The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

                                                                                ― W.B. Yeats

Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

                                            – Miles Davis

I don’t know what I’m doing.

And if you don’t know what to do,

there’s actually a chance of doing something new.

As long as you know what you’re doing,

nothing much of interest is going to happen.

                                        – Philip Glass

An ongoing theme of this blog has been examining the disconnect between our pre-cognitive response to the world we live in vs. our intellectual response.

We’ve come down on the side of the pre-cognitive, i.e., the art – poetry, music, prose…etc. – that gives one goose bumps even though it's difficult to explain why, exactly.

That sentiment describes much of what we've experienced in our visual explorations of the local landscape – not so much a photographic recording of reality as it is a response to the discovery of “beauty” (whatever that is) in unlikely places.

This observation by painter Pablo Picasso neatly sums it up:

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.

                                                        – Henri Matisse

"I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing…the emotional reaction is all that matters, as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."

–– John Coltrane

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"For me, art is the experience of what you’ve felt inside."

                              ––  Hossein Sabzian

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Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits… The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

Jiddu Krishnamurti sums up perfectly the artist vs. the technician:

You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter… We have technique…how to put up a house, how to build a bridge…how to educate our children through a system…we have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty… Creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing… So, having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.

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