Hemispheres.

I am an artist. I am also left-handed. You are not at all surprised, I’m assuming. It’s well known that the left side of the brain governs things like logic and reasoning, as well as the right side of the body. Right brained people (i.e. lefties) have the abstract thought and creativity going for them. In some brains, the hemispheres exchange information most freely, in others, hardly at all. The former is predominantly true for lefties, the latter righties.

I’ve been reading in certain anthropological and archeological publications (here he goes again) that the type of lateral thinking & problem solving we lefties specialize in hasn’t always been an advantage. Quite the contrary, it’s actually been a hindrance in the course of human evolution.

The word “left” comes from the O.E. word for ‘weak’, in other languages, the word for left loosely translates as “clumsy.” Now, I know I’m clumsy, but only in terms of gross motor movement. From the elbow down, I’m anything but clumsy - I’m outright gifted. In my mind, I can string words together to bring men to tears with their eloquence. But these are not the things that will help you escape a saber-toothed tiger. As it turns out, we aren’t clumsy because of any deficiency of the right brain, but because of the aforementioned hemispherical communication. A left-brained (right-handed) person receives only one set of commands from the brain (“Run fast. Get up that tree.”) in times of crisis. A right-brained (left-handed) person is receiving two command sets, from two parts of the brain that process situations differently (“Run fast. Get up that tree. Wait, cat’s don’t swim, get to the river. No, the tree. Oh, God, there are fangs in my kidneys.”).

Granted, it’s the difference between .25 seconds and 1.25 seconds, but that’s a long time when being chased by a smilodon (or so I’d imagine. Eventually a left-handed neanderthal developed the spear and made short work of ‘em).

This roughly explains why the upstairs hallway at my parents house is fettered with the athletic accolades of my two right-handed brothers, and not one contribution to the scholastic sports legacy by yours truly. But it still does not the absence of my science fair honors or my National Latin Exam medals.

How does this translate to art? I would think that would be self-evident. Survival without tools or agriculture was possible, but civilization was not. Those humans capable or a greater level of creative, lateral thought made civilization possible with the creation of tools and the domestication of plants and animals.

So, in other words, art is what sets us apart from the animals. Being able to think creatively enabled us to settle into one place, divide our labor, develop an artisan class, and carve a niche for art in society that never existed before, is not necessary for survival, but is essential for living. Art pervades everything we do. The cultivation of plants is an art. The engineering of an automobile is an art. The writing of a newspaper article is an art.

Sure some of those are formulaic, but then, so is printmaking. I can’t skip a step, or there’ll be no ink on my plate and thus no image. But within each craft, the true artists always emerge and garner greater recognition. Because not only does society need art, it needs artists (but that’s another essay altogether).

Life is tough; it had always been. Sometimes, inhumanly so. At those times, we need the artist to remind us of our own humanity, or the humanity of those around us, across the globe from us, or preceeding us by years, decades, or centuries.

This essay sat three-quarters finished in my computer for weeks. I couldn’t find a way to finish it until we attended the Berkshire Veteran’s Photography Project opening reception last night. As we stood looking at large scale portraits of veterans, while the vets themselves mulled about the room, sharing experiences with but civilians and veterans alike, it struck me. This is a perfect example of the necessity of art in human history. The veterans all posed unsmiling, upright. But the photographer had still coaxed the personality out of his subjects. Sam could stand stony-faced, but couldn’t hide the smile in his eyes from the camera. Every line in Ralph’s face seemed to tell a story.

It takes both lobes of the brain to properly record the course of human history. We need the logical left brain or remember the names, the dates, the movements, and the events that have shaped civilization. But we also need the right brain to breathe life into this data, to make it more than words on a page or a headstone, to put the ‘human’ in the course of human events.