Category: New Paltz, NY

Came across this great short video clip of quirky artist and personal hero of mine, Maira Kalman, speaking about creativity (thanks Swiss-Miss!)

"What is the difference between thinking and feeling?" she asks.  "Whenever I think too much I say: ' Stop thinking.. this will end badly.' "

She goes on to describe how she goes for walks to allow her brain to empty.  "Wonderful things happen when you're brain is empty."

She concludes with a spot-on observation that certainly mirrors my experience as a photographer and, I'm guessing, anyone in a creative field:

"A lot of my work is waiting for the unexpected and to be surprised."

Just came across this provocative excerpt on swiss-miss from an interview with sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in
optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of
your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find
out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the
top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the
echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish
meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I
finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful.
And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you
lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t
matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week
you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you
look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Theres a remarkable story on NPR about a darkroom technician in Indiana who salvages some color slides that are headed for the trash and subsequently discovers the work of one Charles Cushman, an early adopter of the brand new technology of color photography.

Cushman documents, almost obsessively, his travels around the country, pointing his camera at everything — from the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge to inner city families to pastoral scenes and everything in between.

Though there is apparently not much of a record of what motivated Cushman, except for the images themselves, the narrator suggests that Cushman was using photography to uncover beauty and bring meaning and order to an otherwise chaotic world:

I think the camera was a way of putting a frame around that, codifying it — just being able to deal with it in some way that made it manageable….a lot of times I think that's what this life is about — being able to come to terms with the things you find so overwhelmingly beautiful.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened of the old ones"

–– JOHN CAGE

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” writes David Hume. “It
exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind
perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity
where another is sensible of beauty, and every individual ought to
acquiesce in his own sentiment without pretending to regulate those of
others.”

Just read a review of a new biography about the author David Foster Wallace in which the biographer, D.T. Max, chronicles Wallace's evolution as a writer.  I found this observation of special interest, and suggest that it's sentiment goes to the heart of any creative endeavor:

Wallace’s interest in… wordplay, mimicry and metaphysics yielded to a more earnest desire to communicate and connect, how a delight in cleverness and irony gave way to a call for writers who might treat “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.”

I can't recall where I read this description of the photographs of Parisian photographer Eugene Atget, but I found it compelling and, like all photographers, hope the images I create might embody some of this poetic notion:

pictures that he made … are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers' questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript.

When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him:

"Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language." And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.

That metaphor – the word as a vessel – is true as well for the image.

“creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

                                Albert Einstein