"One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in."
- Henry David Thoreau
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The Act of Creation
Marcelo Gleiser, writing on an NPR blog about laughter and health, observes that:
Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation, develops the argument that humor and creativity have a lot in common: in a good joke, there is a rupture of the logic, a point where the narrative departs from its natural flow and takes a sharp turn to the unexpected. That's when we laugh. You can't control it, it just happens. If you retrace your steps and explain the joke to someone who didn't get it, it isn't funny anymore.
I think that may be the reason many of us find contemporary works of art less than satisfying: we feel intuitively that if the work needs to be explained, the essence is lost — perhaps it was never there to begin with.
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Let Them Be Left
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.Gerard Manley Hopkins
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That is Why…
I came across the following quote by composer Jean Sibelius from a 1919 interview and thought the sentiment could apply equally well to any non-verbal creative endeavor: dance, painting, photography…etc.:
If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.
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Freedom Redux
The peripatetic fashion photographer Bill Cunningham is the subject of a new documentary film about his life and work. He's especially well-known to readers of the NEW YORK TIMES for his candid snapshots of everyday New Yorkers who exhibit, in Cunningham's estimation, a sense of style.
After decades of work, he clearly still enjoys what he does and has cultivated a very bohemian, free-spirit approach to his craft. Talking about the time he refused to take money for his work…, Cunningham says: “You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. … Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.”
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Earth’s Eye
I posted this image to the gallery Facebook page as emblematic of the space between seasons – no longer winter but not quite spring. The landscape is muted and monochromatic here in the northeast and not many images suggest themselves.
The reflections in this vernal pool deep in the woods provided a nice counterpoint to an otherwise homogenous scene. It's shape and setting, fringed by trees, recalls Thoreau's observation:
"A lake is the landscape’s most expressive feature. It is earth’s eye…"
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Receptive
Many of the images I capture when I venture out I could not have planned. Even when I do have a certain type of image in mind – think dramatic landscape – it's more likely that I'll return with something I had not envisioned.
If I am receptive to the environment I am passing through, I may be lucky enough to "see" a unique pattern or scene that gently impinges on my consciousness until I respond by framing it in the camera's viewfinder.
Out skiing this past season I paused to catch my breath and this delicate spray of branches just off the trail caught my attention, one of an infinite number of equally captivating vignettes….
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Transcendent
I've been photographing fewer iconic landscapes of the area — as of late, subtle details seem to attract my attention more and I find them compelling in a way that is different than the attraction of the dramatic landscape — more intimate – transcendent.
Here is a recent favorite:
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Beauty Over Time
I've never submitted work to a "call for artists" but recently one caught my attention and so I've prepared a proposal to display two panoramic images taken in the same location in different seasons and presented as canvas triptychs.
The idea is to explore the idea of "beauty" as it exists in a portion of a landscape at a particular moment in time and, when the pieces are considered together, "beauty" as exhibited by the same landscape at unique and very different moments in time.
The two images are "Spring Trees, Wallkill River," and "Spring Ice, Wallkill River," (gallery numbers 2283 and 2256, respectively.)
See what you think…
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“Just to live…”
I came across this wonderful quote by E.B. White, the writer best known for books like "Charlotte's Web" and the classic writing guide, "Elements of Style":
Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
