Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
Time and again we learn of artists confessing an inability to ignore the internal and insistent creative impulse driving their artistic expression. Carl Jung aptly describes this phenomenon:
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends,
but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.
Artists often speak of the process of creating as entering a state where one is less aware of the material world and the passage of time – the creative process itself allowing the artist to experience a feeling of temporarily transcending everyday reality and entering a different and unique state of awareness.
This describes what I often experienced during my photographic exploration of the natural world – time seemingly suspended while framing a composition and tripping the shutter. Perhaps this observation by photographer Edouard Boubat reflects the same phenomenon but from the perspective of the viewer.
I think that the photos that we like were made
when the photographer knew how to disappear.
If there were a secret, certainly that would be it.
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…
One can't possess reality, one can possess images-
one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.
–Susan Sontag
One theme that appears to be universally agreed upon by creatives of every era is that, more often than not, the artist begins work without knowing exactly where the process will lead, making the entire endeavor simultaneously exciting and unnerving.
This describes the mindset that informed many of my photographic explorations of the 'Gunks – the hope that beyond every horizon I would discover something unexpected. As Martin Buber keenly observed:
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
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As a follow-up to the previous post about Georgia O’Keefe’s work being dismissed for being “pretty”, here is author Willa Cather, whose sentiments regarding art were remarkably similar … namely that the feeling evoked by a creative endeavor – painting, poetry…etc – is more relevant than any intellectual explanation of why it satisfies the definition of “art.”
Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.
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Many of these posts concern the way in which we apprehend and appreciate art: emotionally – where the pre-cognitive response to the work is the measure of it's success vs. intellectually – where one must provide a context and establish a basis for it's inclusion in the pantheon of "art."
We favor the former and came across an essay about painter Georgia O'Keefe, whose work we've long been a fan of, which included this observation of hers:
I’m one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty,” she once said. “I don’t mind it being pretty.
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This observation by painter Helen Frankenthaler may well sum up the motivation that drives every creative expression:
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
German geologist Hans Cloos observes that perhaps the reason we are attracted to landscapes is evolutionary:
Why does man find beauty in a landscape? Is it not because he is a part of nature, inwardly subject to nature’s laws, because he has an unconscious insight into the internal order of the earth, into the rhythm of its repetitions, the harmony of its lines and surfaces and the balanced interplay of its parts? And does not our delight in the contemplation of nature grow out of the harmony between the music of our own soul and the music of the earth?
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I am a hunter. I hunt for pictures. I’m not a verbal man. I have nothing to reveal. It’s all in the work, I hope.
–– Robert Frank
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