Existentialism and a Pretty Flower

A little existentialism if you please.  Is art about execution or idea?  As a practitioner of a heavily technical medium I'm inclined towards former, but as an artist I'm inclined toward the latter.  For visual artists it's an important question to consider.  I feel non-visual mediums don't suffer as much from this, a poorly written and preformed piece of music is instantly recognizable, as is bad writing as well as poor acting.  Yet in the visual media one is almost always forced to describe in words what the point is, why this particular stroke of color or that symbolic metaphor.  The first minute of Bach's Suite for Cello leaves me breathless, and yet I've never read his personal interpretation of it.  Is it the responsibility of the artist to do so, or not.  Shouldn't the idea behind the work be clear if the execution was well executed.  Or does it help the viewer understand a deeper, more personal meaning if the artist expands on the idea verbally.  Visiting modern art shows, in all mediums, I sometimes get the feeling well crafted pieces are brushed aside as merely that.  That somehow, complete control of the tools will invariably inhibit the free expressive use of them.  This bothers me because unsubstantiated ideas are cheap and prolific.  It takes beautiful execution in your chosen medium to portray that idea with grace.  I'm a proponent of understanding every nuance of the tools you use to create your work.  Chance favoring the prepared mind.  I recently carved a didgerdoo while on vacation and when deciding on it's surface finish I came across an article talking about how the native Aboriginals of Australia have no distinction between art and craft, they are one in the same.  Perhaps only when execution and idea meld together does true art become made.  No words, no descriptions, no eloquent debates, just the inevitable magnifying glass that true art holds against the self, the species and the world.

So with that, here's a non-existential pretty flower to brighten your Sunday!

Cheers all!

To Seek

The winds of time blow, slowly evaporating into the background of history.  What is it we all strive to seek, to find, to discover.  I stand at the precipice of a deep canyon and yearn to see the other side, a building thunderstorm obscures my view and I am left with emptiness of thought.  Why is it we continue to search the valleys of our soul for answers that may not be there.  I turn to the trees, the clouds, the rocks for understanding of the thing I cannot find from within.  My eyes continue to guide me deep into the recesses of creativity ever present before me, slightly out of reach, mocking me to answer it's call.  For what am I to do but give you the child of my work, born of interpretation of scene, balanced by tone and light.  Into the complex duality of life I find myself creeping deeper, hunting for the meaning of it all through the simple act of photographing trees while sitting on a fragrant patch of moss.  Perhaps there are no answers, only understanding.

A Quiet Calm

A deep breath of air.  A quiet calm.  Sublime observations of minute interactions between light and shadow pulse through the minds eye.  I stand unfettered, patiently accepting the pace at which the natural world unfolds before me.  I stand and stare, lost in peace as my subconscious mechanically calculates the scene.  A slight breeze blows from the East, and I awake in time.  Composition is right, light is balanced, exposure calculated, image taken.  I slowly pack my gear, sling it over my back and continue the slow march deeper into the desert, into nature, into myself.  I take a drink of water and a deep breath.  A quiet calm.

The Astronaut and the Humbled Photographer

I love all things space.  Space travel, history, ships, rockets, trivia, telescopes, moons, pulsars, the list is almost endless.  The Right Stuff is the first move I remember seeing in the theater, well maybe Empire Strikes Back, but they're both about space travel.  I'm a whiz at space trivia, or at least space history trivia, the science can get a bit tricky.  I have old school mission patches, including from my favorite astronaut, Cooper.  Yes, I have a favorite astronaut.  Check him out, he was the definition of one cool customer.  I follow the NASA missions with intense interest and mourned when Spirit got bogged down for good on Mars.  I find it all so incredibly fascinating and wonderful.  Last October we went to the Academy of Sciences building in the Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco.  Each Thursday night the museum puts on an a party, they dim the lights, serve drinks, and even have a DJ.  Which is a bit odd walking around a modern science museum with the thumping base beat pulsing in the background.  Sometimes they have a theme, and bring in special people and displays in honor of that theme.  So last April they celebrated Yuri's night, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight with a slew of different events and speakers.  Buzz Aldrin was abound as were other NASA astronauts. They showed an amazingly cool planetarium show, basically about how very small we are, and how very big the universe truly is.  Trust me, it's big out there.  I have to say now, I've never met an astronaut, and for me it's definitely a 'star struck' kind of thing.  Place any A-list actor in front of me and I could almost care less, but an astronaut, well that's a different ball game.  After a few hours of wandering, and taking in the humbling planetarium show I finally met my first astronaut.  I was a little star struck.  But, as we got to talking he mentioned he did photography as a hobby, and I immediately thought okay now not only do we have something in common, I have a little edge up.  I blabber on about this shoot and that, images I got in far off places and he patiently listens and then chimes in with this.  He was on the first shuttle flight after the Columbia accident and one of his jobs was to spacewalk underneath the shuttle and check for heat shield damage, where he tells me he has a little extra time and so decides to bust out his cameras, yes plural, he likes to shoot what's called stereoscopic images, essentially 3D, and photograph the distant horizon line of the earth.  Trumped.  Astronauts, they just do everything a bit cooler.

