Category: inspiration

cloud watching

When I was sixty, I had a revelation I should have had when I was six. Between classes at work, I liked to lie on my back on a bench outside and gaze at the sky. I was lying there on a warm summer day, the sky clear blue above and to the north over Lake Erie but with a bank of cumulus clouds looming from the southwest. I looked up at the emptiness above, closed my eyes, then opened them and saw a faint puff of white overhead. As I watched, it slowly grew, took on a visual substantiality as it drifted southward where it melded with another small cloud I’d overlooked.

I wondered where it had come from.

Then out of the corner of my eyes I caught sight of another tiny, thin, puffy, slow emergence drifting to join the other.

Then I saw it.

Directly overhead a cloud emerged from nothing, out of thin air in the most literal sense. Growing, transforming, drifting to join the others that were now disappearing against the mottled gray background of the cumulus bank. Over and over I watched the emptiness above give forth faint wisps that grew and drifted away. I saw clouds being born.

As a rational adult I understood what I witnessed. My location was perhaps a thousand yards south of the Lake Erie. As air moved from the lake over land ,humidity condensed with the change in temperature. But this simple atmospheric phenomenon struck me as miraculous because it upset the unquestioned assumptions I had used since childhood to understand the world: that everything comes from somewhere, that what is undetectable to the sensate mind doesn’t exist, that meaning is governed by the mind’s ability to trace the origins of things.

This miracle proved to me by personal experience (and isn’t personal experience the only irrefutable authority for truth?) that nothing gives forth something. I suddenly saw what hadn’t been there, or what had been there but had been invisible, as the humidity was there before the cloud was born.

Cloud watching has taught me what little I know about the creative process. As an artist, what I create is the invisible passing through a temporary form. My images, like clouds, come from nowhere and become now here.

fiber art inspiration Uncategorized

mindfulness and craft

“Non-thinking repetition of mechanical forms allows one to concentrate simply on being without the distraction of having to make decisions, artistic or otherwise.” (Leonard Koren, Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers , p.35)

Those in the artistic community who derogate certain kinds of craft sometimes call it mindless repetition. There is, though, an important difference between mindless repetition and, as Koren says, “non-thinking repetition.”
If one values the practice of craft for its qualities as a meditative activity, as I do, then to call it mindless is simply incorrect, for the essence of any truly meditative act is mindfulness. Certainly this must be what Koren means. Non-thinking repetition is mindful repetition. The meditative crafter seeks to be fully present in the moment by transcending the distraction posed by thoughts, detaching from them so as not to be drawn away from the present reality by following them.
Mindlessness, on the other hand, is not just thoughtlessness, but unconsciousness, as though one practices a craft in one’s sleep. It is possible, I suppose, for crafters to practice mindlessly, producing in a sort of mental blackout. But crafters I know who are passionate about their mediums describe to me a state of total engagement, not trance-like disengagement.
If we agree that all thought is the product of ego, then the goal of meditative, or mindful craft is ego-lessness. And this I think is the reason western art insists on relegating craft to the fringes of the artistic community. Truly, western art seems too often to be all about ego.
So what happens when one practices non-thinking craft? What role is consciousness playing in the act? Is the mind really, as Koren suggests, making decisions?
Being fully present means opening one’s consciousness to the experience of what is arising. When I cross stitch, I work on blank aida cloth with as few preconceptions as possible. In the beginning years, I tried to work with motifs or realize complex patterns that had suggested themselves to me in my dreams or during sitting meditation. Over time I learned to free myself from such preconceptions and now stitch with as little intent as I am capable of. The simple x pattern is the ritual form that initiates the meditative state. As each stich completes itself, options present themselves: up/down, left/right on the cloth. The needle is called to one of them and repeats the ritual pattern. Immediately form emerges: lines, squares, curves, angles. If one stitches with colored thread, as many do, colors call for other colors, color and form begin to interact, complex patterns arise. The mindful worker responds by plying the needle as the emerging image directs it. The reward is the realization that the mind is a co-equal participant in the arising.
So what is really happening? The only decision the crafter makes is whether to be the emerging image or detach from it in order to try to control it. The mind practicing the craft collaborates with the medium and the potential in the emptiness of the blank canvas to bring the image forth. The mind is a midwife of sorts, a useful, even necessary facilitator of the process of becoming.
The ego’s only role is to ply the needle.

