“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

                                                                                 –– Edgar Degas

Following up on the last post about the habits we cultivate, nowhere is this more relevant than in the arts, or any creative endeavor.  Who was the first person to realize that the sound of a record player needle scratching back and forth against a record could act as a musical instrument?

It's supremely difficult for us to realize how set our perceptions have become until we break through them.  Here's a former forester describing one such experience:

Stopping to consider a tree that rose up straight then curved like a question mark, Mr. Wohlleben said …  it was the untrained perspective of visitors he took on forest tours years ago to which he owed much insight.
“For a forester, this tree is ugly, because it is crooked, which means you can’t get very much money for the wood,” he said. “It really surprised me, walking through the forest, when people called a tree like this one beautiful. They said, ‘My life hasn’t always run in a straight line, either.’ And I began to see things with new eyes.”

[thanks, NY TIMES]

Came across an excerpt from nature writer Henry David Thoreau I hadn't previously encountered.  This observation applies not only to day-to-day living, but also when one's focus in on an artistic or creative enterprise:

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."

[thanks, Mohonk Preserve]

Back when photography was in it's infancy, the conventional wisdom was that the new medium was simply a mechanistic reproduction of reality that held no artistic merit.

But photographer John Moran noted that the intent and abilities of the photographer could transcend that view, writing in an 1865 edition of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:

The exercises of the artistic faculties are undoubtedly necessary in the production of pictures from nature, for any given scene offers so many different points of view; but if there is not the perceiving mind to note and feel the relative degrees of importance in the various aspects which nature presents, nothing worthy the name of pictures can be produced. It is this knowledge, or art of seeing, which gives value and importance to the works of certain photographers over all others.

Intellect wished to arrange; intuition wishes to accept.

                                                        –– Georgia O’Keefe

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers. 

                                                                               –– James Baldwin

[thanks JK Glei]

Certainly in photography, and no doubt in many other creative fields as well, serendipity — the chance encounter of a telling result — can play an important role. For that to happen, though, the photographer (or artist) must be open to "discovering" something that one cannot actually search for.

An interesting article in the NY TIMES talks about the relevance of serendipity to science, though the path is really the same for any creative enterprise:

As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act. What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself… One survey of patent holders found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.

[NY TIMES]

Musician and author Patti Smith describes, in her book "Just Kids", the genesis of the creative impulse when she was just a child:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.

The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings. 

[ thanks BP]

For all of us, but especially the artist or those who seek a creative avocation, there is no more difficult task than to be aware of, listen to and act upon that subtle inner voice that nudges us towards the path we are destined for and which no one before us has explored in precisely the way we are able.  I came across a passage from Nietzsche echoing this sentiment:

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

[thanks, BP]

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”

                                                                                                –– Marc Chagall