Monday 13 June 2011

Integrating conscious and unconscious minds

In the wonderful big book Painting Today by Tony Godfrey, he says that
Making a painting is all about hand, eye and brain co-ordination: no other art form links mind and body so totally. 
I think this has similarities to Gregory Bateson's suggestion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that
art integrates the reasons of the heart with the reasons of the reason, i.e. those multiple levels of mind "of which one extreme is called consciousness and the other the unconscious"?
To co-ordinate mind and body and to integrate conscious and unconscious seem to me to be slightly different descriptions of the same thing. If I understand Stephen Gilligan correctly, he seems to identify cognitive mind with conscious mind, and somatic mind (body mind) with the unconscious.

When I am working on small scale 'sketches' especially, I experience a relaxing of conscious control that I think, for me is an important element of this integration.






 

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