Author: G. Steve Jordan

From the documentary "Leaning Into The Wind," here's another perceptive observation by artist Andy Goldsworthy:

I think a good work is a moment of understanding and clarity
In a very chaotic situation
Like a shaft of light that just penetrates
And for a moment is very clear
And then it all becomes unclear again.

In "Leaning Into The Wind", a new documentary about artist Andrew Goldsworthy, he talks about his motivation to explore and create art in the unique way that he does:

There’s two different ways of looking at the world.
You can walk on the path or
You can walk through the hedge.
And I think that's the beauty of art
It just makes you step aside
Off the normal way of walking or looking.

An excerpt from "When I Am Among the Trees" by poet Mary Oliver:

                Around me the trees stir in their leaves

                
and call out, “Stay awhile.”


                The light flows from their branches.

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I find it encouraging to read behind-the-scenes stories of the strife and tensions that often accompany the creative process.  One of my favorite films, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven was sidelined in the middle of shooting while the parties sought to reconcile artistic differences.

This inescapable phenomenon has certainly been true in my own brief venture into filmmaking, typically from well-meaning clients insistence on a misplaced allegiance to the literal:

If you want to watch more TV, the universe won’t bother you.
                                But if you want to do work that matters, it’s going to be a fight.                                                                                                      – Shawn Blanc

One finds this admonition regularly in texts from Thoreau to Dr. Suess, and for the creative person, there's never a bad time to come across a reminder – this time from filmmaker Martin Scorcese:

You have to find your own way. There are no manuals, no shortcuts, no secrets. You write your own manual, develop your own shortcuts, find your own secrets. You go where you’re drawn to go, and you learn by doing the work.
I mean, if you’re scared, if it all seems too daunting, if the machinery of it all seems too big and scary and overwhelming—that’s great. You wake up in the morning and you do it anyway. If it seems impossible, that’s even better. You do it anyway. Now it’s time to get to work.

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In keeping with our exploration of the creative process comes this little gem from Monty Python's Eric Idle:

…in the PBS series Monty Python’s Personal Best, Idle discusses the joy of writing for the show—and compares creating Monty Python to fishing, of all things: “You go to the riverbank every day, you don’t know what you’re going to catch."

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No doubt this sentiment describes the way many artists have channeled their desire for expression in a meaningful way:

Aristotle talks of our passions as being like a horse which has a life of its own. We are riders who have to take into account the life [of] the horse [in] order to guide it where we want it to go. We are not called to suppress our passions or compulsions, nor to confront them head on, nor to be governed by them, but to orientate [sic] them in the direction we want to go.

                                                                                                –– Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

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Unlike still photography, shooting and editing short films is more of a process –– typically one that is fraught with anxiety as one reviews the overwhelming volume of disparate bits of film and audio from which an understandable and compelling finished product is to somehow emerge.

Came across two observations from artists describing this predicament and outcome; Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who wrote:

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.

and Poet T.S. Eliot:

We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.

For two decades I was propelled by some unknown motive force which found me attempting to capture visually the essence of an area I’d been drawn to since first visiting as a boy — the Shawangunk Ridge.

As I peruse the images captured during this time I find myself fascinated by their beguiling nature – it seems I no longer have the ability and good fortune to encounter the array of visual beauty displayed in the portfolio of images from this time.

This observation by naturalist Henry David Thoreau may explain the phenomenon, though not why the change in perception might occur:

A man receives only what he is ready to receive… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be … it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life … His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.

Even more than most creative media, photography poses a special challenge to shoot beyond the cliches, to discover – to "see" – something one had not been expecting.

As a photographer who's literally spent decades wandering through the natural world with a camera, this observation by Hanif Kureishi is exactly the sentiment I tried to cultivate in my travels: 

“As a writer, I don’t like to know too much about what I’m doing. I want to sit down at my desk with hope rather than certainty and be surprised.”