Intention, Intuition and Improvisation

A competent teacher bases lectures, reading and activities on the requirements of a final product of some sort--whether it's a test or an essay or a painting. Yet, there's abhorrence to "teaching to the test" because such teaching stifles creative and critical thinking. Managing that task--encouraging creative and critical thinking and testing it--characterizes competent teaching.


There's a parallel in writing. Writers can't help but to be conscious of their audience as they compose. And it's important they write to their audience, but do not let the audience determine their curriculum, so to speak. Writers of serious narrative nonfiction aren't slaves to formulas and mass-market buzz topics and treatments; instead, they strive to connect with an intelligent and thoughtful audience. 

Ocean Park #79, 1975 Richard Diebenkorn

On a recent rainy Sunday, I spent an afternoon at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California immersed in an extensive exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn's large abstract paintings. It was easy to lose myself in the complexity he painted into these works. Their depth grounds the paintings and holds the viewer's attention at an intellectual and emotional level.
      
Curator Sarah C. Bancroft explains, "The artist worked and reworked the canvases, scraping and repainting, building up layers as well as atmospheric fields and planes, finally arriving at a solution through a combination of intention, intuition and improvisation."
      
Diebenkorn's effort creating the work, his layering of "intention, intuition and improvisation" reaps an emotional connection that washes over the viewer encountering the paintings. We realize the skill intellectually as we slow down and reflect analytically.


There's a parallel in writing. In order to reach an audience at a sophisticated level, we build layers into our writing. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight describes Diebenkorn's layering process: "The narrative in these paintings is a story of their making--of a vertical blue line that gains a violet-rose shadow as it tracks down the edge of a canvas, turning off at an angle like a refracted ray of light and then sliding beneath a wash of luminous gray, only to emerge at the other side as a little wedge of canary yellow. Or, of a field of brushy green that, the longer you look, slowly gives up layers of under-painting in hues you can't quite put your finger on."


Likewise, we layer our stories in multiple drafts and readings to create subtle turns and refracted understandings--with, for example, tense shifts, points of view, back story, foreshadowing, flashes back and forward. We follow Emily Dickinson's vision to "tell the truth, but tell it slant." We write as Diebenkorn painted--to integrate surprise, to turn the obvious on its head. And we know the more sophisticated the reader, the more we need to fight predictability in our writing, the more we need to "solve" the word problems in our stories.


Diebenkorn said it simply in the video at the museum: "I paint for an ideal viewer, not just for myself." And he said about the end product: "Now, the idea is to get everything right. It's not just color or form or space or line--it's everything at once." Effective narrative nonfiction likewise reveals complexity, all "at once," though the process comes from all the "scraping and repainting" and "building up layers."