On Tavis Smiley, Frank Gehry, asked of his method of inspiration / composition, said that it is in work, model building over and over till an idea emerges. That is the important theme in the method of composition, finding out what is there to be designed only by working, except he said, and showed it, the second sketch he ever made of Bilbao looks very like the finished work. This is, he said, one of a kind, not that it proves anything, but validates the process in the exception. Much more of Gehry's mythology here.
I am not a conceptual artist. I can’t just sit there and
think of an idea. Most of it comes out of my hands . . . I have always used
whatever comes to hand, or into my head, that makes sense in my own work, that
I can get some energy from.” Peter Voulkos quoted posthumously in Ceramics
Monthly, April 2002
“The minute you begin
to understand what you’re doing it loses that searching quality. You have to
forget about the little technical problems that don’t matter—you’ve overcome
them long ago anyway. You finally reach a point where you’re no longer
concerned with keeping this blob of clay centered on the wheel and up in the
air. Your emotions take over and what happens just happens. Usually you don’t
know it’s happened until after it’s done.”
Likewise in Rising: The Art and Life of John Waddel (excerpt) the method of work is the same, except it's not in paper but in large forms of wood, beeswax, stone, sketched over and over and applied to models on the wall out of which his Rising emerged after a decade of so of tearing down and building back up. That is, he did not know what he was making until it was made.
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