G. Steve Journal

Began To See

Following up on the last post about the habits we cultivate, nowhere is this more relevant than in the arts, or any creative endeavor.  Who was the first person to realize that the sound of a record player needle scratching back and forth against a record could act as a musical instrument?

It's supremely difficult for us to realize how set our perceptions have become until we break through them.  Here's a former forester describing one such experience:

Stopping to consider a tree that rose up straight then curved like a question mark, Mr. Wohlleben said ...  it was the untrained perspective of visitors he took on forest tours years ago to which he owed much insight.
“For a forester, this tree is ugly, because it is crooked, which means you can’t get very much money for the wood,” he said. “It really surprised me, walking through the forest, when people called a tree like this one beautiful. They said, ‘My life hasn’t always run in a straight line, either.’ And I began to see things with new eyes.”

[thanks, NY TIMES]

 

Over and Over

 

Came across an excerpt from nature writer Henry David Thoreau I hadn't previously encountered.  This observation applies not only to day-to-day living, but also when one's focus in on an artistic or creative enterprise:

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."

[thanks, Mohonk Preserve]

Art of Seeing

Back when photography was in it's infancy, the conventional wisdom was that the new medium was simply a mechanistic reproduction of reality that held no artistic merit.

But photographer John Moran noted that the intent and abilities of the photographer could transcend that view, writing in an 1865 edition of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:

The exercises of the artistic faculties are undoubtedly necessary in the production of pictures from nature, for any given scene offers so many different points of view; but if there is not the perceiving mind to note and feel the relative degrees of importance in the various aspects which nature presents, nothing worthy the name of pictures can be produced. It is this knowledge, or art of seeing, which gives value and importance to the works of certain photographers over all others.

Intuition

 

Intellect wished to arrange; intuition wishes to accept.

                                                        –– Georgia O’Keefe