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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As a follow-up to the previous post about Georgia O’Keefe’s work being dismissed for being “pretty”, here is author Willa Cather, whose sentiments regarding art were remarkably similar … namely that the feeling evoked by a creative endeavor – painting, poetry…etc – is more relevant than any intellectual explanation of why it satisfies the definition of “art.”

Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.

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Many of these posts concern the way in which we apprehend and appreciate art: emotionally – where the pre-cognitive response to the work is the measure of it's success vs. intellectually – where one must provide a context and establish a basis for it's inclusion in the pantheon of "art." 

We favor the former and came across an essay about painter Georgia O'Keefe, whose work we've long been a fan of, which included this observation of hers:

I’m one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty,” she once said. “I don’t mind it being pretty.

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This observation by painter Helen Frankenthaler may well sum up the motivation that drives every creative expression:

I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.

German geologist Hans Cloos observes that perhaps the reason we are attracted to landscapes is evolutionary:

Why does man find beauty in a landscape? Is it not because he is a part of nature, inwardly subject to nature’s laws, because he has an unconscious insight into the internal order of the earth, into the rhythm of its repetitions, the harmony of its lines and surfaces and the balanced interplay of its parts? And does not our delight in the contemplation of nature grow out of the harmony between the music of our own soul and the music of the earth?

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I am a hunter. I hunt for pictures. I’m not a verbal man. I have nothing to reveal. It’s all in the work, I hope.

                                                                                                                      –– Robert Frank

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For many artists, and this photographer, the creative effort is an attempt to make some sense out of a reality that can often appear bewildering. This metaphor describing that process is an apt one:

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

                                                                                                                              – Terence McKenna 

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

                                                                                                        ~ Henry Miller

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