Don’t try to be original.

        Be simple.

        Be good technically,

        and if there is something in you,

        it will come out.

                – Henri Matisse

 

… when we have something?

Musician and composer Quincy Jones responded with a simple answer – one that every artist understands:

We simply did what gave us the goosebumps.

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A perennial theme explored in these posts is the tension between how we apprehend the world: intellectually versus emotionally – cognitive vs. pre-cognitive is how we’ve often labeled it – and we make the case that the most powerful and meaningful creative expressions are those that evoke a pre-cognitive emotional response.

Here’s filmmaker Werner Herzog weighing in on this theme, using poetry as an example:

You will find that in great poetry, when you listen or read a great poem it will occur to you very abruptly that there’s a deep, enormous truth in this poem and you feel illuminated, and you don’t have to analyze, and you don’t have to read lots of literature about this poem, you just know it instantly.

And why do you know it? Because there’s an ecstasy of truth that is in this poem.

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An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive

at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere.

You always have to realize that

you're constantly in a state of becoming.

And, as long as you can stay in that realm

you'll sort of be alright.

                                                           – Bob Dylan

 

 

People say you have to travel to see the world.

Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place

and keep your eyes open,

you're going to see just about all that you can handle.

                                                            – Paul Auster

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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“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye…”

                                            ― Dorothy Parker

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