Browsing the Explore website and came across this excellent observation excerpted from an interview with British psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips. Though Phillips' comments refer to music, they hold true for any successful creative expression:

The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental—that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.

Came across an excerpt from a letter by Pablo Picasso that echoes the idea highlighted in many of these blog posts, namely that an intellectual approach to art often misses what the work is about:

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.

Came across this provocative video by photographer Jordan Matter (thanks petapixel) about embracing the fickle nature of on-location photography, which I pursued commercially for many years, and looking for and being open to alternative options — aka serendipity — when the assignment starts going south:

I expect serendipity to guide my creative process. No matter how high the stakes, I rarely plan out or storyboard my shoots. Instead, I rely on my instincts to see the spontaneous opportunities around me. 

Listening to All Things Considered on NPR one recent morning about Winston Churchill’s 1921 essay, “Painting as a Pastime” where he writes about how his new hobby changed the way he viewed the world.  No doubt this is true of any creative enterprise — as composer John Cage once remarked: “An artist’s job is to pay attention.”

Here’s what Churchill discovered:

One is quite astonished to find how many things there are in the landscape and in every object in it. One never noticed before so many colors on the hillside, each different in shadow and in sunlight, such brilliant reflections in the pool, each a key lower than what they repeat, such lovely lights gilding or silvering surface or outline, all tinted exquisitely with pale color – rose, orange, green or violet. And I had lived for over 40 years without ever noticing any of them.

From an article in the NY TIMES about composer John Luther Adams, another example of an artist's experience that has relevance to all creative endeavors, especially photography:

“I’m highly suspicious of political art,” he said. “I’m not a propagandist. I’m not trying in my music to teach a lesson or tell a story. I’m trying to discover a place and invite you into that landscape to find your own way and — if I’m lucky — get hopelessly lost in it.”

“Music is not what I do; it’s how I understand the world.” “We don’t really create anything except answers to creation. Everything that we do, everything that we think, and everything that we think we create ultimately derives from this incredibly rich and complex and diverse world that we live in. It’s impossible for us to separate who we are from where we are.”

“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”

                                                                                                    - George Orwell

Last year Krista Tippet, the host of the radio show On Being, interviewed marketer Seth Godin, asking about his perspective on art in the digital age.  Not surprisingly, Godin's responses were interesting, informative and in keeping with his previous writings on the subject. 

I found one comment in particular to be spot on:

Art is by people who have a compass, rather than a map — who have an understanding of true north and are willing to solve a problem in an interesting way.

Visitors to the gallery who are familiar with the area are often momentarily overcome by emotion when they view certain images.  I came across a column by Roger Cohen in the NY TIMES that may help explain that reaction:

In a… recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

Beauty slips through the door of our rational thought and gets us to see the world differently.

                                                                                                                        –– Sarah Lewis

from a talk at the New York Public Library, March 26, 2014.(thanks, BP)

Timothy Egan, in an interesting NY TIMES op-ed column yesterday, examined the creative process:

Here’s how John Lennon wrote “Nowhere Man,” as he recalled it in an interview that ran just before he was murdered in 1980: After working five hours trying to craft a song, he had nothing to show for it. “Then, ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down.”

An original work, an aha! product or a fresh insight is rarely the result of precise calculation at one end producing genius at the other. You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out. There is no recipe for “Nowhere Man,” other than showing up, and then, maybe lying down.

And here’s how Oscar Wilde defined his profession: “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”