Tags craft, ego-less art, mindfulness

inspiration photography

seeing upright

A universal spiritual principal I dedicate myself to is the ideal of neither desiring nor fearing any particular experience. The ways in which the world’s wisdom traditions express this ideal are numerous and varied. It is the ideal behind the notion of Acceptance, whether of Truth, or the Tao, or, God’s will. It is the meaning of Obedience and the essence of Humility. It is the Zen principal of Equanimity commonly expressed as Being Upright, a state of consciousness in which we neither lean toward experience in a state of desire, nor lean away in a state of aversion.

Much of my artistic practice has been an effort to embody this ideal in my work. I’ve asked myself what it would mean to create art that fosters being upright in the viewer. A simple answer would be to make representational allegories that depict the spiritual consequences of desire and aversion. But that kind of didacticism exploits fear and desire, encouraging those very states of being in order to manipulate the viewer into rejecting them. Such effort seems self-defeating. Work of this sort would be like the art school assignment of the photo essay, which I have little interest in because, as I get older, I have little if anything to say about the world.

The more difficult response is to strive for art that invites the viewer into a state of equanimity free of fear and desire. This means art that is valued less for what it refers to in the world, than for its ability to hold the viewer’s eye in a still point of contemplation. Knowing the nature of that still point seems the key.

The questions easily leads to consideration of a commonly observed difference between trained and untrained (or primitive) art.

Trained art cultivates depth perspective, which has the effect—whether intended or not—of making the viewer aware of his individual point of view. We feel near to parts of an image and far from others. This can only happen if consciousness resides in a fixed position in relation to the image. The fixed position determines the ego identity. Where one stands in the world is who one is.

But while strengthening self-consciousness by affirming the ego identity, depth perspective has the simultaneous effect of reinforcing fear and desire. The ego tries to make near what it wants and make far what it doesn’t, the way a camera, for example, makes near what is important and far what is not. The ego is never still, I think. It is always fleeing from or grasping at experience. That is why trained photographic art might be best described as an ego with a camera.

Primitive art, on the other hand, generally de-emphasizes or ignores perspective altogether. The viewer sees near and far as the same, meaning the viewer’s consciousness is both near and far and not defined by the ego.

In a review of Obsessive Emulsion Disorder, a critic described the work as flat. I took this to mean OED minimizes the dimensionality, or depth perspective, essential to representational photography, which in fact it often does. Perhaps the critic got the point. Viewing an emulsion disorder can be akin to viewing a mandala where one’s eye is not moved three-dimensionally in the work in order to produce a reaction to its subject matter. One instead inhabits the work in a contemplative gaze, perhaps achieving the still point and seeing upright.

cleveland inspiration photography

what am i doing with a camera?

Post author By admin
Post date May 3, 2013
No Comments on what am i doing with a camera?

I do not consider myself a documentary photographer because I do not believe photography has a documentary imperative. From a spiritual perspective, to grasp at life in order to create some sort of permanence is a misperception of reality, so to believe the camera preserves a moment in time is to believe photography perpetuates a delusion. Life is a process of perpetual becoming, of infinite creation. Life is art, and the meaning of art is the process itself: from inspiration, through creation to perception by another. This is the meaningful narrative arc repeated endlessly through the illusion of time. Photography can only tell the truth if it affirms this.

So if I am not documenting the world with my camera, what am I doing? Perhaps an explanation of how I became a photographer will help make it clear.

In the early 1990s I attended an exhibition of Ray Metzker’s landscapes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The work literally took my breath away. The illusion of time disappeared in the viewing of his images and I felt completely alive.

Being artistically and spiritually naïve, I thought the proper response was to incorporate what I had seen into my sense of who I was. So I went into the woods with a camera to re-create a “Metzker Landscape,” working first with a 35 mm pentax, then a toyo 4 x 5, and eventually a deardorff 8 x10. Such folly was a form of grasping and could only end in failure.

Re-creating Metzker’s work was, of course, impossible, but I kept shooting and processing and printing because these activities themselves engaged me. Over the years, my work improved so that I eventually began to take pleasure from looking at my images. What I experienced when I saw them was not to remember Metzker’s remarkable photographs, even less to remember the subject of the particular picture I had taken. My delight (if that is the right word) came from the resuscitation of the feeling of making the photograph. Not that seeing the images made me remember standing in the river or field with all of my senses engaged, experiencing the light, handling the equipment and calculating the aperture and speed. What I experienced on viewing the images was the recreation of the feeling of being fully in the present moment—in short, of being completely alive.

This is what I seek in any work of art I view: the experience of being fully in the present moment. It is all that I hope to provoke in others through my own work.

One of my chosen media for this is the darkroom. Whether the subject of a photograph arises by means of the camera from the world around me, or without the camera from the infinite potential of the film emulsion itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is being completely alive.

Tags photography, Ray Metzker