By Jack Bowman Ó

Virtually all aspects of art come from the evolution of the human mind in its attempt to keep the body alive. This is pronounced in the following example:

Two naked primal men are walking trough the jungle. Everything is green. One of them sees an orange spot in all the green. He reacts and runs. The other did not see the orange spot and the orange spot becomes a tiger and devours the second man. The one that reacted to that which was most different in his environment survived and reproduced and he is our ancestor. The one that did not react to that which is most different did not survive and did not reproduce.

This relates to art in a major way. Creativity. Creativity is the orange spot in the green jungle. Creativity is that which is most different in an otherwise stable environment. The green jungle was the save stable environment and the orange spot was the creativity.

This translates to "Creativity is something different in an otherwise stable environment" and "Man reacts to that which is most different in an otherwise stable environment" Therefore the orange spot not only defines creativity but it also makes creativity important. It also accounts for the lack of interest in so much of the boring art of the world.

Gestalt is a German word that means the whole or the entire form. It is the fact that some people see the whole first and then the parts. This is critical to design. Because design is the whole without the parts. Gestalt states that we see the whole first without seeing the parts. This means that the world is the whole first and the parts are only secondary (at least the way man perceives reality) The whole then is the design and the part then is the creativity if it is very different from the whole.

Gestalt is a difficult concept and there really is no translation to English. Therefore, I will give an example of what is not Gestalt.

If we take a math problem like one plus one equals two. The first one is a part. The second one is a part but the answer two is not. It is the whole. This seems simple enough but there is one difficulty here. We see the parts first. We see the first one as a part and the second one as a part. In a piece of art or as far as that goes our visual environment we see the whole environment first and not the parts. In art and the visual world it is like there is a whole that is made up of parts and in the math world there is a bunch of parts that make up a whole.

This becomes very important when creating a work of art because the work or art is just that. It is a "work of art". It is not a bunch of pieces that make a work of art. Artist tend to start with the whole first and not the parts. You may think this cannot be true. However, it is. They may not see all the whole and they may see different wholes as they progress. But they are always seeing the whole. This generally known as their vision. Their artistic vision.

There is a real conflict here in teaching art and seeing the Gestalt. For teachers to teach art they usually start with art elements; Shape, form, color, etc. This is not the proper way to teach art. Teaching the elements are OK but the student must always be made aware that they do not make art. This can be proven by taking all the art elements and via computer combine them. There will not be a work of art. It is due mainly to the orange tiger. The elements combined only make that stable green world without the tiger. The goal then is to teach the whole if you are teaching art.

In teaching the whole we should not be very concerned with the traditional art elements because they become the green jungle. But we have to deal with the orange tiger that becomes the creativity. In the final analysis the art elements become less important because we realize we can inject the creativity with only a fundamental knowledge of the art elements. This fundamental knowledge is that the green jungle or neutral background must consist of balance or balanced parts. It is true here that the balance can be, and is, achieved by distributing and selecting art elements. If we consider this in its purist form it is essentially that art elements must be properly distributed so we can and will ignore them.

In photography the design becomes far more important than in drawing and painting. This is because the visual world as we photograph it is very chaotic. The photography does not take into account color constancy (the tendency for the human mind to see things the same all the time). The observer still expects things to go to that green jungle and then the creativity. The green jungle is the challenge in photography. So we have to deal with the color constancy by putting it into the still photograph. In other words we have to make something the human mind understands as ordinary, or seen before, and not chaotic.

We achieve "color constancy" artificially by imposing a geometric or balanced world in our flat photograph. This is where design theory comes into play. "We must see the whole without the parts."