"I think that an artist teaches you, somebody put it to me, will lead you back to reality again.
Can make you see, as though for the first time, something you've been seeing all your life.
And in that sense, you know, an artist is very, very powerful."
–James Baldwin
The photos that interest me most, I can't say why I took them.
I think my gift is that I still work with a certain amount of unconsciousness.
- Sarah Moon
"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
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
– Martha Graham
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
― W.B. Yeats
The light constantly changes,
and that alters the atmosphere
and beauty of things every minute.
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.