Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
In 1952, E.B. White sent Ursula Nordstrom a letter about his book Charlotte’s Web. I think the sentiment he expresses perfectly describes many creative impulses that are acted upon but remain difficult to describe:
I haven’t told why I wrote the book, but I haven’t told you why I sneeze, either.
A book is a sneeze.
[thanks, Brain Pickings]
Poet T. S. Eliot, writing about the creative process, described a feeling of release — when quotidian stresses momentarily lift and allow one an unimpeded path to deeper understanding:
…we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
In an Op-ed piece in the NY TIMES, Ann Della Subin explores the subject of procrastination and suggests that perhaps it is a natural response to our over-scheduled modern world, asking the question: "Why not view procrastination not as a defect, an illness or a sin, but as an act of resistance against the strictures of time and productivity…?" Della Subin holds out as an example the novelist Albert Cossery:
“Firm in his belief that time is not as natural or apolitical as we might think, Cossery, in his writings and in his life, strove to reject the very system in which procrastination could have any meaning at all…Rather than charge through the day, storming the gates of tomorrow, his stylized repose was a perch from which to observe, reflect and question whether the world really needs all those things we feel we ought to get done… "So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it,” Cossery would say.
Musician Jeff Buckley was interviewed by an Italian journalist two years before his accidental death and I came across excerpts of his musings on music and life that echo the sentiments of other creative people:
[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding…. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.
Another telling and provocative excerpt from the journal of artist Anne Truitt:
The terms of the experience [of being an artist] and the terms of the work itself are totally different. But if the work is successful — I cannot ever know whether it is or not — the experience becomes the work and, through the work, is accessible to others with its original force.
For me, this process is mysterious. It’s like not knowing where you’re going but knowing how to get there.
[thanks, Brain Pickings]
Came across some fascinating explorations of what it means to be an "artist" excerpted from "Daybook: The Journal of an Artist" — a collection of journal entries by artist Anne Truitt. She delves deep into her own psyche in an attempt to learn what drives her to create and whether that makes her special:
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that artists are, in this sense, special because they are intrinsically involved in a difficult balance not so blatantly precarious in other professions. The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.
[thanks Brain Pickings]
Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist of the 1960s, declared:
“Organized perception is what art is all about.”
Came across some provocative excerpts from a book written in 1897 by Leo Tolstoy entitled: "What Is Art? –– part of our ongoing investigation of emotion, or "feeling" vs. intellect in the creative process. Tolstoy makes the case that the test of art is whether it creates emotional resonance:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.
[thanks, Brain Pickings]
Came across an excerpt of author Rebecca Solnit's book "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" and was intrigued enough by the theme of the book to order a copy. Her book about photographer Edward Muybridge, River of Shadows, was excellent and I'll look forward to her musings on creativity:
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since.
[thanks, Brain Pickings]
Having a bad day? Perhaps it's all for the best. In an interview that appears in An Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists, The late Francis Bacon, considered Britain’s greatest living painter at the time of the interview in 1972 made this provocative observation:
But I feel ever so strongly that an artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or for the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
[thanks Brain Pickings]