On Photography

This week, I received my very first DSLR camera. I have been waiting for quite awhile to buy a camera as my last one died two years ago, just before school started. At its core, photography is a simple process, but I wanted some time think a little more deeply about the camera and photography in general.

Disclaimer: I don't want to portray a glorified image of 'the artist' or of photography. Sometimes photography is just fun, and it is very wonderful just like that. But there's more to photography than simply pressing a button, and I want to acknowledge it as the art form that it truly is, regardless of whether or not I live up to being a good artist.

Initially, photography makes me think of slowing down. It takes time to see and to learn how to see. I am just now in my first photo class and am loving every minute of it. But I'm also grateful for the past four or so years that I have had learning photography outside of the classroom.

Photography gives the chance, that moment of grace, to stop, breathe, consider the world around you. More than simple consideration, the camera invites the photographer to see the world more clearly and go from mere thought to an opening of eyes. Of course, that clarity can go many ways - contemporary photographers in particular seem drawn to seeing the cynicism of this world rather than its beauty, to find the ugly, the pain, the tragedy because it is undeniably there. But that clarity can also be used towards finding the corners and shadows of light that fall between branches and in-between doors. It can help our eyes see the shadow of the image of God that is in every face around us. To see the beauty that is in every way as deep and real as the pain and tragedy around us.

Somedays, it helps to think of photography as a gentle insistence on beauty.

Photography has been means of grace in my daily life. It helps me see the beauty in the mundane rituals of life, in sweeping my house floors and doing my bed. And the more I learn this art and learn to love it, the more I realize what beautiful grace this is.

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"Something filled with light"

Do you have a creed or a motto that as an artist you live by?

I do. Life is short. Life goes fast. And what I really want to do with my life is to bring something new, something beautiful, and something filled with light into the world. I try to think of that every day so that I can remember why I am coming to my studio.

Excerpt from an interview with Ross Blecker, from Inside the Painter's Studio by Joe Fig

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Wanderlust

(All of these pictures are stills from one of my video-art projects.)

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The Way I See It: Growth

It was The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring with live music. Live music! The film played through a projector on a huge screen, and right below it, the orchestra and choir played through the entire film. Pure beauty.

I've been thinking a lot about how beauty makes us grow. Seeing beauty is definitely a growing experience, but I struggle with how to explain it. It's a growing deeper into the world and ourselves, a type of becoming. The growth that beauty brings is unquantifiable. It pushes and pierces and prods us, until we reach a state of surprise and wonder. We become more human after encounters with beauty, after beauty makes us grow.

Just the day before the concert, I watched Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life with some friends. It is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen (and actually deserves an entire post for itself). At the end of the film, there was a wordless wonder that we all felt and a growing of our friendship that we shared this piece of beauty together. I felt the same way after the Lord of the Rings concert. Beauty helps us grow together, as friends and as humans.

Growing in beauty is something that seems just out of reach for our words.

(The Way I See It is hosted by Molly at Close at Home.)

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Cobwebs and Light

I came and sat underneath the sycamore trees. The larger-than-life sculpture towered over me. Strange, but I first noticed the cobwebs between the figures' massive hands. The webs, so light and fragile against the bronze matter, caught light and held it, but only for an instant. A blink of the eye or quick turn of head, and the light fled. It settled on the figures, sinking deep into the folds of their garments, the furrows on their brows.

I stayed there for an hour, watching the light fall all around. Such beauty.

(The sculpture is Rodin's Burghers of Calais at the Norton Simon Museum. Highly, highly, highly recommended, if you're ever in the area.)

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Lessons from Art

I have come to feel that everything, even the most ordinary affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art: that beauty is often where you don't expect to find it; that it is something that we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is also richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas.

And that it is always good to keep your eyes wide open, because you never know what you wil discover.

From The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by Michael Kimmelman

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True Beauty

"Define true beauty."

...

"Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself but totally the opposite.'

I chanced a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eye.

So I continued more bravely: 'It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly -' my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed like fireworks in the air - 'you have this epiphany that there's more world than just you and what you want or even who you are."

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen

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The Impractical Life, Pt. 1

I love watching people's reactions when I tell them I'm an art major. Reactions range from passionate interest to supercilious dismissal. It's always a great conversation starter. One way or another, most people ask about the practicality of it all.

We have this unspoken assumption that education is inherently about practicality. If I said I was a pre-med student, reactions would be entirely different. But how healthy is this idea of education and practicality?

Education has changed so much in past two, maybe even three, hundred years. It used to be about the liberal arts, the education worthy of a free person. The point was to create people with whole souls. Education had one primary goal: to learn how to love and how to love rightly. But now, it is vocation-based not soul-based. We're more concerned about churning out practical, competent humans than humans who have developed souls.

In some sense, isn't practicality just a piece of selfishness? The American Dream has no place for impractical things like love and kindness. It's about beating the odds, building an empire of practical goods, making the cover of Time magazine. There are instances when practicality is not selfishness, but here in our society, I doubt it.

After all, we serve an impractical God. He's self-sufficient, yet He created an entire world for His pleasure. He created practical things like food and animals, but He also created so-called impractical things like dirt, butterflies, rainbows. He sent His son to die for us in the the most unpractical manner. And we are called to go and serve him in a similarly impractical manner.

Maybe we need a strong dose of impractically in our lives. Something like well, the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness.

For what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

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