I reserve the term “pretty” to mean something easy to grasp and familiar. A pretty picture may well demonstrate high craft and in fact may be even beautiful, however, rather than representing a new perspective, a pretty picture merely duplicates past representations of reality; it is a photograph replicating other photographs conventionally thought to be […]
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No. 35: I hope that there are not many “pretty” pictures at my site.
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No. 34: “The Eye is Part of the Mind” or Seeing is not Perceiving
The true artist is doing more that presenting a work they hope will be attractive to the viewer; they are trying to express something about the human experience. I mentioned Leo Steinberg’s collection of essays, Other Criteria, in a previous blog. As he noted in his essay, “The Eye is Part of the Mind”: “Even […]
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No. 33: Context Matters
“First Things” recently carried an article entitled: Leo Steinberg’s Artistic Vision by Dr. Dianne Phillips. This very interesting article makes the following point: The fact that medieval and Renaissance religious paintings in America are almost always encountered in museum galleries rather than churches also facilitated their aestheticization and the inability or unwillingness to understand them […]
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No. 32: The Current Photographic Art World Is Schizophrenic
I confess to over simplifying the current condition of photographic art regularly in this blog. While it is true to say that generally the banal is king, it is not true to say that there are no photographic artists who share the f-64/straight photography aesthetic because landscape photographers do. These artists think nothing of spending […]
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No. 31: The Fall of Man
Modernist and abstract painter Paul Klee said: “The modern artist places more value on the powers that do the forming, than on the final forms.” Necessarily for Modernists, mystery was fact, something true that was simply beyond human understanding; it reflected humility and an acceptance of human limitations. The two world wars destroyed the foundations […]
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No. 30: The Romantic Imagination
When speaking of Minor White, John Szarkowski noted in his wonderful book, Looking at Photographs, that: As a rule, photography has not been especially generous to those of her followers possessed by the romantic imagination, but every student of the medium will have his own considerable list of conspicuous exceptions. The romantic temper is distinguished […]
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No. 29: “The owl of Minerva only spreads her wings only at dusk.”
The observation by Hegal that is the title of the blog is all too often true, unfortunately. While no single person will ever do more than catch a glimpse of the creation, I can say that I appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of things now more than I ever did as a youth. This provisional […]
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No. 28: OK. I’ll discuss two photographs
John Armstrong wrote in The Secret Power of Beauty that: “Seeing beauty isn’t a matter of looking at one thing intently; it is a matter of looking at a lot of things together…. When we seek to explain the beauty of an object, we are actually trying to see its details, to grasp more fully […]
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No. 27: “Projects”
I’m for a manly image that stands on its own two feet and speaks for itself, not one hiding in a herd, hoping that the many will provide weight otherwise missing. So as an artist, I don’t like “projects” very much, and by a “project” I mean a tightly focused idea, like one I saw […]
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No. 36 Pure Reason is Death
As post-Enlightenment moderns we worship reason based on empirically discovered data, consciously not emotion. The marvels of science and technology have only enhanced its reputation since the 18th Century rejection of traditional authority that was the Enlightenment. But pure reason is death. Think about what it would mean to be purely rational; to conduct one’s […]