Left Brain Art

Explore Explain Exploit

Left Brain Art (LBA) is a distinct art form centered on the artist’s search for the core elements essential to the produced artwork. Developed by Mel Zaid from 1971 onward, its underpinnings are based on an Art Method paralleling the well understood Scientific Method, the backbone of many important advances in science. This analogy between these separate creative processes is especially valuable for artists with a strong “left brain” proclivity, enhancing the creative process and forming a bridge between Art and Science as it evolves in an Art/Sci – Art/Tec movement.

Expressed simply, this Left Brain Art Method analogizes the Scientific Method by introducing three related precepts Explore, Explain and Exploit, making complex artworks and their concepts visually accessible.

EXPLORE

``Explore`` embodies the process of statement, searching, simplifying and concluding, resulting in a specific artwork where questions of why and what are well explored and understood by the producing artist.

EXPLAIN

“Explain” affords “peer review” in which the artist reveals to others the fundamental visual concepts of the artwork without resorting to clichés.

EXPLOIT

“Exploit” is the process of expanding the separate unique language elements into a self-consistent body of art work which brings a readily understandable language and meaning to the intuitive viewer.

The end result is a unique and expansive visual language — providing an additional form of communication for otherwise complex and intractable concepts – an art/science goal.

This “method” in the creation of art has a long history spanning centuries. Although not specifically conceptualized as in Left Brain Art, an examination of much of the art seen in museums will reveal many similar attributes. The work of Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Umberto Boccioni, Richard Serra, and John Chamberlain, as well many other ground-breaking artists, all reveal a similar searching for “core understandings” in their development of a “consistent body of work”.

In a contemporary development within Left Brain Art, a large body of Multi-space Art was first initiated by Zaid in 1979 in both sculpture and flat work and each of these were described in many related exhibitions, presentations and in various publications including many in ARTLIFE (1981-2005, including “SciTec – Artists with a left brain” 2004, Vol 24, Nr 8 & Nr 9), Art gallery International (1987) and other writings, the DVD Video “multi-space”, a published pamphlet (2006) entitled “LBA” and the web site www.multispace.net.

ENTER - LEFT BRAIN ART GALLERY