Art & Perception

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”

–George Bernard Shaw

Photographers are a profligate, wasteful bunch. Maybe not those 4×5 guys, where it takes so much effort to decide to take one picture, but I’m a 35mm guy. I don’t understand large format; it’s a different animal entirely. For me the singular unit is the roll, not the frame. I learned my craft in the era of roll-it-yourself film in reusable cassettes. I found my voice by photographing over, and over, and over again, until I figured it out, in a manner that made it affordable.

I have structured my entire creative process around this unique feature of the photographic process. I shoot in order to find out what it is that is compelling to me. The actual act of operating a camera is how I access the state of consciousness from which my photographs emerge. The more complex the environment I am working in, the more that I can depend on my unconscious mind to find the coherent, complete image.

An aside: In the digital realm, the last barriers to restraint when shooting are pretty much history. Unless you give into temptation, and watch the LCD screen. Seeing your pictures while you’re shooting them is a sure way to interrupt and defeat the process of deepening a connection with the moment. The editing brain is a different one than the shooting brain. It defeats the point to mix them up.

When I’m shooting I don’t know where in the process I’ve “got it”. But I do know when I’m done. Somewhere in there, while I was in that altered state of consciousness, I can sense that it happened. Where precisely, I don’t know. I have to figure that out later.

That “later” process doesn’t get enough attention. Somehow you have to decide which egg you’re going to allow to hatch. It requires a degree of removal from the act of conception, to witness and judge the work for the formal qualities that exist only in the image, and not in your memory of the moment. Henry Wessel, a photo hero of mine, takes it to an extreme unmanageable for most of us. He waits a year to review his work before deciding what to print.

Back in the darkroom days, I’d scan my contact sheets to see which images had some promise, and I’d make work prints. I’d post the prints in the kitchen on a big bulletin board for a few days. It’s one thing to study and consider the work—it’s another to see them in your peripheral vision without knowing you’re looking at them. I’d gradually weed out the prints that were starting to bore me, until there were one or two survivors. These were what I would work on deeper, in the darkroom, to see what potential they held.

I’m still working on the best way to bring this editing process into the digital age. For most of my output my only encounter with the image is on a computer screen. It is not a friendly environment for either a considered, or an unconscious judgement process. Sometimes I’ll go through the effort of making work prints, just like the old days, but it’s harder. It feels removed from something intrinsic to the digital process, and I haven’t found the analogous replacement for the editing mode. I’ll report again in six months and tell you what I’ve figured out.

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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To be an artist today is to confront continual uncertainty. There is economic uncertainty, and also uncertainty of purpose. Modern society seems to value art — art is preserved in museums, and purchased for large sums by “collectors.” And yet the typical artist is strangely disconnected from the top levels of success. Compare this with other professions. A competent pilot, trained at a good flight school, is more or less assured of a successful career. He or she might not get the opportunity to fly the biggest and newest commercial planes, or fancy jet fighters; but a stable career is a reasonable expectation, certainly compared to what an artist can hope for.

The profession of art has not always been so uncertain. For example, Cennino Cennini discusses the motivations of those entering the profession in his time (the 14th c.) “There are those who pursue it” he writes, “because of poverty and domestic need.” In 17th c. Holland, parents would encourage a talented son to pursue art as a profitable and respectable occupation. But nowadays, “poverty and domestic need” would better describe the results of becoming an artist, rather than causes for becoming one.

There is far more wealth in the world today to purchase art than in any time past. The difficult position of artist today is therefore something of a mystery.

If there is a general appreciation of art, and money to buy art, then why is it so difficult to fulfill the role of artist?

I do better work when I flow with rather than resist my passions. You are probably the
same. This winter my great passion was skiing.

I needed the exercise, for one. When I get out of shape, I lose my vim. When I lose my vim, I lose everything else. But exercise all by itself is boring, so doing something that is both fun and physically demanding is just the thing. This post asks no important questions. Probably, I should put it on my blog and not here, but I do share some photos for the first time, and I do get to an important theme to all artists at the end.

And yeah, this is a long post. But I’ve been gone. There’s some catching up to do.

