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ON MY LAST ENTRY, JOHN LINN LEFT A COMMENT THAT READ in part:
“I am now involved with a camera club in our new community and will be presenting some ideas/thoughts on how we can find beauty around us that is not obvious without careful observation and visual curiosity... skills that need to be learned and internalized... skills that you are expert in and have written extensively about in the past.”
Thanks for the comment. Re: “find(ing) beauty around us that is not obvious…skills that you are expert in…” in my extensive writing about find(ing) beauty around us that is not obvious I have probably been less than precise in defining / describing what it is I actually see / find / picture in the everyday world.
To wit, in fact, I rarely see beauty in the everyday world. However, what I do see is a sense of form, aka: the relationship of color, line, shape, form, and texture-the “classic” elements of art-that emerges when isolated within my imposed framing to create, at the very least, to my eye and sensibilities, a visually interesting picturing possibility. In most cases, the depicted referent, when pictured and printed, is one that most viewers would not consider to be representative of the common notion of “beauty”.
That written, I believe that the beauty to be seen and found in my pictures is the beauty perceived in a carefully crafted print (which illustrates and illuminates how I see the world). The print, in and of itself, is a “beautiful” object (or, at least, visually interesting) independent of that which is depicted.
In fact, I believe that the transformative act of appropriating everyday artifacts for use as raw material for the creation of a beautiful object-a painting, a sculpture, a photograph-is what making Art is all about. To my eye and sensibilities, that act is nearly an act of magic…in a sense, making something beautiful out of “nothing”.