G. Steve Journal

Inner Essence

I was speaking recently with a collector who was attempting to choose from among the hundreds of images we include on the gallery website.  He described looking through every image and said that although he couldn't articulate it exactly, it seemed to him, as he clicked through image after image, that there was a "personality" evident that was more than the subject matter would suggest -- something abstract and transcendent. 

I was flattered -- he has a discriminating eye -- and thanked him for the observation. Later in the week I came across this quote that described, perhaps better than he could, what he experienced:

Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow.
                                                                                                                                — Eckhart Tolle

 

Even More

Came across this refreshing encouragement by Pop artist Andy Warhol:

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”


Filled Up

Came across an inspiring video interview with photographer Jay Maisel:

"When I go out I try very hard not to pre-determine what I'm going to do, and I want to go out as unprepared as possible so I can get filled up with what the world has to offer, and the more I can be influenced by what's around me the more fun it is for me."

" I don't have a hidden message -- I like looking at life -- life is very beautiful to me.

 

The Story

Rebecca Mead, in a recent NEW YORKER article, writes about Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer (Apocalypse Now and English Patient) who is working now on a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider, which, among other things, has been used to prove the existence of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson particle. 

When asked whether his work on the film has led to a greater reverence for the universe, Murch replied:

"I think of a Muriel Rukeyser quote, where she says the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.  The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story.  It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it's made of molecules of grains of film, thinking, If I finally get to the heart of that, will it tell me where my story comes from?  While we know these are two separate universes."

"It may be that our story, whatever that is - existence -- depends on the Higgs boson and atoms, but it depends on it the way the film depends on the molecular structure of the celluloid. That just happens to be the medium through which it is manifest, but the story predates the film and, in fact, actually created the film itself."