Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
In art school, photographer Harley Weir pushed back against the predominant mind-set favoring intellect over intuition in self-expression:
“It was frowned upon to do something that was good looking or less considered, more intuitive,” she says. “But I don’t like the idea of coming to an art project knowing what you want — for me, I find photography a way of learning, to figure something out with an image.”
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The aim of art is insight, understanding of the essential life of feeling. But all understanding requires abstraction. The abstractions which literal discourse makes are useless for this particular subject-matter, they obscure and falsify rather than communicate our ideas of vitality and sentience. Yet there is no understanding without symbolization, and no symbolization without abstraction. Anything about reality, that is to be expressed and conveyed, must be abstracted from reality. There is no sense in trying to convey reality pure and simple. Even experience itself cannot do that. What we understand, we conceive, and conception always involves formulation, presentation, and therefore abstraction.
–– Susanne Langer
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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
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"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
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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
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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…
