Experiencing our world as 'visual white noise'

We are daily surrounded by a material world that 'someone' had to create. We daily experience the results of the creativity of others, and much of this in our daily lived experience we take for granted. We pass these things all the time, but pay them no mind at all.

Last night I joined a group of friends and former colleagues for a meal (Quartz Restaurant, Rolleston), and my attention was caught by these quite overt examples of creativity that I suspect, for almost all diners, are simply visual 'background noise', perhaps we could describe these things as the material world equivalent of 'white noise'. (I would add that there is no judgement on the quality of these pieces, merely on their presence).

This morning I sat in the waiting area of my doctor's surgery. I was making an effort NOT to look at my phone but rather to notice the world around me, and my eye was caught by these lovely shapes.

These are all examples of some act of creativity from someone, somewhere, some time. It struck me that these things merge into a world of 'visual white noise' unless we are deliberate and intentional in 'noticing' them, in really looking at the world around us.

Now I was not trained in the visual arts. I was trained into the world of economics, the 'dismal science', a world with which I fell out of love some years ago. 

You may have heard some of the jokes about economists:

"Did you know that economists have successfully predicted 5 of the last 3 recessions?"

or ..

"If you put all of the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion."

It's not a profession with which one normally associates 'noticing', even though it bases its understandings on large volumes of statistical data and creatively imagined theoretical models. It's just a shame that the two don't coincide more often.

In contrast, my very incomplete understanding of the teaching of the creative arts involves cultivating the deliberate and intentional 'noticing', the observation, of the world around us. I believe this to be true of the poetry that I try to write, based as it so often is on the 'noticing' of emotion, or people, or events.

Elwyn Richardson made direct reference to this, when he encouraged the children in his care to observe the world, and to capture what they saw, whether in clay, on paper, or in movement. In his book 'In the early world', he says:

"A great deal of the school work was directed towards establishing attitudes of awareness in the children. Thus in art and poetry we had come to see that accuracy was an important part of the work and that it was closely linked with the individual's awareness of his environment. .... Some were observers of nature and showed a keener observation of scientific detail; others had a feeling for space relationships and noticed, for example, that a bird can fly within the bare branches of a winter tree. I think this awareness is also the basis of learning processes such as those found in arithmetic and spelling." (Richardson, Pge 125)

I think it is one of the benefits of learning in the 'arts' generally that we learn to notice, to observe, to see (or hear, or feel) the detail, or more generally to simply 'see'. I have become an advocate for arts education because it supports the development of such skills which are then transferable to whatever other area of learning we care to name: sciences, mathematics, technology... etc

Perhaps more particularly though, a broader arts education allows us to better appreciate the world in which we live, to appreciate beauty, cleverness, and problem solving, to appreciate creativity, rather than walk 'zombie like' through our lives experiencing our world as 'visual white noise'. Perhaps this is one of the secrets behind the impact of creativity on our wellbeing.