Galway Kinnell offers a pitch-perfect example of noticing, observing and naming.
Daybreak
On the tidal mud, just before sunset, dozens of starfishes were creeping. It was as though the mud were a sky and enormous, imperfect stars moved across it as slowly as the actual stars cross heaven. All at once they stopped, and, as if they had simply increased their receptivity to gravity, they sank down into the mud; they faded down into it and lay still, and by the time pink of sunset broke across them they were as invisible as the true stars at daybreak.
- Galway Kinnell
From: A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz (1998)
Even when I don't want to, I am always noticing: people, light, movement, scents, geometry, space, emotion, trees, territories, sound, shadows, surfaces, moonlight, architecture, umbrellas, breath, and more. Years of practice as an artist has made it difficult to turn this off. I distracted by what is around me until that pull, that exchange of energy happens and I fall out of time and focus intensely on the exchange.
One of the pleasures, and perhaps a responsibilities, of being a photographer and an artist is observing others, locations, settings. It is inherently being in the middle of things, most often without any destination.
This is a brief slideshow I made inspired by Nick Drake's, From the Morning. I made the images (photograph, collage, painting, remix) during the last few years. Hope you'll take a look and afterwards, do some observing as well.
Observing leads to imagining.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Yesterday, spring had finally arrived (at least in ways I can see) in northern New Jersey. I set the task to observe no further then my yard and record what I saw. Here are a few images from that venture.
