G. Steve Journal

Magic Things

 

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

                                                                                ― W.B. Yeats

 

Every Minute

 

The light constantly changes,

and that alters the atmosphere

and beauty of things every minute.

 

A Long Time

 

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

                                            – Miles Davis

 

I Don't Know

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

 

Like a Child

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.

 

No Right Way

 

Essential

 

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

                                                        – Henri Matisse

 

All That Matters

"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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Felt Inside

 

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

                              ––  Hossein Sabzian

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The First Time

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.