civilized ku # 530 ~ it's about passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you, back into the world

Post and cable ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Lake Placid, NY • click to embiggenI had to play golf yesterday so I'm a day late and a dollar short on my intent to comment on the idea that reading critical commentary on the work of picture makers can lead to insights about one's own work.

As I have mentioned many times, I read about the medium of photography on a very regular basis. Most of that reading is about theory, history, critical analysis, and photo critique stuff as opposed to gear and technique stuff. With the exception of the photo critique stuff, most of that reading is all words and no pictures.

The result of that proclivity is very often insights that I acquire about my own work.

Consider my civilized ku # 525-28 name substitution exercise of a few days ago (3 entries below) wherein the idea of a picture "convey(ing) a state of being, rather than the suggestion of any visual or narrative action unfolding" struck me as a very apt description of most of my pictures. A word-description that I would most likely never have coined if left to my own word-description devices.

IMO, the idea that my pictures convey "a state of being" very accurately describes my state-of-being when I am in the act of picturing - that state-of-being being one of (as described in civilized ku # 522-23 [5 entries below]) being actively receptive to the world around me.

And, here's the interesting thing (at least it is to me) - a state of being actively receptive to the world around one's self is, in fact, exactly the meaning, AKA - the connoted - I wish to convey with my pictures. Or, as Joel Meyerowitz opines about an artist's response to the sensation of seeing ...

The place (the subject) resonates a quality that you respond to. You feel your self in relation to its otherness ... Whether you are making images, poetry, painting, music, or love, you should be totally enraptured by that, by the experience itself. That's what it's about - the location of subject, it's about passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you, back into the world. That's what artists do. They separate their experience from the totality, from the raw experience, and it's the quality of their experience that makes them visible to the world.

Or, more simply stated - as Rockwell Kent titled his 2 autobiographies - This Is My Own (1940) and It's Me, O Lord (1955).

So, all of that said, it should quite obvious that, IMO, the more words you read about the medium, the more you might learn about your own work as well as that of others. And that knowledge and insight will aid immeasurably in not only your ability to make more interesting pictures but to also "understand" better those of others.

Comments

[Sven W]

I've always liked the work of Dutch painter Vermeer. Perhaps at a subconscious level I wish to create photographs that are something like his paintings.

I stumbled across this website recently: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/glossary/glossary_a_c.html.

These excerpts have parallels to some recent Landscapist blog entries:

"one of the most compelling aspects of Vermeer's work: the emotional intensity of his figures"

"One of the most distinctive characteristics of Vermeer’s painting is balance. However, the artist usually did not employ symmetry as a means to balance his compositions as did Raphael and other painters of the Renaissance. The great part of his of his compositions are organized around perpendicular lines which divide the canvas into simple areas of light and dark which can be more easily assimilated and understood. This simplified and highly determined organization of the painting’s two dimensional composition creates a sense of repose and permanence."

Also:

Arthur Wheelock states. "The range of interpretation possible for Vermeer's paintings is part of their poetic qualities." Albert Blankert: "Vermeer deliberately left the situation undefined to make it more involving." And Daniel Arasse states that "the uncertainly of meaning is deliberate in Vermeer."

As a side note, there is a tenuous link between Vermeer and camera equipment: scholars see evidence in his paintings of using a camera obscura (e.g perfect perspective, DOF effects).