Posts Tagged ‘beauty’

Aesthetic Arrest

Wednesday, January 9th, 2019
I love this term—‘Aesthetic Arrest’. It best describes the feeling we have when in the presence of a work of art, or any object of beauty, that has that ‘wow’ quality, that stops us in our tracks. We feel somehow altered by the encounter, taken outside of ourselves, elevated somehow. Robert Rye best expresses it […]

Aspects of Visual Discernment

Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
Everyone is a photographer now. Yet despite the ever increasing number of photographs being taken, we seem to be suffering from what I like to call a poverty of visual discernment. The reasons are varied, beginning with the preoccupation of sharing images on social media, which generally short circuits the process of true seeing, let […]

Empty Your Cup

Thursday, May 10th, 2018
When we’re full of ourselves, art cannot flow through us, neither can our richest experience of life. Often when I’m teaching a photography workshop, there is an initial discomfort among participants around ’emptying their cup’. Everyone has brought expectations, preconceived ways of seeing, established ideas about photography, themselves, and often a serious agenda for the […]

Necessary Beauty

Friday, April 6th, 2018
  To the ancient Greeks, human society was characterized by three values, equal in importance: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. By that definition, the experience of beauty involved the appreciation of Aesthetics, Art and Nature. As someone who has made a living making things look beautiful, I’ve often questioned to what extent I was adding value […]

The ‘Good Eye’

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017
Like many who have built a career around being a photographer, I’ve often been told I have a ‘good eye’. It’s more or less a necessary job skill. A question that has come up throughout my career  is whether or not having a ‘good eye’ is something that can be learned, or is it some […]

The Fresh Eyes of Exile

Friday, February 10th, 2017
I’ve written of the need to have ‘Fresh Eyes’ in the pursuit of any creative endeavor here in the past. I came across this essay by Costica Bradatan which beautifully validates, and expands on this idea. It speaks to the upside of exile—typically a term carrying a negative connotation—banishment from all we hold dear, from […]

Ideas are the Easy Part

Sunday, September 25th, 2016
I wake up every morning saying to myself  ‘I should write a blog post today‘. The closest I get most days is simply jotting down more ideas for posts. This is the thing—for many of us ideas are the easy part. They come unbidden; most often not the result of concentrated effort, spontaneously rather, usually […]

What is Your Ikigai?

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
I first came across this term a couple years ago in a TED talk by Dan Buettner on “Blue Zones”—communities (there are 4 in the world) whose elders live with vim and vigor to record setting ages. Okinawa is one of them. Ikigai proved to be one of the core factors contributing to life expectancy. […]

Beauty as a Core Value

Tuesday, March 8th, 2016
Krista Tippett, who is the host of NPR’s OnBeing speaks to this aspiration in her new and resoundingly inspirational book Becoming Wise An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. She states the book’s purpose as offering “a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century—of personal growth but also renewed public […]

Reclaiming Beauty

Tuesday, October 13th, 2015
I recently came across a tagline for an interior design business which captures an idea I’ve been pondering for some time now. It read, simply, Creating beauty, Changing lives. Of course the reference to the very commercial enterprise of marketing home furnishings is blatant, but it also speaks to the idea that the presence of […]