Anyhoo, I was painting something, and it felt off, wrong, bad...but also oddly right. I worked it and worked it, and it was just awful, but something told me it was going well on some level.
I finished it. It was hideous.
I looked at it, trying to figure out why i also felt it was good.
I turned it upside-down, and it was the best thing I'd painted up to that point. It took me all of half an hour to make it work in this position, and it's still one of the best things I've done.
On the writing side of things, I read a review of something of mine, and the reviewer loved it, saying it had something to say about the way we treat children in this country, and doggone it if he wasn't right.
I hadn't thought of that issue ONCE while I was actually writing it, but I think about it very often in my other writing. But he went on and on about it, and there it was.
In either case, had I known what I was doing, I couldn't have finished the work.
This will spook you.
When an artist hits the wall on their piece, the “secret trick” is to turn the work _upside down_ so you “detach” from the “reality” of the object/subject and see ~only~ the shape, shadow, color and form.
Somehow, intuitively, you kicked the “right side of your brain” into overdrive and it rebelled against your left-brained -perception- of whatever you were painting and went into total instinctual mode, instead.
Cool.....:]