Writings on photography, fine art, spirituality and self-discovery.
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 between…
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…
Developing Taste and Value
What we enjoy, what we appreciate and what we choose to consume constitutes our taste. The journey to developing taste mirrors the larger process of how curiosity can shape our…
Critical Compassion
My daughter brought me a wonderful piece of art that she had created titled “When the Birds Graduate From High School”. It contains no birds and no evidence of their…
2Q22
What do we call a hero who ignores, abandons or refuses the quest? In Haruki Murakami’s seminal work, his main character finds her self in a world that she suspects…
Conceptual Awareness – Moment of Conception
At what point within the process of making the photograph, did the photographer understand what it was he or she was trying to capture? It is tempting to look at…
Conceptual Awareness – What Is Real
How do we treat the subjects of our photography? Do we seek to express inherent qualities of the object as seen outside of ourselves, or do we use the things…
Conceptual Awareness – World Within the Frame
Looking back through images we have created can give us useful insights about how we think about the art we make, if we can leverage the questions that matter. Minor…
Conceptual Awareness – Fix it in Post
What do you notice when you look at your own work? Minor White created a five point framework for helping his students break down elements of photographs to try and…
Conceptual Awareness – Surfaces and Presentation
How we present our images to the world has a great deal to tell us about why we make them, and how we think about them. In this article I…
Conceptual Awareness – Reflecting on our Photographs
Creating photos is also creating a trail of breadcrumbs. Looking carefully at the images we create can help us discover language and ideas about how we think about our work,…
Lens Taoism 