Sitting before the big white empty canvas, I have loaded my brush with a mixture of Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber and Alizarin Crimson oil paints to make a rich dark purple for the shadows. I am hesitant to start and I am intimidated by all that blank canvas since I plan to try something different this time in how I am going to paint this landscape painting of The Lost Mine Peak in Big Bend National Park. I look over the blank canvas and decide just where the top of the highest rock crag should be to be the center of interest. I look one last time at the photograph and study the shapes of the shadows of the rock crags at the mountain top. I take the brush and make the first mark on the canvas in the shape of the shadow of the highest crag. Moving to the next shadow, I paint its shape. From shadow to shadow, I paint all the dark areas of the painting first. While doing this, I am also trying not to think consciously about what I am doing, but to let my subconscious mind make the decisions for me to do this painting. As the painting progresses, I let my hunches and gut feelings decide for me as to what to do next.

Before doing this painting, I have always carefully designed what the painting should be and transposed the design to the canvas and then carefully selected the colors before starting the painting. It was almost a “paint by the numbers” approach. And then I read a book on how our brain functions and the importance of our subconscious mind. The title of the book is Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain, written by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine. The word Incognito in the title is referring to our subconscious mind.

Our subconscious mind is where we have all of our knowledge and life experiences stored up to help us make decisions and to operate our bodies. Without us consciously thinking about it, it takes care of all of body functions such as breathing, blood circulation, digestion, vision, smell, feeling, growth and etc. Through life experiences we have put the information in our subconscious mind so that it can send all the necessary nerve signals for us to manipulate our bodies to walk, run, jump, move our eyes, hands, fingers and such so that we can function without having to consciously think about it. As we have been growing from early childhood, we have been putting information into our subconscious mind on how to do things such as learning to speak, to read, to write, to do mathematics, to type, to drive a car, and all the other things we need to know how to do to live in this world. Also, we have been putting information in the subconscious mind on how to interact with the other humans and creatures that we live with in this world.

We can never be really good at a particular thing until our subconscious mind is fully developed and programmed to do that particular thing. For instance, a football quarterback can never be good at passing a football to a receiver running at some distance away from him until he has fully developed his subconscious mind to do all of the calculations, in a millisecond, for the distance, the trajectory of the ball, the wind direction and speed, the defenders probable location, the receivers speed and direction, his hand gripping the football, his feet placement and the exact arm strength force necessary to launch the spiraling football to go where he thinks the receiver will be when the ball comes down. If he has to think about all of this with his conscious mind, he can’t do it in the fraction of a second that he has to decide what to do. Football practice is actually the coaches teaching the subconscious mind of each player their role for each and every play. In a game, if any member of the team has to stop and think about their individual role on any given play, then the play is likely to go bad and the coaches will be screaming. Our subconscious mind requires the practice of repetition of each thing that we want to learn until it is fully programmed to do it without the involvement of our conscious mind.

During my career as an architect, many times I used my subconscious mind to solve difficult problems. Since each design project always had a limited amount of time and expense to do the project, I had learned to not spend very much time on those things that I did not know how to do, but to always keep working on those things that I did know what to do. At night, before going to sleep, I would review in my mind the problems that I didn’t know how to do, and very often I would awake the next morning knowing the answers to those problems.

Now for me, a retired architect trying to be an artist, the message from this book is that I have to train my subconscious mind to be an artist.

The other big thing that I learned in reading this book is the conflict in our minds between emotion and reasoning. Essentially all of our decisions are initially made based on our emotional wants, but have to be justified by our reasoning before we will act on the decision. At least that is the way we should be doing it. We start out as babies with mostly just the emotional wants. As we grow, we begin to add reasoning to counter the emotional side of our minds, however we will continue to always make decisions that were first based on our emotional wants.

To be successful in art, the artist has to be able to produce something that will please the emotional side of the mind of the viewer. However, to get the viewer to purchase the art, the reasoning side of their mind has to be convinced with all the reasons why the viewer should purchase the art.

So, for me trying to be an artist, I am going to select subject matters for my paintings that are emotionally appealing to me and then maybe they will also be emotionally appealing to others. I also have to train my subconscious mind to skillfully portray my subject matters in my paintings so that the reasoning side of the minds of the viewers of my artwork will be inclined to think that they should also purchase my artwork. This sounds simple enough, don’t you think?

I suppose that I am going to have to put some reins on my conscious mind to stay out of the way and not interfere too much.

My favorite hiking trail in Big Bend National Park is The Lost Mine Trail that starts at Panther Pass and goes up to the top of The Lost Mine Peak. So, emotionally this mountain scene is a good one for me to use in a painting. I basically let my subconscious mind do this painting, in other words, I didn’t think about it, I just painted what my “gut” said that I should do. It is a start in this new adventure of trying to be an artist. I hope you like it.

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