Beauty arrests me. It stops me in my tracks and I am left without words. I think it is in the speechless state that I find grace and forgiveness for things I have said, done, or worse yet, not done.
Everytime I recognize something for it’s beauty I am filled with hope for humanity and especially for myself. If I can recognize something that is beautiful it is my hope that it is a confirmation that there is something beautiful inside of me that is recognizing it.
When I make a photograph of something beautiful it is like I am saying a little prayer of gratitude and asking for forgiveness for all the ways I fall short in my day to day life.
As my wife and I were driving up to Priest Lake last week we were listening to an interview of a poet named Natasha Trethewey who was talking her relationship with her father. She said her father always quoted William Butler Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
This concept stuck with me and has resonated with my own daily inner conflict. I’ve often thought that content people aren’t creative but creative people can become content. I think it is the poetry in our artwork that helps us find meaning as we move through the world aware of our mortality and fragility. The making of art becomes a meditative practice where I can empty my mind of distractions and take refuge from the ego and its status conscious, fear driven, external and internal judgements.
The world is full of polemic rhetoric today as in every generation. I think that somewhere between fear and greed lies wisdom. In my art I try to walk the inflection point that is a wisdom that comes from experiencing gratitude for what I have and even more gratitude for the losses that have been transformational.
A few weeks ago I was listening to a podcast that confirmed something I have learned for myself over the years which is the value of creating a gratitude journal. It turns out that taking 5-10 minutes a day to write down things you are grateful for has long lasting effects on reducing depression and anxiety. I use a combination of my cell phone camera and a moleskine notebook to jot down my own daily journal of gratitude. It has made a huge difference in my overall level of happiness.
As I reflect on today’s snapshot journal of a leaf and the stop sign that reminds me to look, I am thining of John Berger’s book “Ways of Seeing” where he points out that seeing comes before words. My artwork is an attempt to transmit what I see without words so that you can experience the beauty without judgement. I think words are used to divide us and differentiate rather than unify. Just think about what comes to your mind as you read the words conservative and liberal. These words are used to divide in a way that doesn’t allow for unity. As humans we are more than 99% alike genetically and emotionally and yet we use words to exact fear, judgement, and aggression.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently as I have been embarking in a personal study of japanese flower arranging known as IKEBANA. As I approach this art form from my own internal inspiration from looking at nature and having a desire to compose images based what I see that moves me, I am left to wonder if the label of ikebana as a Japanese art form would discredit the authenticity of my own efforts. Would learning from these ideas and applying it to my artwork be seen as copying something Asian? This is not where my inquiry started but is where it led.
Fortunately I don’t have to take this concern very seriously because the Sogetsu school arrived in 1927 with the ideal that anyone can do contemplative flower arrangements. Sofu Teshigahara founded the Sogetsu School with the motto: Anyone, anytime, anywhere, using any material. It is in this attitude I see the unifying human element. Again it is William Butler Yeats that said, “Talent perceives differences; genius unity.”
For the past three years I have been intensely working through a personal process of exploring botanicals and their fractal patterns that soothe anxiety in my work. My work has evolved into composing images based up mixing and matching visual elements together in my own flower arrangement of sorts.
This year my practice evolved to include gardening and caring for plants and taking daily walks along a trail behind our house. Each day I noted subtle changes in the sunlight and in the lifecycle of the plants. Through this process I have become a naturalist and a transcendentalist at heart, and I experience a spiritual connection to all elements of life.
Every tree, flower, and rock comes alive with the animals of the forest. This evolution of thought has found me experiencing an alignment with Taoism, Zen, and Shinto traditions but I don’t think those labels are accurate either because I can find these same elements in many traditions. I can find these elements in Greek antiquity as well as the neoclassical and neoplatonists arts.
The poetry that comes to me visually and in words when I walk along the trail or tend the garden is similar to Haiku as well as Robert Frost and yet I didn’t think about this at the time. Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Kant are all known for being walking philosophers and to this list I find myself adding my name without fear of comparison because of the authenticity of the experience.
I think through all this rambling and excess verbage I am getting to the importance of remembering to experience life without words and to return to a universal experience of what it means to be human in a universal since and to recognize that written and spoken words involve the use of language which by it’s very nature is divisive. So much of the world is defined by it’s language. Language is the assertion of power and colonization and it is the way in which we tell stories that help us live with our shared history of naked acts of aggression.
Through the beauty of images that are both visual, verbal, and written in form, I am able to remind myself that underlying all of the strata of culture lies a human being who is capable of recognizing and replicating the beauty of nature in new and original ways.