G. Steve Journal

Pure Intuition

An ongoing theme of these blog posts has been the role intellect plays in creative expression - "art" – versus emotion or intuition.  Here's a telling story from fine-art landscape photographer Andreas Gursky about ignoring his intellectual training and allowing instinct to prevail:

It was 1990 and I was out driving with my family, sightseeing in and around Naples. Late in the afternoon, we came across this view over the harbour of Salerno. The sun was setting over the city so I had to hurry. I set up my tripod and my 4x5 inch camera, then took four frames. There was no time to weigh up whether it was worth it or not.

Visually, everything was completely at odds with what I had been taught. My teachers, the conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, had told me to avoid photographing with sunlight, blue sky or strong shadows.

I hadn’t been sure the photograph would work. I just felt compelled. It was pure intuition.

Only when I got back home and put together the first contact sheet did I realise what I had. I saw immediately that pattern, that pictorial density, that industrial aesthetic. This image became an important piece for me, a turning point. It opened up a new sense of possibility, stylistically and thematically

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Don't Hold Your Breath

It's very easy to delay the start of a project until conditions are "just right," or refrain from releasing work until it's "perfect."  Sadly, that often means the creative output – song, poem, photo – is never shared at all.  Singer/songwriter Bjork counsels us to view the creative process more like a pipeline that needs always to flow if it is to remain open:

Like, don’t hold your breath for five or seven years and not release anything, and then you’ve just got clogged up with way too much stuff...Maybe you’ve gained some immaculate, perfect versions of some of the songs, but overall, I think there’s more minus to that because of how you clog your own flow. You lose contact to the part of you, your subconscious, that’s writing songs all the time, and the part of you that’s showing it to the world. As much similarity between those two parts of you, I think, the better. That’s more important, to sustain that flow, than to wait until things are perfect.

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Inner Impulse

Coming across a post in Maria Popova's blog, I recalled a Fresh Air interview years ago with then bandleader and trumpet player on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, Doc Severinsen.  When host Terry Gross asked him about the source of his inspiration he became uncomfortable and deflected the question. 

When she pressed him, he expressed reluctance and gave an ambiguous explanation that revealed that not only was he somewhat superstitious about dissecting the source of his talent, but also not sure if he had an answer.

Popova's post in her eclectic Brain Pickings blog contained this telling excerpt:

...Polish poet Wisława Szymborska considers why artists are so reluctant to answer questions about what inspiration is and where it comes from:

"It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself."