An anecdote is told of the great Victorian sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer that at least shows him to have had a sense of humour. He was a close friend of the novelist George Eliot, and the story has it that one day, while walking in the garden, Spencer was prompted to run out an extensive set of speculations about the evolution of the plants at which they were looking. Eliot interrupted his flow by pointing out a rather elementary inconsistency between his theorising and their own observations. He is said to have acknowledged the problem with a smile, and the comment, “Alas, a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact!”
I know how the felt because I had a similar experience today. Readers of the previous post will remember that I was suggesting that aspects of our current educational system, by favouring “left-brain” aspects of education, possibly act unfavourably on the development of children’s artistic abilities. I have to admit that I do go on a bit about this issue, but this is probably understandable as a result of my experience of an attempt to “correct” my left-handedness when I started school. My evangelical fervour about the issue encountered an uncomfortable observation today.
The composition on which I am working at the moment, as an element in my series on creation and creativity, is a complicated composition that “quotes” a variety of instances from the history of art, relating these to the imagination of a small child. Included in the items that are illustrated here is a group of the outlines of the human hand that have been discovered in pre-historic cave-dwellings. Looking at these today I couldn’t help but notice that all of the hands in the illustration from which I have been working are left hands. The obvious implication of this is that the ancient artists responsible for them placed their left hands on the stone and painted round them using their right hands. In other words, pre-historic artists were generally right-handed. The “ugly fact” I have to face is that they were certainly not victims of an educational system that prioritised linguistic and mathematical skills.
Maybe I should just stop feeling sorry for myself and get on with painting.