Till Noever — author & polymath

Visual Creations

Having been born into a family of artists, I suppose the ‘visual art’ thing is always lurking somewhere. Nature or nurture? Who can tell? Never mind that I am of a very disposition, with a serious dab of ontological philosophy driving that. Never mind that I have always been a reading addict—my novels/novella reading count runs into the thousands, most of them probably not sufficiently high-brow to be called ‘literature'; excepting the works of Jack Vance of course!—and, maybe inevitably, ended up with the ‘writing’ bug as well.

Along the way I’ve also produced a range of… Not sure what to call them. I have a dislike for the word ‘art’ and everything associated with it, as I consider it so overused, abused and mangled that it’s become almost meaningless. Just like ‘story telling’, which is currently suffering the same fate. So, let me just call these products ‘visual creations’. Not trying to be pompous or ‘different’. Just really fed up with the word ‘art’. ‘Visual creation’ was the best thing I could come up with.

Aside: for a rant on my low opinion of modern art, look here.

I suppose photography comes under that label as well, but it’s different; requires a set of dissimilar skills. The brain has a completely different job to do when it captures and processes an image provided by a bunch of photons incident on film or a digital sensor, than when it attempts to develop a connection between its left and right. Not sure I completely believe in the left vs. right brain paradigm, but it’ll have to do.

Connecting your brain to not just capture and, basically technically, process the raw captured image, but to actually create and image using even simple tools, such as pencils, is a very different thing altogether. As Darren Rouser summarizes it here:

“You were born with two eyes. As you grew your eyes learned to focus on what you touched and your mind learned to connect what it perceived with what your eyes saw. You learned to see.
And then, something changed.
Over time your sight became so bombarded with stimuli that your mind learned to take shortcuts. On the whole, this was a very good thing. But as those shortcuts piled up you forgot how to learn how to see. As a normally functioning person, you might not notice. As a budding artist you most certainly will.
Unlearning a lifetime of cognitive shortcuts and then learning accurate sight requires an objective and consistent standard. That standard is nature, your visual source. It is not your subjective feelings about it nor someone else’s shortcut version of it.
Rather, it is doing your best to accurately perceive what’s visually in front of you and then record that observation. Only after you can do that consistently can you make intentional, intelligent, and artistic choices about deviating from your source. You can also more easily scale because your eye is now trained to accurately see.”

Protagonists, who are active in the creation of visual materials, appear in several of my novels. At the time of creating this page, the latest one of these of is Louisa and Rick; where, like in How Come We Didn’t know?, The Ultimate Adventure and Emortal’s Quest, the activity visual creation plays a major dramatic and even pivotal role.

It was maybe unavoidable that eventually—like now—I’m finally committing myself to a determined exploration just how far I can develop my skills in this area, which is so very different from, yet oddly connected to, writing novels. That’s maybe not a surprise, since I tend to be very visual in my descriptions of scenes that I consider important. My current self-developmental focus is on pencil drawing. I love pencil; possibly inspired by my late mother who was a graphic artist and did some beautiful work in that medium. Right now I want to focus on becoming more than merely proficient in drawing people. Way I see it, if you can draw people, and expecially their faces, you can draw just about anything. There’s nothing more challenging rendering the subtleties of the human face.

Meanwhile, below is an eclectic selection of random visual creations, using various different media. I’ve excluded my odd sculpture excursions, except for a pendant, created decades aIn due time I’ll add another carousel of images below with my recent attempts to progress in this new, challenging and and slightly scary endeavor.

Indeed, I’m faced with the challenge of stepping way out of my comfort zone with a project that may just rearrange my brain beyond what I am able to anticipate right now.

Scary stuff…