painting. Yes, it was still the realistic animal stuff, but so much better. In fact, it was pretty darned good.
 
I talked to him the other day and mentioned how impressed I was with his latest work. He reminded me of all the times I would tell him painting was about seeing. And finally, he said, he knew he was seeing differently. He mentioned that while trying to work with his wife, who has also taken up the Bob Ross style of painting, he realized he was seeing information that she couldn't see.
 
Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, would describe Bob's new seeing ability as a cognitive shift from verbal, analytical L-Mode to visual, perceptual R-Mode; learning to see and draw one's perceptions, not just what he thought he saw, but what he really saw. It's about learning to perceive edges, spaces, relationship, light and shadow, and in turn, being able to see the whole.

"The left hemisphere deals with an explicit world, where things are named and counted, where time is kept, and step-by-step plans remove uncertainty from the future. The right hemisphere exists in the moment, in a timeless, implicit world, where things are buried in context, and complicated outlooks are constantly changing." (Betty Edwards) My guess is that it took Bob-my-neighbor years to get to that point because he was always painting in a linear, step-by-step, language-based way. He never trusted the process enough to move outside his comfort zone of verbalizing everything. Finally, there must have been some new neural connections made between his analytic brain hemisphere and his visual, perceptual hemisphere. I doubt that it would have taken as long if he had worked differently, but in the end, he should treasure the win.

The black-capped chickadee survives long winters by storing seeds in hundreds of places within its ten-mile range. The bird can remember where all the seeds are located because its brain changes for the winter. The hippocampus, a complex part of the brain specialized for memory and spatial recognition, expands pre-winter by about 30 percent to accommodate the soon-to-be increase in activity. What triggers this adaptation is a mystery, but it proves, once again, that the brain can rewire itself, often in truly amazing ways.

I'm not aware of humans having the ability to grow a larger brain in winter, but our brains do change. Learning, experience, and memory formation create new neural pathways and alter existing ones. It's simply a process of adaptation. There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the human brain, with the average neuron connecting to a thousand other neurons, resulting in 100 trillion neuronal connections. Doing the same thing in the same way reinforces connections, but a change in activity, either internal or external, creates new connections and new patterns of organization.
 
While  repetition can be good for mastering a very specific skill, making art with a capital A requires more than an ability to mix color, handle a brush, and apply paint. As I told Bob repeatedly, it's all about the seeing. And if you want to see differently, you need to work at it. I know from my workshop experience that painters can be shown a different way of seeing. I can point out where to look and what to look at. I can get a student to see what color a shadow is by looking elsewhere first, to a more obvious color, for example, and then back to the shadow. I remind them to look for shapes and spaces, colors, and values. But the onus of continuing on that path is on them, and it's not easy.
 
Doing something once or twice is not the same as creating a new pathway or neural connection that makes the process more accessible. It takes concentration and focus and it's necessary to switch from analytical thinking to spatial, perceptual thinking while painting. Failure to do so creates a place rife with potential for repetition, learned symbols, and predictable outcomes. Over the years, I have watched many painters start strong and fade quickly because they quit looking. They get caught up in the pieces and ignore the relationships. They default to the obvious, more linear path and resort to using the part of the brain that can count seeds; but it's also the part of the brain that can't understand the space the seeds are hidden in.

 Dancer Backstage by Carolyn Anderson

"No artist is pleased. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." - Martha Graham