Coming across this thoughtful observation by naturalist and author Rachel Carson, I realized it describes the motivation that propelled my decades-long exploration and visual chronicling of the diverse landscapes of the Shawangunk Ridge.  Spend enough time traipsing through a landscape and one is liable to experience fleeting moments of beauty and wonder that provoke an urge to capture and share them, especially with those who seem oblivious to their existence:

For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body.

It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules.

We either feel beauty or we don’t.


                                                                                   – Jorge Luis Borges

I just watched the recently released biopic of Fred Rogers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and was struck by what a unique and visionary performer he was. I never had the pleasure of viewing “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” in real time – I was a few years past the ideal age – and I didn’t quite realize what a seminal figure he was in the advent of children’s television.

There’s a wonderful scene where Fred Rogers is testifying before a taciturn Senator Joe Pastore in an effort to secure $20 million in funding to continue. All the previous testimony has been dry and dogmatic and Senator Pastore has clearly heard enough. When Rogers’ turn comes, he speaks plainly and simply and from the heart. When he is through, there is a moment of silence until Senator Pastore announces: “Well, I guess you just got your $20 million.”

Like many artists and performers referred to in this blog, Fred Rogers exemplified the courage to follow his creative muse, despite there being no previously created template for such a show. The movie includes a particularly telling quote of his that neatly sums up his philosophy:

What is essential in life, is invisible to the eye.

Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.

                                                                                                                                    –– Amy Lowell

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This cogent observation by Irish poet David Whyte seems especially true for the artist who takes inspiration from the natural world:

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

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Art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

                                                                              ~ Saul Bellow

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To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

                                                                                                                               — Viggo Mortensen

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

                                                                                                                            –– Seamus Heaney

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If you get out of the way of your work, your work will tell you exactly what it needs. Usually your work is much more forward-thinking than you are. Half of what we do, we're doing almost intuitively. It's later that we really understand what we've actually done or why we've done something a certain way.

                                                                                       — Carrie Mae Weems

Echoing David Lynch's observations from an earlier post, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on language as an anemic and unsatisfying medium of creative expression:

There are certain areas of feeling and reality…or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it…which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket…. There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience.

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