I belong to a camera club that has a few professional
photographers and some who are almost at that level. They create images, mostly
in black and white that are meant to evoke emotional response or tell a story. However,
to untrained eyes, many of them look disjointed, overexposed or ill composed.
They are not “pretty” pictures by a standard definition of the term.
I know by now how to take “pretty” pictures, according to
these photographers, and should move on to taking pictures like theirs. Bruce, the
person who organizes the club, told me to select a poem or a sonnet and take
pictures that evoke my selection. This
would be the way for me to slide into their fraternity.
I am not sure what to do next, as I am generally quite ignorant
of poems and even less so of sonnets. Unlike music, stories, photographs or
paintings, they don’t do anything for me. The only poem I could remember, when
Bruce put me on a spot, was, the famous one by Robert Frost: “Woods are lovely
dark and deep”. (There is a reason why most Indians know that poem---something
to do with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime minister of India). Bruce told me to
disregard that poem as being too pedantic and not stretching my imagination to
the extent he wants me to. After all, I am already taking pictures of dark and
deep New England woods.
That has created an interesting challenge: If I am not at
all into poetry how will I select one to convert into photography? Even more
challenging, if their series of
not-very-good photographs do not evoke a poem in my mind, how will I ever create them? In other words, how would I ever know if I have succeeded if
I do not know what success is?
So, I have concluded that
you cannot create art that you cannot appreciate yourself.
Now, I am attempting to move beyond “pretty
pictures” and the way forward I have discovered is creating digital art. Using
Photoshop, I am able to create abstracts and other forms of artwork that I think
is quite good. I have learned somehow to appreciate this type of artwork, while I cannot the poetic ones. Having passed
that first hurdle, I have then figured out how to create it using various
techniques.
I am not sure why I am reasonably successful in doing so
while failing the poetic taste. I have not received any formal training in
modern or abstract art. I am reading a book that provides me some guidance on
how to appreciate modern art, titled “Varieties of Visual Experience,” by
Edmund Burke Feldman. It helps but that’s not it.
Perhaps our right brain has some preordained preferences on
what we consider art and what we don’t. These “nature,” plus some “nurture”
elements in the brain define whether we are able to move beyond pretty pictures
and melodious music, and able to appreciate a work by Picasso or Arnold
Schoenberg (a modern composer). They may also dictate what we will not be able to appreciate, even though
we may say so to display our refined taste.
We all have urge to create something. Others can indicate various
outlets, and guide us…but in the end, it is up to us how we satisfy it. This is
especially true if one is pursuing art for its own sake and not as a commercial
venture.
That is the way I plan
to proceed.
