I love live theater. 

A screwball comedy, a musical or a drama, classical repertoire, tributes to musicians or something experimental: I love it all. I love Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Henrik Ibsen as well as Oscar Wilde and Gilbert & Sullivan, and dozens more. I’ve been enthralled in London’s West End and at the restored Globe Theater; wept publically and laughed until I nearly had a urinary emergency on Broadway and in Brooklyn; had at least one moment of genuine spiritual awakening at a dinner theater in Dallas; was immersed in the stories and music of Janis Joplin and Hank Williams in Austin, Texas, and sat through student productions, including one of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in Oxford, England, that is mostly memorable for the truly awful “Southern accents” attempted. 

As everyone knows, among the things that an audience member must do, if he or she wants to engage a play, is willingly to suspend disbelief. 

You have to let texts and actors and sets transport you into another world. And you just can’t do that unless you let go of the sides of the pool and venture with them out into the deep water. (Sorry about those metaphors getting mixed up!)

If you will let go of  your pesky disbelief, then you’re not in a theater anymore, you’re in a shabby New Orleans sitting room with Blanche DuBois. You’re allowing the narrator at the opening of Henry V to take you out of that little O where the audience sits side-by-side and onto the bloody field of Agincourt. “We few. We happy few!” 

The willing suspension of disbelief allows us to believe we’re elsewhere in time and space. 

There’s another sort of “willing suspension,” however, that is necessary for visual artists. It is the willing suspension of belief. It works like this. 

Let’s say you are on a ramble through a grassy valley. Let’s say you are walking a familiar road in the Yorkshire Dales of northern England. You know this ground well. You’ve rambled here many times before. Rolling hills. Cattle and sheep dot the landscape. A dark stream flows over rocks at the bottom of the valley. You know the scene, right? 

Ahhh. But therein lies the rub! 

Your natural tendency is not to separate what you’ve seen a hundred times before, what you’ve already identified, and named, and classified, what you believe is there  from what you are seeing right now. Your beliefs are driving your perception. Your benign prejudices are shuttering your eyes. You see what you expect to see; you see it so clearly, you can’t see what it actually looks like. At least, you can’t see it as a visual artist needs to see it. 

{The paragraph above could be stated better: “Your natural tendency is to overlay what you are seeing right now with what you’ve seen a hundred times before, what you’ve already identified, named, classified, what you already believe is there. Your beliefs and prior conceptions are driving your perception.}

Is that vague shape far up on the distant fells a barn?

Don’t you dare answer that question!!! Before you can name it, paint just what you see! Just exactly what you see. Just that. Grey lines, maybe. A burnt umber break in a gray shape. Sharply defined lines on three sides, ragged lines on a fourth. And what’s that diagonal line cutting across it? Don’t know. Just paint what you see!

Are those odd blurs of white and black on that hill sheep?

Before you can answer yes and identify them, paint what you see!!! Just what your eyes take in and your brain is trying to make sense of. Not what your preconception are is telling you a sheep looks like. Just paint what your eye sees. Don’t you dare give me a fluffy white lamb with four little legs and a black face; give me that splotch of colors that you actually see right there, right now. 

Your beliefs — based on long experience — are rushing in.

Build a dam to keep them out! 

Get those cheerleaders on the sidelines shouting, “Hold ‘em back! Push ‘em back! Way back!”

Suspend your beliefs, your preconceptions, with all your will! Let what you see (just that!) guide your imagination, your hand, your charcoal, your brush. Let your imagination be supercharged by your lack of naming, your willful unwillingness to identify, your willing disbelief that keeps you from categorizing and taxonomizing the world to death and mounting that dead thing on a wall. 

There’s a curve beneath a jagged fat line of greens near the horizon. It’s violet or violet blending into a really dark purple tinged with a color like something pulled fresh from a peat bog. Then below the purple there’s a different green altogether, spreading out into various shades and weird shapes and blending with rivulets of gold. Don’t you dare believe that is a line of trees, a long shadow, grass on a field! Why? 

Because!!! Because if you will put on the canvas just what you see (just that!), rather than what your beliefs inform you that you must be seeing, rather than your mere expectations, you have the opportunity to allow the world to reveal itself on its own terms to you and (almost as important) to those people who will eventually view your painting. You want them to join you on that windy trail, squinting into the distance, ready to discover, ready also to see. 

Several years ago, my wife Deborah showed me some work by a nationally recognized watercolor artist. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten his name. He wins prizes and conducts workshops all over the country. On first blush, I was captivated by his apparent technical skill. But, then, Debbie placed another and another and another image of paintings he did before me. And something became very clear, something she already had noticed. His barns — no matter where they appeared — were the same barns. His trees were variations on a few models. So were his hills and fields.  Examining his paintings, it became clear that his landscapes possessed all the spontaneity of a very tired, very predictable television sitcom with canned laughter and applause.

Where there is no element of discovery there is little chance for art to emerge. Indeed, it is a poor artist who hides the wonders of the world behind a screen of his or her own prejudices. Let creation surprise you!

There’s a little game I play sometimes with photographs I’ve taken. I’ll bring one up on my iPad and I’ll ask someone, “What is it?” 

My photographs often deliberately decontextualize the subject to the point where it is hard to name what you’re looking at. 

One of my favorite such images is the illustration for this little essay.

Often when I’ve shown it, people will say, “Oh, that must be an early morning photo of a narrow path through the fog.” “Did you use a special lens to get that effect? Or was it really that foggy that morning?” Some see strange vegetation growing and remark about the odd colors. Others will actually turn the photo upside down. 

When I reveal that it’s a picture of the edge of a pond, looking straight down through shallow water into the muddy bottom below, some folks will say, “Oh, I SEE it now.” I would perhaps argue that they saw even better before they named it. 

But my favorite response is, “NOOOOO. I don’t believe you.”