G. Steve Journal

True North

Last year Krista Tippet, the host of the radio show On Being, interviewed marketer Seth Godin, asking about his perspective on art in the digital age.  Not surprisingly, Godin's responses were interesting, informative and in keeping with his previous writings on the subject. 

I found one comment in particular to be spot on:

Art is by people who have a compass, rather than a map — who have an understanding of true north and are willing to solve a problem in an interesting way.

Things Felt

Visitors to the gallery who are familiar with the area are often momentarily overcome by emotion when they view certain images.  I came across a column by Roger Cohen in the NY TIMES that may help explain that reaction:

In a... recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.