Writings on photography, fine art, spirituality and self-discovery.
Calling all artists! I am collecting 2D works created by and about themes related to being a Taoist in world today. Exhibition will be posted online. There is no fee for entry. Artist will be cited and retain all rights to their work. Join the conversation around contemporary Taoism through images to inspire others!
The Fabric and Lens of Language
I am reading the book book “China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen” by David Hinton (Shambhala Press, 2020). In it, he traces the movement of Buddhism as it traveled…
Call for Entries: American Tao ’24
This is an invitation for visual artists to submit work for an online exhibition centering on the theme of what it means to be a Taoist today, especially from the…
Natural Divide
Moonlight, or drifting clouds, when encountering the ridge, spend not a thought about whether, and continue to fall, heart first, drawn to the unseen path they were already bound to…
The Claustrophobic Silo: Boxing Ourselves Out
We are at war with ourselves. The ways in which we have organized the superstructures of western society are actively degrading our ability to be humans in the most meaningful…
Slant
falling flitting drifting cavorting so much life within one slant of sunlight on this summer evening
Nurturing Connection, an Artistic Imperative?
I believe that art takes shape in response to the realities in which it exists. Art is a mirror held up to society. It is a canary in the coal…
Reading Integrity in Art
In my previous post I tried to outline a way of thinking about the integrity of a work of art. The two main aspects that I think can be meaningfully…
Viewing art through a framework of integrity.
The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it’s a quality found in many beautiful things. Rebecca Solnit from her…
![TAO: [T]he [A]rt [O]f](https://lenstaoism.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/tao-detail.jpg?w=800&h=800&crop=1)
TAO: [T]he [A]rt [O]f
The phrase “the art of” shows up regularly as a catchy headline, but what does it mean to be artful? Can the word be cut down into something that points…
Beauty is the Absence of Ego
I have been fascinated by Emmanuel Kant’s description of aesthetic knowledge and the nature of “beauty” as outlined in his Critique of Judgement. He weaves a tight net of deduction…
Aesthetics of the Unending
Exploring aesthetic theory of new media AI generative networks. Follow-on post from “Herding Electric Sheep”, which was inspired by the work of Refik Anadol Studio. Anadol creates AI networks which,…
Herding Electric Sheep
Art made of visuals that continuously morph from one moment of semi-stability into the next challenge a view of what art is and is ultimately for. Specifically I am thinking…
The Legacy Of Taste
The Development of Taste. I have been teasing out what I want to say about developing taste and aesthetic judgment. There is something tangled up in this concept which I…
Two Types of Artist
When it comes down to it, there are really only two types of artists in the world. It is always a matter of how you cut it, but let me…
The Intrinsic Meaning of Art – Wingless Pegasus
The rise of text to image generators has been causing a lot of distress within the art community. I want to unpack what this could mean for art making and…
AI Art | Aesthetic Judgement
Like any new technology, AI art generators will affect different types of artists much differently. To speak about it as a monolith is misleading and unhelpful. To ban them outright…
Twisted and Flowing
Recently I have been going through a difficult transition with my career. The stress of trying to fit myself into a box that I don’t desire, don’t feel comfortable in…
Beauty and Art in Relation
Emmanuel Kant laid out his thoughts about the nature of Aesthetics, and changed our perception of beauty for all periods that followed. To digest the question of “what is beauty”…
Naming the Shrines
Wisdom is knowledge that has seeped into the bones from the time and energy spent on practice. It cannot be taught, only pointed out. I have spent much of my…
The Abstraction of the Real
Jean Baudrillard describes our world as a nested, tangled, layered incomprehensible piling of Simulacra, or Simulations. He is describing a reality in which our perceptions of the world are contingent…
What is Wisdom?
Can you explain complex ideas without using jargon or technical terms? Can you give someone a clear idea of what you mean in less than two sentences? I just had…
The Once and Future Echoes of My Father’s Words
Reflections on the fragmented memories of my father and how they continue to shape my world like ruins in a romantic landscape.
To Remain Silent / the Worth of What we Create
When the pressing need to keep talking overrides the vital perspective that what one has to say isn’t worth saying, or, that saying something just for the sake of saying…
Slow Wisdom
Knowledge and understanding about our world come to us in many forms. Most often we learn new information through the fastest methods, which are words and demonstrations. Reading the description…
Original Sin and the Artist
“All means are sinful if they did not spring from the source of internal necessity” Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912, p.176 In my search for interconnecting roads…
The Art of Anything
Art is a complicated word pretty much any way that we try to slice it. In this post I want to talk about a specific usage of the word “art”…
Touch and Understanding
We tend think about what we know in terms of language and the world of words. When we speak about what we do we explain in with words. When we…
Resource: Fotostiftung Schweiz
This Swiss photography museum is host to a significant collection of online-accessible photographs which mainly come from the mid-twentieth century, and feature work from photographers working in and around the…
A Peek at Transformation
Greek photographer Yatromanolakis Yorgos has poetically documented his unintentional return to a painful past, both geographically and emotionally. His photographs capture an unintentional alteration of his perceptions, in which the…
Ferocious Harmony
As the wild winter winds blew snow sideways and shook the streetlights, I found myself travelling with incongruent balance those same chill streets. On the intellectual level, it was a…
Wandering Path Arts 