A central issue in any craft that aspires to art is the rhetoric, which is the means of communicating a thought or feeling that is more an experience than a thought. Generally speaking, rhetoric in art deals with the structure of the work. In music, for example, random sounds do not communicate anything; at minimum […]
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No. 44: Beauty Has A Minor Key
My last blog might have led some to believe that I think about beauty only in a major key, something bright and soaring, but all true artists understand that beauty has a minor key as well. The word “awful” comes to mind. In common usage the word usually means very bad or worse. “Awful” originally […]
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No. 43: The Nature of Beauty
I’ve been asked to do an interview on the subject of beauty’s role in art and culture by Alexandra Dickerman at Three Bridges West (http://threebridgeswest.com/general/beauty-silence-and-finding-home/). That got me to thinking about the nature of beauty, which has always been a tough one. I think I’ve stumbled on a good operational definition that comports with my […]
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No. 41: The Rational Mind of God
Professor Steve Weinberg’s book The First Three Minutes ends with “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”This is because he believes that there is no reason for it. Leonardo da Vinci wrote relevant to photography: “This is the true rule how observers of natural effects must proceed: while nature begins […]
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No. 40: The Blue Flower
We are odd creatures living in an odd place. One wonders if there are other such creatures in this universe; creatures who are never satisfied; creatures who suffer; creatures who are so uncomfortable with what they are that they change their appearance to deny it. We all long to return home. We may not know […]
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No. 39: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Perception
No, I’m not a physicist and I don’t even play one on TV, but I think a rudimentary understanding of physics is necessary to understand more completely the meaning of “perception,” of what we mean when we say that we “know” something. Also, there is a mysticism about these subjects that is totally unwarranted. The […]
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No. 38: Elliot Porter and “Pixel Peeping”
I visited the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth the other day. They had some wonderful Singer Sargent paintings hung, including one of my favorites: “Smoke of Ambergris.” They also had five stunning 30” X 40” photographs by Elliot Porter, who is also one of my favorite artists. Standing at a normal viewing distance, their […]
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No. 37 Anathem and Platonic Realism
I am reading a great science fiction book entitled Anathem by Neal Stephenson. These lines struck me as quite insightful. “I…was struck by their intelligence, their polish, and (as usual) how much stuff they owned. But there was nothing underneath. They knew many things but had no idea why.” [Watching fire on the mountain] “beauty […]
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No. 46: Where is the Image?
I wrestle with what I am actually doing when I create an image. Am I displaying an aspect of the thing photographed or am I creating an entirely new, two-dimensional image that does not represent anything outside of my own imagination? Romantic Era avant-garde Realistic painters and writers of the Nineteenth Century were expressly not […]