Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
Artist David Hockney reflects on how our perception of the world may be determined, in part, by what we choose to pay attention to:
"I do get a deep pleasure from looking," he says. "I mean, I can look at a little puddle on a road in Yorkshire and just have the rain falling on it and think it's marvelous. … I see the world as very beautiful."
Every work of art expresses, more or less purely, more or less subtly, not feelings and emotions which the artist has, but feelings and emotions which the artist knows; his insight into the nature of sentience, his pictures of vital experience, physical and emotive and fantastic.
–– Susanne Langer
[via]
"Work is self-expression. We must not think of self-expression as something we may do or something we may not do. Self-expression is inevitable. In your work, in the way that you do your work, and in the result of your work, your self is expressed."
–– Agnes Martin
[via]
From a recent article in the NY TIMES about photographer William Eggleston:
He either takes one photograph of his subject or no photographs of it. There is never a moment of internal consideration or indecision — there is only certainty — which explains why he has no favorites: “Each one, to me, is equal, or I didn’t take it to begin with.” Eggleston can find the perfect gem without ever having to even sift: “I never think about it beforehand. When I get there, something happens and in a split second the picture emerges.”
“It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life; he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he cannot have it, must despair. The burden of the mystery must be with him day and night.”
–– Goethe
[via]
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.
In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other.
–– Rainer Maria Rilke
Paging through an illustrated guide to New York’s Museum of Modern Art – MOMA – and was intrigued by a phrase referring to the life and work of the late French photographer, Eugene Atget, as: "the disciplined cultivation of original perceptions.”
That seems like an excellent way to characterize the very essence of all meaningful artistic careers…
I love this perfectly captured moment of 60's folk singers Mimi and Richard Farina…
This observation by Sol Lewitt certainly explains most creative impulses:
The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
An excerpt from the Journal of naturalist and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau:
Jan. 21,1838. Such is beauty ever –– neither here nor there, now nor then –– neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire. If I seek her elsewhere because I do not find her at home, my search will prove a fruitless one.