 

more… »

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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Works of art create their own worlds, with their own rules. . . Internal coherence is more important than any resemblance the work might have to something outside of it.

–Arthur Whitman

I think this is one of the most insightful statements about what art is about, or supposed to be about, that we have had on Art & Perception so far. As Arthur points out, it is not so much a definition of art, as a statement of what is most valuable in art.

Arthur’s statement is not so useful for telling us what is art versus what is not (in that respect it is far too broad.) Rather, it is an interesting way to think about what a given artwork is accomplishing. I say “accomplishing” in the present tense, because an artwork, to be perceived, must have a parallel representation in the mind of the viewer (the mind being the greatest world-builder of all). Whatever world the artist has created in their artwork must be rebuilt in the mind of the viewer in order to be seen and felt.

I read something tantalizing in Arthur’s statement about world building, something that suggests to me that art is the externalization of an artist’s inner perceptual world, or a world synthesized through an interaction of the inner world of the mind and the materials and stimuli of the outside world. The problem is that to be more than simply tantalizing, we need to take what Arthur is saying a lot further.

Let me ask then, what are the implications of the statements that I quote at the beginning of this post? How can the concept of art as world-building enhance our appreciation of, and ability to create, art?

The exigencies of life have ever had a way of intruding on art.

Today, for example, I had a really fun post in the works. I got a bunch of pictures from my various ski adventures this season, and I was planning a little art of life exposition.

Grammarians will recognize my use of the pluperfect, for all that is long in the past.

Instead of spending a few hours cooking fine cuisine for wealthy and highly appreciative guests — the usual case at the resort where I chef — I find myself having to serve up a cost effective buffet for a gang of miscreants who’ve grossly underpaid; furthermore, we just lost half our staff.

Grrr…

And so I take this brief moment to apologize once again for a non-post. Many people think artists are not able to deal with real life. To the contrary, I think we are generally as tough as they come. We have to be. The universe does not often agree with our dreams.

It seems I’ve been seeing more and more theme cookbooks these days. I almost never look at them. And I’m not proposing that we create a compilation of “Favorite recipes from Art and Perception.” I am interested not so much in what you cook as in how you cook.

My question: Is there any connection between how you cook and how you do art?

I don’t mean to suppose that my plates have heaping mountains of textures while David’s meals are more flattened shapes like Chinese roadkill, or that Rex dines on charred tidbits while Sunil’s dishes are drenched in ketchup and mustard.

It’s more about approach, about your fundamental relation to your creations. Do your art and your cooking reveal two entirely different yous? Or is your life a seamless whole that reflects your intuitive grasp of the universe?

Are you always trying new dishes? Are they invented by you or from a cookbook? Do you follow recipes precisely? At all? Do you like to use exotic ingredients? Do specialized kitchen tools turn you on? How do you recharge your culinary batteries when you hit a slump?

I’ll provide some of my own answers, but first I have to go and make breakfast.

By the way, got any good recipes?

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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Art dealers are not shop keepers. As Edward Winkleman writes, “Saying a dealer is just a shopkeeper might make someone feel superior, but it hardly accurately describes the job.”

Why do I say dealers are artists? Well, try this: come up with a definition of what artist means today (a serious definition) that will encompass conceptual artists and installation artists and others working in non-traditional media, and I think you will find that it is hard to exclude dealers, at least the better ones, from the category of artist. Dealers can make art from objects that would not be considered art otherwise. Dealers create a program in the medium of art, the program itself is art.

‘Artist’ is generally considered to be an honorable title, for someone who does it well. Why then are the dealers not rushing to claim label? I notice a pretty conspicuous silence, in fact. What’s the deal?

Here is my guess: dealers don’t need to claim the title of artist, because they already have the substance, the power of artists. Calling themselves artists would create some awkwardness — it would put all those other artists in the dealer’s program into an almost assistant-like position, explicitly. Why agitate the artists more than necessary? Also, calling themselves artists would open the dealers up to a whole class of art criticism that is avoided by declining the title, ‘artist’.

If dealers are artists, it poses a challenging question to self-proclaimed artists: Why am I not also using art as a medium? If art dealing is an art form — and a pretty important one — then why are we letting the dealers have all the fun?