Artistic Ability

Every sign has its complement of artists. But the all-time greats — geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso — belong to a category all their own. Here are some indicators of artistic talent  

A planet is prominent-when it s within 8° of your Ascendant or Midheaven when it occupies an angle (that is, it s in the first, fourth, seventh, or tenth house of your chart) or when it makes close aspects to other planets. 

A house is active either when it holds one or more planets or when its ruler is in a prominent position. 

1 w By sign Two of the three signs on the list are central in Kahlo s chart. Taurus holds the Moon and the Midheaven, while Leo is the home of her Ascendant and her Mercury. Only Libra is vacant. 

Frida Kahlo struggled with heart-rending difficulties during her short life, but lack of artistic talent was not among them. 

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Once I had decided on a career in chemistry, I was determined rather single-mindedly to make a success of it. I sometimes think about what would have happened had I chosen a different occupation or field. Having a rather competitive nature, I could probably have done reasonably well in a number of other areas. Certainly for some fields you must be born with a special talent. Musical talent, artistic ability, business acumen, leadership ability, and vision can be further developed. 

Memorial Plaque Designed by Georges Urbain in Honor of the Schiitzen-berger Centennial. This is a fine example of Professor Urbain s artistic ability. 

Imagine the expertise that went into illustrating this book. You can combine a science background with your artistic ability in the technically demanding career of scientific illustrator. 

Neptune in the first house You re impressionable, dreamy, and fluid. Your intuition is acute, but you can easily become dependent. You confuse and fascinate people they aren t sure who you are or what you re up to because your identity seems to shift. There s a good chance that you have musical or artistic ability. 

Thus, natural selection chose the physically strong and the agile to survive. Intelligence beyond that needed to outthink a bison was no more necessary in the matter of selection than was artistic ability. In all life forms, intelligence is only a tool. It simply doesn t enter into the process of natural selection unless it is critical to survival. 

Even in the Renaissance, the deceptively realistic imitation of nature in art n/as considered proof of an artist s superior technical ability. The Field of Flowers playfully takes up this artistic tradition of imitating nature and sets the petals in motion, causing them to rhythmically open and close. The photovoltaic module that supplies the energy for this is in the center the petals have a reflective coating on the outside, so that they mirror their surroundings when closed. 

Although STMs do a splendid job of providing atomic-scale images, nanotechnology specialists are also interested in the machine s ability to move a single atom, as mentioned in the sidebar on pages 50-52. In 1989, the IBM scientist Don Eigler discovered that he could move around atoms with the STM. He spelled the company letters, IBM, with xenon atoms on a nickel surface. Since then, scientists have yielded to a creative impulse and made a variety of artistic pictures with small numbers of atoms. (Such art not only requires an STM to make, it also requires one in order for people to see and appreciate.)... 

But we also have to take account of the relation between cognition and aesthetic experience. This raises important questions is, for example, a work of artistic landscaping as beautiful as it was at first sight when we learn it is ecologically pernicious or has been created by exploited labour Humans certainly have the ability to separate an experience into compartments by impermeable barriers or to become completely insensitive to certain aspects of it. Time and place enter into our appreciations. We do not admire a Gothic cathedral the less for knowing that it was built with safety measures so primitive that today they would be regarded as criminal. 

The first chapter is dedicated to scientific word and text processing. Wipke describes the philosophy, purposes and abilities of word processors. The chapter is not written with the intent to promote a particular make of word processor, but to show the scientist what to look for when choosing a new product or evaluating an existing one. A careful reader will notice a subtle difference between the layout of the first and those of the rest of the chapters. In order to show the high quality manuscript that any chemist can produce in his or her own office without the assistance of artists, typists, editors, etc., Wipke has supplied his manuscript in camera-ready form made on a PC-based word processor, hence the minor differences. 

So far we have considered memory from the point of view of recognition and identification. There is yet another side to memory that is concerned with recall and mental imagery. Here the perfumer is at a natural disadvantage when compared to the artist or musician. Most of us have more or less well developed senses of visual and auditory recall. The ability to see familiar objects in our mind s eye is one that we put to constant use, and the trained artist can reproduce on paper realistic images from memory. Similarly a musician can be trained to know precisely the sound that will be produced from the notes of a musical score, as might be heard in an actual performance. However, the ability to recall smell is usually much less developed. Can we really recall the smell of a rose in the same way that we can recall a color or a melody We may be able to describe the smell and recapture all the associations that go with it, but can we experience a concrete olfactory image of it in our minds ... 

Of the 180 artists surveyed, 114 said that their psychedelic experiences had affected the content of their work they mainly cited their use of eidetic, or closed-eyes, imagery as a source of subject matter. Fully 131 responded that there had been "a noticeable improvement in their artistic technique, most often mentioning a greater ability to use colors. In addition, 142 attributed a change in creative approach to the psychedelics. Many indicated that dormant interests in art and music had been activated by psychedelic sessions. 

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