Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
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.”
Is not all the summer akin to a paradise?
– Thoreau
Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert… When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there.
––Thoreau
Today's NY TIMES book review about the accomplished biographer Robert Caro quotes Philip Larkin to describes Caro's fierce tenacity to discover the full measure of each of his subjects:
Larkin observed that “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”
No doubt that sentiment is true for many artists who are compelled to pursue their craft even though they may not be able to describe why, exactly, they are so driven.
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A decade ago radio host Krista Tippett spoke with the late John O'Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher, about beauty:
Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness… Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.
I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
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