Use Your Imagination

Lately I've been giving my brain a workout by participating in Cuban-born artist Elsita's imagination exercises. The conqueror-of-every-medium has been producing the most astonishing pencil drawings and asking her readers to give their interpretations of the delicate, complex works. It's been so much fun to carefully view and reflect on the symbolism of the images. It's also entertaining to read the comments to see how many divergent interpretations arise from one image.

I am quite taken by what Elsita herself said about the response to her own drawings:

"I look at the piece and try to read between lines. But as always, the most interesting explanations never come from myself but from other people. For example Natalie [Elsita's daughter]; when she saw the Flower Girl drawing she said: hey! that's sooo funny!!!! That girl was messing up with the flower and now the flower is eating her! run for your life little girl!!!!
And that's the best part of art, the freedom that it gives us to express ourselves in infinite ways as the creator of the piece or as the viewer."

I've had a very big creative block over the last few months, and Elsita's philosophy about art has unlocked it a bit. It's empowering to have an artist say that there is creativity involved in being a viewer of a piece of art. It also feels inspiring to have an artist say that her art isn't exclusive to its creator or to a few informed art critics. Instead, it's a participatory experience. Here's Elsita's formal invitation to join in her imagination exercises, which I encourage you to accept:

"I invite you to keep these interpretation games alive in this blog as a way to stimulate our imagination and as a way to connect with each other through one of the most rewarding things ever: art :)"

Elsita's is a model I hope that other artists adopt, especially given that blogland is such an effective medium for connecting with others and sharing ideas.

Let me leave you with yet another of Elsita's ideas about art and existence:

"Art isn't really alive, think about that, we are talking about objects, what is really alive is us and all the ideas coming out from our mind when we interact with that object."

I had a moment like this, a feeling of being intensely alive and connected to a piece of art (and to my son), when my son and I stood in front of Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912), at MOMA last month. We stood there for many minutes, exclaiming as different images leaped out at us from the painting. It was the first painting that my son had responded to that morning, and I think his excitement arose from looking at the painting like a code of images to decipher. I felt like all my synapses were firing at once!

I wonder if there are other daily imagination exercises, like Elsita's, that can be done to keep our brains awake and inspired?