I’m very happily returning to this space after too long an absence due to a very busy few months navigating some big life changes. I’ve been dividing my time between two beautiful places I am now fortunate to call home: San Miguel de Allende, and the tiny island of Bequia in St. Vincent and The […]
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 […]
I’ve often written here about the concept of ‘Flow’ as it relates to creative process and our overall sense of well-being; that there is a higher intelligence at work regarding a formula for creativity that we can trust as an organizing principle not only in the creative process, but more importantly in our day to day […]
We all experience ‘gaps’ in our lives; those in between times where we are not forging ahead with a strong sense of direction, where we feel a little lost, where we are in limbo. Gaps present as periods of ‘not-knowing’ large and small: the voids and upset we periodically experience as we move through life. These […]
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 […]
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 […]
In recent posts I’ve written about the Zen of Seeing as a mindfulness practice. Another way Zen figures into the quality of our seeing, and therefore our photography practice, is that it offers a set of visual disciplines, or guidelines for aesthetic beauty. Much of Japanese culture puts the value of beauty—the importance, articulation and […]
“Each of us is responsible for how we see…and how we see determines what we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the soul. When the soul is alive to beauty then we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of […]
I’m most excited to be developing a new workshop entitled The Zen of Seeing. It’s been several years in the making, and is an offshoot of my Good Eye workshop, where I hone in on the aspects of visual discernment. Here I introduce how we can use our cameras as a mindfulness tool: “The second […]
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 […]