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"…my desire, on one level, is not to know too much — and there's no danger in that — but my desire is to fling myself into the project and make mistakes and then try to find my way of telling you what I want to tell you"

                                                                                                                        Maira Kalman

Came across some excerpts of William Faulkner's take on art, life and writing that are clearly true for any creative endeavor:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

                                                                                  ––  Stephen Jay Gould

There's a fascinating piece in the NY TIMES about the role our surroundings may exert on our creative efforts — namely that the creative process may be stimulated by a cluttered, messy environment.

Test subjects were placed in either a neat and organized space, or a cluttered, disorganized space and then asked to generate creative ideas — the results?

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

Musician Andrew Bird's behind-the-scenes look at his creative process (from an article in the NY TIMES)

It’s kind of a racket. When I step onstage I feel myself adopting that comedian’s posture, a shrug of the shoulders that says, “I don’t know, folks. We’re all just puzzling through it together. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers but here’s what I’ve seen."

To emerge from creative hibernation with my perfect oeuvre and
worldview fully realized feels stifling and boring. And while I’m
anything but an exhibitionist I have this perverse impulse to introduce
half-written songs and invite the trouble that it might bring. Maybe I’m
saying to my former teachers, “Look, by your standards I’m failing, but
it feels great.” But mostly it’s that I just prefer a fluid questioning
present to a fixed past.

The short essay I wrote for our 2014 calendar points out the important distinction between competence and creative expression — just because one is able to use the tools does not mean the end result is worth the effort.  This seems especially true of photography, where the tools get ever more hi-tech.

I came across an older post from Seth Godin's blog that speaks to that very same sentiment:

I spent some time a few days ago listening to a nascent band performing classic rock songs.
The first group sang a note-for-note rendition of a song by the Stones. The notes were right, but nothing else was. The singer didn’t know what the song meant. And the musicians, they just stood there. No energy, no smiles, no connection. It could have been a funeral with a great soundtrack.

The funny thing is that learning to Sing It is a lot easier than learning how to play the guitar. For some reason, we work on the technique before we worry about adding the joy.

If you’re going to go to all the trouble of learning the song and performing it, then SING IT. Sing it loud and with feeling and like you mean it. Deliver it, don’t just make it. When you answer the phone or greet me at your office or come to a meeting or write something, don’t bother if all you’re going to do is do it. Sing it or stay home.

Quite often, when visitors to the gallery are deciding on a purchase, they are attracted at first to a particular photograph but then feel the need to view more of them before circling back to their original selection.  What's interesting is that, when they then seek to describe why they came back to their original choice, words fail them — they can't articulate specific reasons – they just do.

I came across a quote by author Steven King, about the subtle art of the opening sentence, that helps explain why gallery customers may have such trouble talking about their choice:

               "To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar."

Here's an excerpt from an interview with photographer Camille Seaman in a recent issue of Parabola magazine:

I suspect there are things we don't have words for.  And if you have a certain quality of sensitivity, they are felt, but no one knows how to talk about it.

Exactly, exactly.  It's that intangible. Part of the magic of an artist is being able to draw from the intangible and create a physical. That's magic, truly, because you're literally reaching into a void and drawing energy and making something…"