Rivers and Tides

[cross-posted on my Gaia site]

Last Christmas, my friend Kathy gave me a copy of the documentary Rivers and Tides, about the work of Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to get around to watching it. I'm so glad I finally did.

At first blush, this documentary is 90 minutes of footage of a man playing with sticks, snow and rocks. Beneath the surface, this is a very compelling and beautiful story of a man who has found his life's work making beautiful sculptures from the elements. His work is designed to be ephemeral -- he'll spend a day or two or three developing a piece of art, only to see it melt, thaw or be carried out with the tide.

His work offers a window into the transcendent in nature and illustrates the extreme fragility of the world around us.

Something about this documentary touched some pretty deep chords in me. After sitting down somewhat skeptically and watching the documentary with just one eye over the first ten or fifteen minutes, I got completely drawn in. There is so much that I admire about what this man is doing. I rewound certain parts and watched them again and again. I got out the second DVD and watched a bunch of the additional footage, the kind that certifies your standing as a bona fide fan. And I had to stop halfway into the video and get out my journal and write:

"Here's a guy who is basically doing pure art. He's working in deep connection to a landscape and he seems to be working for no particular audience. The elements are so pure. Water, sun, earth. He is doing it to achieve a greater understanding of the transience of life. It's not about scoring xyz gallery or spinning his grant application in the right way with the right phrases. It is about pleasure, learning and beauty."

Over the past couple of years I have noticed the increasing volume of drumbeats in my head. The drumbeats calling me to The Great Work. This Goldsworthy video was another wakeup call.

I'm not even sure what I mean by The Great Work, and I feel more than a bit foolish talking about it here. But the idea isn't going away, so it's probably time to try to poke at it some more.

What it's not:
This is not about spraypainting my name ("Class of '92!!!!") on the caves of Lascaux. This is not some Salieri-esque dream of immortality. I don't wish to be famous or rich. I don't care about making some mark on the artistic world that will never fade away.

What it is:
It's a desire to create something larger and more honest and more direct. It's a desire to bring more truth to the table. It's what Mike Scott was getting at when he wrote a song called "The Big Music" for The Waterboys 20 years ago:

I have heard the big music
And I'll never be the same
Something so pure
just called my name

Why fill your life with hundreds of your dumb snapshots when you can take three or four or just one really good photo. I think that we have the opportunity to speak more truth, we should.

(For me, "truth" is still a word that has a lot of sticky Christian tentacles attached to it. Certain Christian groups talk about the world's "truth" and about Jesus's "Truth," and about how the only enduring Truth is that found in Jesus Christ. I don't believe that anymore, and I'm trying to reclaim the concept from the church. Truth is turning out to be something much more beautiful and powerful and startling and life-giving than I was ever able to see before.)

In all of its breathlessness and recklessness, Annie Dillard's Living With Weasels grabbed me by the scruff of my neck about fifteen years ago and it still hasn't let go:

"We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

the long apprenticeship

Whew. I had no intention of letting this blog go for so long. I've been getting adjusted to my new work schedule, and feeling more overwhelmed than usual.

What's funny about my new schedule is that I work way more than I used to. And I get paid less. If I wasn't enjoying the work so much, I think this would be called irony.

Tonight daylight saving is on my side, and I have an extra hour, and I'd like to just say hello, because I've missed writing here.

Work with my photographer friend Mark has been going pretty well. I'm looking at my time with him as a long apprenticeship where I get paid only a little -- but I get to ask a lot of questions.

I'm learning a lot. And not all of it is technical stuff. A lot of it is good life stuff.

When I started working with Mark last month, I felt pretty sure that he was a photography god. (Well, sure. I do have a tendency to idolize my creative heroes.) I was convinced that he was one of the lucky ones who was just born with a boatload of natural talent.

Now I'm changing my view. I still think he's a damned good photographer. But now I think that his success is due only in a small part to what he was born with. More of his success comes from how hard he has worked to build his craft, how he slaves away at making his photos really sparkle. The purity and clarity that I see in his finished photos isn't there straight out of the camera. It's a process, a secret sauce. He begins with strong composition. Then he makes thoughtful choices about editing, cropping, color balancing. And then things start to shine.

My work with Mark requires me to look at a lot of photos. Sometimes I have to sort through a couple thousand shots a day, making quick judgments about what stays and what goes. I have two things to say about this. First, I love getting paid to look at photos all day. Second, the editorial process is teaching me some good stuff about what makes a photo work. I can't quite verbalize what I am learning, but when you look at a couple thousand photos a day, you start to develop a pretty strong sense of what makes a photo successful. So I am tucking away good information about what I'm seeing each day. I'd like to try to start incorporating some of the ideas I'm picking up from my time at the studio in my own photography.

In the afternoon, we stop working and go downstairs to eat something. And we talk about photography. At his core, Mark is a people-watcher. He is a big fan of the work of Gary Winogrand (you may enjoy Winogrand's World's Fair, New York photo, or his spectacular 1969 image, Los Angeles, California).

We talk about Gary Winogrand a lot.

Gary Winogrand was a great photographer. Gary Winogrand also shot a ton of photos. According to this Wikipedia entry, he left behind more than 2, 500 undeveloped rolls of film when he died. That's a lot of film. He just shot all the time. If you shoot ten rolls of film a day and give the tiniest bit of attention to what you're doing, you're probably going to walk away with some very good shots over the course of your lifetime.

What I'd really like to do now is get over my fear of doing bad work. I have to remind myself that the only way to do something better is to do it badly for a while.

So much of my creative life the past couple of years has been about making a plan, hitting a wall, losing my way, falling apart for a while, and then starting over. This time around, I'm actually enjoying the process and yielding to the lessons as they come. This time I'm grateful to work my ass off for less money, grateful to learn, grateful to soak it all up like a sponge.

art and fear

Several years have passed since I visited the Inman Park Arts Festival. It's one of Atlanta's big spring arts festivals, and it's one of our better ones. Sculptors, woodturners, painters, jewelry makers, metalworkers, knitters, and, yes, photographers had art on display today when I visited.

At festivals like this, I always examine the photographers' goods most carefully. It inevitably becomes a little contest. I size up their photos. I mercilessly compare the quality of their work to mine. I create an imaginary graph with x and y axes and see who scores the strongest. (It's really kind of ridiculous.)

Today I saw some mediocre work there, and some really beautiful work. I saw some stuff that I really enjoyed. I even splurged on a wonderful black-and-white print from a north Georgia artist who shoots beautiful nudes.

It was only when I got home from the festival that I started to reflect on the uselessness of my little comparison game. Setting up a contest like that is basically an exercise in envy. It yields mostly resentment.

It occurs to me that these anxious feelings are an almost constant companion for my photography right now, to one degree or another.

It's a good indication that I need to re-program some of my thinking.

Julia Cameron might as well have been there with me today as I mercilessly eyed the artists' wares:

"Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren't able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion. It doesn't allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us that there is room for only one — one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being..."

As you might guess, carrying around an attitude like this tends to drain a lot of the fun out of art. It flavors the artistic process with bitterness — rather than the natural sweetness of playing, enjoying, noticing, exploring.

I've felt for a while now that I'm at a threshold with my photography. I think today's experience at the Festival was just another reminder that I need to keep pushing to get into grad school. It's not even a particular degree I'm after — it's the structure of the curriculum, and the opportunity to learn new things while gaining a clearer sense of what my own work is about.

I want to pursue school mostly because I'm not doing myself any favors by staying in this small and petty place with my art. Sure, I want to take better photographs. I also want to get myself to a more open place, and stroll through the Festival with a desire to celebrate every piece of art I run across.