I came across this provocative quote of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry this morning:
One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
Category: New Paltz, NY
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What is Real
Came across a wonderful interview with legendary designer Milton Glaser in a new magazine, Generation Monthly, in which the interviewer asks Glaser his views on art:
"To summarize, what I have ended up with as a definition now is that first off, art is a successful mechanism that our species has come up with – and a device we use – to determine what is real."
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The Busy Trap
From a thoughtful, provocative, must-read op-ed piece in the NY TIMES this week, here is an excerpt from Tim Kreider's "The Busy Trap."
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
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Move
Came across this wonderfully simple but telling observation by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser:
“I move things around until they look right.”
The corollary for a photographer is equally simple: moving the camera around until things look right…
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Just Do It
Just a quick clarification of the previous post. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd suggest that what Bradbury really means is not "Don't think" but rather: don't let thinking get in the way. Came across this observation along similar lines:
Artspeak always sounds like a bunch of twenty-dollar words used to obscure the artist's inability to articulate what he or she is doing.
It's like over-thinking when throwing a rock at a street sign. Don't think about it, just do it, and you hit the target.
Start thinking about the outfit you should wear while throwing rocks at street signs, or how your body moves while throwing the rock, or what rock should be thrown at which street sign, and you're gonna get a lot of misses.
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Don’t Think
I came across this quote in the eclectic and always entertaining blog Swiss Miss and it's one of the ongoing themes of this blog, namely that there is a way we "know" things without being able to conceptualize or articulate them, and that way, though elusive, is the key to true creativity:
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”
- Ray Douglas Bradbury
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Integrity of Seeing
George Schumacher, a practicing psychiatrist, engaged in photography as a hobby from the late 50's to 1970, utilizing especially the Polaroid instant process, and he wrote this about his experience
"Often as one explores an object or subject with macroscopic or even microscopic scrutiny, the beauty and meaning seen and felt deepens to a spiritual quality. One is thus led inexorably to a more humanistic philosophy; to a better and more compassionate understanding of one's fellow man which, especially in therapy, aids in seeing and understanding more fully the "self" within. Photography thus becomes a means to a richer fulfillment in life. For me no other art medium so facilitates this integrity of seeing as photography."
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Life
If there is a thread that runs through the posts in this blog it is the ongoing exploration of art, and beauty, intellectually vs. emotionally. With that in mind, I came across a quote by the actor and comedian Charlie Chaplin that describes his view on the matter:
“What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.”
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Dragonfly
During a recent radio interview, a book author paraphrased a haiku by the poet Issa and it struck me as a perfect metaphor for apprehending the natural world:
I look in the dragonfly's eye
and see the mountain over my shoulder.
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Creative Fuel
I came across a provocative interview with celebrity portrait photographer Norman Seeff and enjoyed his response to the question:
Was anyone particularly challenging to photograph?
NS: Yes, me. I was the biggest challenge to my photography, in the sense that I had to shift my paradigm inside out once I began working in the arena of public personalities. My discovery was that true communication is emotion based — emotions are the fuel of the creative process.[emphasis mine]
In the world I had come from emotions were considered to be an impediment to being objective. The very inner resources at the source of creativity, both imagination and emotion, were considered weak, irrelevant and embarrassing. And then I find myself in a new world where those fundamental resources of the creative process are the foundation out of which thoughtful creativity emerges. I had to begin learning the 101 fundamentals of how to create an intimate, emotional interaction between artists and it scared the s— out of me.