Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
From a commencement address delivered by designer Greil Marcus:
What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”
The "Lens" section of the NY TIMES presents an eclectic collection of photographs that range from previously unknown images by famous photographers to the latest offerings of shooters just starting out, including a recent piece about Kristen Bedford who spent time in Philadelphia documenting the remaining followers of the late charismatic leader Father Divine. The way she described her approach to photography was what I found most interesting:
For me, photography is about showing up again and again to see what happens,” she said. “It’s about following those invisible lines of intuition that take you into places you can’t rationally explain. I’m open to walking into things I don’t understand, and maybe I’ll never understand. Through photography, I might get a glimpse of this unknown.
The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy….
–– Pearl S. Buck
Jumping between radio stations driving in this morning and came across a reading of a comic essay that appeared in the NEW YORKER a few years ago. It's about a caveman society and the narrator is describing life in the stone-age, including this tongue-in-cheek swipe at conceptual art:
Boog is very good at making words. For example, last week he showed off his new picture at the Main Cave. Everyone was expecting it to be a horse or a bear (all his pictures so far have been horses, bears, or a mix of horses and bears). But this picture was not of any animal. It was just a bunch of red streaks. People were angry.
“I wanted animals,” the Old Person said. “Where are the animals?”
It was bad situation. I thought that Boog would lose his job or maybe be killed by stones. But then Boog stood on a rock and spoke.
“My art is smart,” he said. “And anyone who does not get it is stupid.”
Everyone was quiet. We looked at the Old Person to see what he would say.
The Old Person squinted at the red streaks for a while. Then he rubbed his chin and said, “Oh, yes, now I get it. It is smart. People who do not get it are stupid.”
A few seconds later, everyone else got it.
“It is smart,” they said. “It is smart!”
I came across an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's essay, Walden, and was reminded of his unique ability to offer clear-eyed expositions of the most ethereal subjects– in this case, his musings on the subtle rewards of a life spent in careful observation of the natural world and the rare insights revealed, the essence of which applies to most creative endeavors:
Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Former trial lawyer Denise Shekerjian, curious to explore notions of creativity, chose to focus on recipients of the MacArthur "Genius Grant" and in 1991 completed a book on the subject: "Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born." Here's one of the broad conclusions she reached:
Staying loose, allowing yourself the freedom to ramble, opening yourself up to outside influences, keeping a flexible mind willing to entertain all sorts of notions and avenues — this is the attitude that is most appropriate for the start of any project where the aim is to generate something new.
I’m moving from stills into video production and to learn more I recently attended some seminars where I heard a phrase that immediately struck a chord with me: “failing forward.” Of course! That’s the perfect metaphor for how one should approach a new and daunting path – we’re bound to screw up, so be sure you’re taking something from the experience that advances you toward the distant objective.
Came across an excerpt from the marketing guru Seth Godin that speaks to this strategy:
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine.
In chatting with visitors to the gallery I've learned most assume landscape photography requires patience — waiting for the right light. That may be true for some photographers but is not the style I've found most successful.
I've had more luck approaching the challenge with a spirit of discovery and an open mind, not unlike many of the artists I've written about in earlier posts: Maira Kalman, Alex Webb, Steve McCurry…etc.
Though the following excerpt from an essay by Oscar Wilde refers to the viewer of art, it seems to me equally important that the artist cultivate a similar mindset during the creative process:
The temperament to which Art appeals … is the temperament of receptivity. That is all.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.
This observation by writer Virginia Woolf seems a perfect description of any artist's creative response to aspects of the world that strike a particular chord:
A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.
