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Intuition Over Logic

2/14/2017

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in·tu·i·tion
noun the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

  I had a big revelation yesterday.  With good art, there's often times no logical reason why it works.  You could sit an analyze it all day long, without ever understanding why.  The same is true of something that makes you laugh.  You could sit and think about why something is funny, but there may be no rhyme or reason to it.  So what makes someone a good artist?  And what makes someone funny?  That's what interests me. 
  I feel that I was trying too hard to analyze how and why a drawing is good.  It's easy to get caught up in technique and never actually practice.  But to be a good artist, you need to have good intuition.  I believe that you can hone your intuition through practice, but you can't really teach that feeling of intuition.  This is what makes a work of art significant in my opinion.  There's no logic to define which colors you should use or how quickly you should draw.  It's all very nebulous.
  As an example, I redid my website yesterday.  I chose some new fonts for the website text based on intuition instead of following what other websites do.  I went by feeling instead of thinking.  Now, I had to know how to build my website and the various options that I had, but I ultimately made my own decision.  Another thing to remember is that you don't have to stick with something forever.  I can change the font on this site whenever I want.  Pencils have erasers so you can change your mind.
  My favorite author, Haruki Murakami, says it like this: "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
 
  
I'll be following my instincts from now on.
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