Photographic Aesthetic
I’m a complete amateur at this. I mainly do it for joy. My writing training has hung layers on me of varied aesthetics & aesthetic histories, college degrees, taking writing classes & teaching them, & so on & so forth such that I’m delighted to have an art where I neither have to succeed nor fail or be troubled to over-think something that contains for me such natural delight! Anytime I take pictures, I’m brought to the vividness of my senses & appreciation for their self-existent artfulness.
I haven’t taken on any formal photographic theories, excepting Chogyam Trungpa’s dharma art teachings. Here I spent a great deal of time absorbed in how he thought about art generally & visual art in particular. A focus of his teaching describes immediate sensory perception as innately free of imposed concepts, revealing an expressive brilliance that has its own things to say–a sacred world of limitless freshness & spontaneous, ever-transforming, energetic display.
Like most anyone who works in visual art, I have a fascination for line, depth, dimension, form, texture, & color. Chogyam Trungpa would say we’re working with the magic of perception, that this is what composes our reality: “The only magic that exists is this life, this world, the particular phenomena we are all experiencing right this moment.”
A Four Seasons Gallery
Here I’ve collected photos reflecting the four seasons, mainly of trees & flowers, but other things pop up. Poetry books of classical Japanese haiku were frequently arranged by seasons, one way of organizing felt perceptions of life as it appears & dissolves. On their example, I’ve collected the photos by season to reflect primarily the natural world, looking for its luminous moments. I’m in search of either elegance or maybe chaos (elegant chaos?), or at least that’s often what the frame is aimed to delineate. It always amazes me to explore the unending vistas to be found even in one tangle of twigs or in the facets of a single leaf. I often feel a kind of rich centerlessness to the phenomenal world, a kaleidoscope as big as all outdoors.