Creativity Research and Potent Personal Imagery

The Wide-Image

I recently came upon a concept developed by Gregory Ulmer called "the wide-image", guided by the categories that showed up in research into breakthrough inventors:

"Their imaginations tended to be composite assemblages of cultural materials drawn from family experience, entertainment or popular culture materials, schooling background, and a particular community history. I am thinking of investigations by Holton or Gruber that characterize how innovators draw upon an image of wide scope--an aesthetic embodiment of their attunement with the world (what the philosophical tradition referred to as Stimmung).
My pedagogy aims at helping students notice, map, and enhance their own image of wide scope (their own learning style--with the term style marking the aesthetic quality of the thinking).

Given the heuretic principle that requires me to try out for myself whatever poetics my students are using, I have been exploring my own wide image. Perhaps I can get you to test this idea on yourself as well? You will recognize that the method of inquiry into Stimmung is what I have called mystorical. It starts with finding a memory associated with family (my memories of my father, for example, and I might have to come back to those again later). In the institution of Family we are introduced into our native language, and develop for a brief time an oral culture."

How interesting is that?!

What Gregory touches on is that the artist's desire to recapture certain moods, or to incorporate the wide-image into his work, propels the artist down particular paths in their artistic journey. Mood and image meld and their role in the artist's creative process is complex.

A wide-image may be just about anything: a striking visual image such a bright cloud floating alone against a dark sky, a haunting melody heard during an emotional event, a fascinating object such as an ornately decorative box filled with odds and ends, or a place such as a lonely dock or the last house on the edge of town.

The idea of the "wide-image" refers to the image's ability to evoke, represent, or imply many things, but goes beyond metaphor in that it suggests more than similarity. When creators make repeated use of this wide-image, it leads to recurring themes in their work.

For Einstein, the wide scope image was a compass controlled by the Earth’s invisible magnetic field. He had been entranced by a compass when just four or five years old, which had him convinced that there must be “something behind things, something deeply hidden.” Later, he added the concept of the continuum to his image of wide scope. The idea of a hidden continuum steered his research, influenced his view of quantum physics, and determined the nature of his experiments and theories.

Virginia Woolf remembered a magical moment from her childhood, wherein she awoke to the enchanting sound drifting through an open window, the sound of waves rhythmically breaking upon the shore. For Woolf, this cherished experience came to suggest the eternal passing of time. She went on to use the image of waves on the short as a central motif.

Darwin was very interested by the branching of trees. The structure of the tree turned out to be especially useful when he came to formulate his theory of evolution. The tree structure may have prompted the insight as to how different species are related. When developing his theory of natural selection, his notebook was filled with sketches of the "tree of evolution."

I'm beginning to wonder if this could be a powerful practice as an artist, and I may spend some time patiently exploring my most important and vivid mental images from the past. I'm hoping that among these visual memories, and comparing them to my photographs, I'll be able to find my own wide-images. I'll also be reflecting to a greater extent as to why I want to create what I want to create, as it seems a characteristic of the wide-image is that the creators, in each case, feel compelled to express the vision repeatedly within their work.

Whether or not it's legitimate, it's certainly great practice for digging deeper into our creative soil in search for our roots.

What do you keep returning to?