G. Steve Journal

All of These

Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth, the size of the world you make for yourselves, your ability to influence the things you believe in, your obsessions, your failures — all of these components will also become the raw material for the art you make.

                                                                                                    artist Teresita Fernández

Our Task

 

“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art… Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”
                                                                                                                                Susan Sontag

[thanks BP]

 

Why

 

From a commencement address delivered by designer Greil Marcus:

What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

[thanks, BP]

Showing Up

The "Lens" section of the NY TIMES presents an eclectic collection of photographs that range from previously unknown images by famous photographers to the latest offerings of shooters just starting out, including a recent piece about Kristen Bedford who spent time in Philadelphia documenting the remaining followers of the late charismatic leader Father Divine.  The way she described her approach to photography was what I found most interesting:

For me, photography is about showing up again and again to see what happens,” she said. “It’s about following those invisible lines of intuition that take you into places you can’t rationally explain. I’m open to walking into things I don’t understand, and maybe I’ll never understand. Through photography, I might get a glimpse of this unknown.