Context Revisited

A response to my post on February 10th.

On a cold Winter day in December 1944 Pablo Picasso was sitting in his Parisian third floor studio when the German Gestapo paid him a visit.  This wasn't a new thing, they'd been harassing the artist for months with allegations of hiding Jewish friends and distributing works of art that had no place in the ever increasing fascist Europe.  On a little wooden table there laid a pile of postcards depicting his 1937 painting Guernica, the brutal depiction of the German fire bombing of the Basque country town of the same name.  One of the German's picked up a postcard of the painting and asked, did you do this.  Picasso simply said, no you did, go on take it, it's a souvenir.   Sixty-six years later, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, Colon Powell gave a speech at the UN drumming support for the illegal invasion of Iraq which was to be followed by a press conference.  At the press conference, behind his podium, hung a life size tapestry of the painting Guernica, 12x22 feet in all.  This, as it turns out, just wouldn't do, so instead of heeding the deep symbolic message that lives in the painting, they covered it up.  That by my definition is the power of art.  A grotesquely, cubist rendition of a Nazi war crime, not photographed but painted in oils, remains as relevant today as it did sixty plus years ago.  


Modern art can be the most powerful of mediums, but I still detest blank pieces of paper pinned to the wall.  
Cheers All!

Two Poems

Today I wanted to simply post two of my favorite poems, both speak with simple words, but are deep in eternal meaning. The first is by the immeasurable Walt Whitman, who in my humble opinion can eloquently write more in a single sentence than most authors say in entire books.  The second piece is from the poet laureate Robert Bly, which speaks clearly to how I feel when I'm out buried in the landscape.

A Clear Midnight by Walt Whitman
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Solitude Late at Night in the Woods by Robert Bly
The body is like November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens
In these trees there is no ambition, no sudden body, no
     leaves,
Nothing bu bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn
I must return to the trapped fields,
To the obedient earth.
The trees shall be reaching all the winter.

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odor that partridges love.

Context

The more I visit art galleries and museums the more I'm convinced modern art is unfortunately all about context.  Or I should say the perceived value is all about context.  Not only economic value, but the artistic as well.  I recently attended an open night at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco to see the amazing cellist Zoe Keating (if you've never heard her, you need to today, here's a link).  After the show I wandered around the four floors of mixed art work with equally mixed emotions, sometimes cynical but mostly disappointment.  As an example of this, on the third floor I casually turned to my wife and cynically said "it's not a modern art gallery without a blank piece of paper taped to a wall" and sure enough the next room we went into had an entire wall of blank pieces of paper pinned to the wall.  This same floor also had two huge canvases painted solid color of blue, by different artists and located in different parts of the museum.  I had to read a lengthy explanation about the intention of the artist, which was full of funny ramblings about mans inability to focus attention on the structure of blah blah blah.  If a piece of artwork is required to have a multi-page explanation, perhaps the actual piece wasn't executed effectively.  In a rare interview J.D. Salinger gave regarding his seminal work Catcher in the Rye he was asked about the intentions of the main character Holden Crawfield, and Salinger curtly relied "read the book, it's all there, if I need to better explain my characters intention, I would have written the story differently...".  Perhaps that is why he was such a recluse, his artistic intentions are perfectly laid out in his books.  Maybe this isn't the best example because the written word is much easier to understand than the often confusing abstraction of modern visual art.  But if a piece of work is required to have a written explanation in order for its understanding, perhaps the explanation is what should be presented.  If these artworks were removed from the immaculate space of the museum and placed in an alleyway, would they hold the same esteem.  Blank pieces of paper taped to a wall anywhere else would be considered trash, but here it's art.