Tag Archives: creativity

Visiting the 100 Acres

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Photo Venture Camera Club, the club I belong to, schedules trips around town to areas of interest to photographers.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently opened 100 Acres IMA, an area rich in opportunities for engagement and, for the most part, interaction with large scale art works.  Becky and I went over to scout it out before scheduling our next meeting there.

Interaction with large scale art works.  I got there before Becky and was wandering around shooting whatever caught my eye.  I wanted to get an abstract image of metal and shadow at the first exhibit from the parking lot but kids kept getting in the way.

There’s one of the little critters over to the right in the image above.  His dad is watching from the left.  I tried to out-wait them but they kept showing up.

Here’s one dropping out the sky (although not very far).  It slowly dawned on me that whatever other reason the kids were there, they were also there as teachers.  They knew what to do here, it is not to ‘interact’ but to play.  A much simpler word and far more packed with meaning.  Time to play.

Becky got stuck in traffic and after awhile I sat down on a low wall in the shade to wait for her.  There was a gentleman already there and we struck up a conversation.  He was saying he was pretty tired from walking around the area (100 acres covers a lot of ground).  Then he allowed that he had worked out in the gym for an hour that morning and for someone 92 years of age that plus a long walk was indeed pretty tiring.   I think he was there to play too.

Becky showed up and off we went.  There is a good sized lake (30 acres I believe) and a young boy we saw knew just what to do with it.  He threw rocks into the water and I worked at photographing it.

Play.  I’ve been reading a book about how very creative people create.  A wide range of creative people are introduced ranging from Richard Feynman to Frank Zappa.  It is interesting to see how often the word ‘play’ comes up.  Play is central to the way some creative people work.  It is not a casual kind of play, rather it is intense.  But fun, and out of it, new relationships are discovered and presented.  Kids are pretty intense in their play as well and I suspect that is an important way for them to learn about the world.

I would like to say to my wife that I am off on a creative venture, one whose pure intent is creative work but she knows better.  She’s a quilter and she knows what fun is.

Go create.  Go have fun.

Creative encounter

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When events are spread out over time, say one now, another in a week, a third two weeks later and the fourth a month after that, we aren’t as inclined to see them as being connected as we would be if they happen over the course of two hours.

I had been working on an image that came out of the camera club trip to Adams Mill, a trip I wrote about in an earlier post.   This is one of those images that seemed like a good idea at the time but which resisted giving up the image within an image, the image with personal meaning that I hoped was in there somewhere.

This was of a set of ropes hanging by a door.  As shown here, it is essentially what came out of the camera.  The subject – whether the ropes, the door, the colors, the texture or some combination of elements – wasn’t coming clear to me.

Easter morning arrived and I was involved in the usual Sunday morning battle with myself over whether to go to church.  My wife and I belong to a wonderful church with an excellent minister, good friends, a strong bent to community service, and people tolerant of one another’s political and religious beliefs.  But I have never liked going to church and the feeling is getting stronger over the years.  Aside from delivering an elderly lady to church who had (thankfully) lost her driver’s license, I had no special demands on me to go.  I could drop her off and go to Fort Harrison State Park to do some shooting.  Or I could go to church.

I was in my studio reading ‘The Courage to Create’, a book by Rollo May.  He was making the point that any creative act is an encounter, essentially an interaction between an individual and a situation, scene, problem, another individual, etc.   The intensity of the encounter is a major force in deciding the outcome.  The encounter for me would be with a scene and later perhaps with the image as it (and I) matured.  The camera, lens, Photoshop and printer are secondary to the encounter; they provide the means for realizing it, or expressing it.

At this point I felt compelled, driven, pushed,  to stop reading and go back to work on the image in Photoshop.  What was needed now seemed entirely clear – crop it down to show some of the ropes and the door and darken the image to emphasize the light seeping in around the door and through the knothole.  That was it.  The light is what this image is about.

I emailed  the completed image to a friend, not telling her the title.   Here is her response:

‘My initial reaction was curiosity and I liked the warmth of the brown wood and the texture of the rope. A moment later,  I began to assign my own projection of danger to it and realized something bad could be lurking on the other side of that door or within the dark space.’

I then told her the title – ‘Doorway into the Light’ – and she responded:

‘That would definitely work. One could definitely anticipate good things on the light side – and there might be a hellish aspect to the dark door and the heavy or possibly threatening rope.’

I was glad to get that response, it is consistent with what I saw.

I decided to go to church, if only to see if it seemed like a mistake when I was in the church service.  This Easter Sunday the minister did not give the usual sermon about resurrection.  Rather, he talked about the essence of the Christian experience being an encounter with Jesus.  There was that word again.  Encounter.  In my frame of reference that made an encounter with Jesus a creative act.  Reflecting on Jesus’ dialogs with various disciples and other followers, in all the cases I can think of, someone asks a question and Jesus answers in an unexpected way, a creative way.  This encounter with Jesus absolutely requires intensity, giving oneself to it.  Through that intense encounter comes transformation.

It was all coming together.  The encounter with the scene of the ropes, door and light; the resolution of the problem of what the image was to be; understanding better the nature of creativity;  coming to see  encounter with Jesus as critical to the Christian experience.

The image now takes on additional meaning.  It can be frightening to pass through that doorway, not knowing exactly what is on the other side.  Better perhaps, to stay on this side of the door in the comfort of what we know.  But hanging there are those ropes which can bind us to the present, hold us back.  That fear can indeed make the experience of passing through the door, the encounter,  intense.  This gives us a better idea of what May meant when he titled his book ‘The Courage to Create’.  It does take courage to step out and create something new, whether it be a photograph or a spiritual transformation.

I think I’ll give church another chance.

Johnny Cash, meet Carl Jung

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Every once in awhile two or three things happen close together in time and they work together to set off a train of thought. 

I was reading William Bridges’ ‘Transitions   Making Sense of Life’s Changes’ and ran across a quote from Carl Jung’s ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ where he is talking about a man in the second half of life:

Fully aware as he is of the  social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.

I’m pretty well into the second half of my life and that struck home;  pursuing creative activities is very important to me and I hadn’t thought of it before as a way of understanding who I am.

The second thing that happened was a repeat of a conversation between Terry Gross, host of ‘Fresh Air’ on NPR and Johnny Cash who was talking about recording songs.  He said

I would  keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one.  That it was right from my soul.

Right from my soul.  Creative activity as a way of working out my own development.

I devote a lot of time to photography and Photoshop and I really don’t feel complete if I’ve been away from it too long.   My wife, who this weekend is off to quilt camp, feels the same way about her quilting.  Are these our mirrors inward?  Perhaps.  I do know that I am coming to see photography as a path in a spiritual life.

Creativity can come in at any stage of the process of making a picture.  Sometimes it is simply seeing something interesting.

Sometimes it comes about accidentally.  This one benefited from unintentional camera shake.

Sometimes it is developed in Photoshop.  As an example, I started with these two images:

and

I had originally intended for them to each stand on their own but that didn’t work out so I combined them and did a little work with Photoshop to produce this:

I have a strong feeling that if creativity, especially in the second half of life, is a way of working out one’s own development, then photography can be the torch that illuminates the way.  At least it does for me.