Williamson

© Beth Williamson 2008
a modicum of planning and control.’ 37 This effectively precludes the sort of
Basic Design training that ‘simply kept repeating the same known formulas
while ignoring the creative individuality of the student.’ 38 It was this sort of use of
Basic Design exercises to which Ehrenzweig objected. The difficulty, as he
clearly sees it in this paper, is that, ‘Creative thinking … presupposes a
mysterious capacity for operating precisely within imprecise structures. The
creative thinker has to take steps and make interim decisions without being able
to visualize their precise relationship with the end product.’ 39 The problem is
that in creative thinking, more and more possibilities open up at each and every
stage. The artist then has a potentially infinite number of options, which simply
cannot be consciously examined one by one. Hence,
he must rely on unconscious intuition for scanning these many
possibilities….[T]he assistance of the unconscious mind is not
merely needed for a greater measure of imagination, as is
commonly assumed, but is indispensable for efficient work, owing
to the superiority of unconscious scanning over conscious
visualization. 40
The conscious mind, of course, will perceive all of this as rather vague. For
Ehrenzweig, it was paramount that students should resist the temptation to
settle for a neat solution, any ‘well-clipped Gestalt.’ 41 His point was that
students should be encouraged to think creatively, to shift their working register
from surface to depth, scanning solutions syncretically and exploring the
limitlessness of their own psyche in order to create the work. It is only through
re·bus Issue 2 Autumn 2008 16