Fill In The Blanks

Featured image: Artichoke II

Did you know that when we see a banana in a bowl, our brain transfers that image of a banana, without any conscious awareness at a rate of 10 million bits of visual sensory information every fraction of a second? Think of it – our minds are so amazing.

Have you ever seen just an edge with a bit of color of something and can instantly know what it is? I have so many times. Our memory fills in the parts that are missing so even if we only see an edge with a bit of color we can fill in the blanks.
So, when we see an abstract painting and our mind cannot connect the dots and find something to relate to, it gets lost and we get lost. We get lost because our minds don’t know how to read the abstract. So we begin to organize the abstract into something familiar where we feel comfortable and can say, "I see a waterfall." In reality, we are looking at a blue rectangle and a green triangle.

We imagine. We create. This is where it happens. This is where the concept is born as we discover and explore. If we close down our minds to something we cannot immediately understand, we stop growing, we stop processing and we stop creating.

Using our minds to untangle abstractions, for that matter, just using our own minds and not allowing others to think for us is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves.

Don’t be afraid of abstraction – grow – expand – live.