On Art
If you post photographs on a site like Luminous Landscape, something I've done for many years, sooner or later you run into the question: "what is art?" Everybody seems to have a definition. In fact the word "art" has so many different meanings that standing alone it's meaningless. You need to define it before you use it. So, for what's to follow I'll define it: "Art is something created by a human being that gives you a transcendental experience."
What's a transcendental experience? Merriam-Webster gives several meanings for that word, but the one I'm after is derived from "transcendence": "A state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience." In other words, if I look at a painting and my reaction is, "it's pretty," it's clear I like the painting, but what I've gotten from it isn't a transcendental experience. On the other hand if I look at a painting and something inside me cries or shouts, and I don't know how to describe the effect the painting has on me, it's given me a transcendental experience.
For me, music produces the most vivid examples of the difference. I like Linda Ronstadt's collection, "Round Midnight," and I like a lot of the stuff Credence Clearwater Revival does. But though Linda is pleasant and Credence is fun, they're both a long way from, say, Pavarotti singing Panis Angelicus, which never fails to bring me to tears, and not because it's pretty. Luciano interprets César Franck's masterpiece in a way that reaches deep inside me and opens a door to my soul. That's a transcendental experience. The composer who can do that most often is Giacomo Puccini, but there are others who produce what for me is powerful art.
I don't mean to imply that in order to be called "art," a work always has to knock you down the way Panis Angelicus knocks me down. I think there are degrees. The important thing is that the art gives you an experience you can't put into words; an experience beyond the literal meaning of the work itself. Going back to Linda's "Round Midnight," there's some Gershwin in that collection that pushes up to and maybe a bit beyond the bounds of simple human experience.
I've never been much of a musician. It's my own fault. I took piano lessons for ten years, beginning when I was five, but I never worked very hard at it, and when girls came along I was through trying to do anything serious with it. I never learned to read music, mainly because I could memorize pretty quickly. So, though I think music can be the most powerful art, it's not something I've done much with. I've described my time in Lincoln High School's Choir A in "My Early Life," and the quartet in Squadron Officer's School in "Rapid City and Great Falls." I also used to sing in a church choir during summers at Lewiston, Michigan, and when I belonged to little St. Athanasius Anglican Church here in Colorado Springs I was the backup cantor. But I've never produced music that rose to the level of art.
Poetry is another art form that can be very powerful, though perhaps not as powerful as music. The difference, I think, is that music doesn't depend on symbols of human experience; it bypasses experience and speaks directly to the soul. Poetry must use words, and words have meanings that often are independent of their significance in a poem. Here's a stanza from Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night":
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Taken at face value the words are gibberish, but the imagery, like great music, goes beyond the words and touches something deeper than comprehension; deeper than mind. Twenty years ago I wrote an essay for a discussion group about what makes poetry work. The essay mostly is a review of Archibald McLeish's book, Poetry and Experience, and It makes the case that a poem's "meaning" is carried in the interstices between images, not in the words themselves.
I started writing what I thought was poetry when I was a little kid. Then at University of Michigan I discovered the difference between verse and poetry. I started writing poetry and I got a lot of it published, but nobody's ever going to do a PhD thesis on my poetry. I like Haiku, though at a lecture I once attended the Japanese professor pointed out that to write real Haiku you have to write it in Japanese because the characters themselves are part of the art, and I can't do that. Here's one of my better ones — in English:
Silent house! Darkness!
Children breathing softly. Wind…
Outside in the night.
Something comes through from those words that goes beyond the words, though it's nowhere near as powerful as the jolt I get from Pavarotti and Panis Angelicus. I can't really critique my own poetry because I know too much about what's behind it, but a couple other pieces stick out for me. For the Wind Passeth Over It is one that I think carries a transcendental touch in the interstices between its images. And Ubon has some passages that for me do the same thing.
I've also tried my hand at fiction. There's a collection of short stories I wrote shortly after I returned from Thailand on my second Southeast Asian tour, and a single non-Asian short short I wrote later on. I hope to spend some time writing more fiction because I enjoy doing it, but I'm never going to be a best-selling author.
I tried some other art genres. For a while in the sixties I got interested in prints. I made some woodcuts, at least one of which wasn't bad, and was hanging in my brother Richard's house last time I was there: a serious compliment since Rich is a real artist. I did some painting and wasn't very good at it. I took a drawing class. The nude model was cute, but more importantly I found I could do faces reasonably well.
But I wasn't that kind of artist. The principal outcome from my interest in painting has been that I've studied the masters. I have a pretty complete library of courses on the subject from The Great Courses, and I've gone through them all, sometimes more than once. Like nearly everybody else I dote on the Impressionists, and I especially love Renoir's "Le déjeuner des canotiers," "Luncheon of the Boating Party." But for more serious transcendence I go to Edward Hopper. His paintings seem simple, but some of them give me an experience I can't describe or explain.
Beyond poetry my main adventure in art has been photography. I built my first darkroom in my parents' fruit cellar when I was about thirteen, but I didn't really get into photography until I got to Korea in 1953. Once the war ended I started going downtown and shooting the local scene. I shot pictures of a lot of people, and I was doing street photography, though I didn't know it at the time. Three of us built a darkroom in the corner of a barracks, found a discarded tip tank, bribed some engineers to put it up on some struts and run a hose into the darkroom from outside, mail-ordered an enlarger, a darkroom light, pans, developer, stop, fix, etc., etc. We conned the guy who filled the base's water tanks into topping off our tip tank as he went by. It wasn't much, and in the winter we couldn't control water temperatures very well, but it worked.
In Great Falls, Beausejour, and Kansas City I shot mostly color, because I didn't have access to a darkroom. In Thailand and Vietnam I had my black and white film processed and printed locally. The results often were coarse, but they were usable. In Vietnam I was making enough money playing poker to buy some pretty fine camera gear. Back home in Colorado Springs we rented 1115 N. Cascade. The house had a wonderful basement with a room perfect for an extensive darkroom, which I proceeded to set up.
By the time we got to Colorado Springs I'd run across some books by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and I'd begun to understand what street photography was all about. I won't explain at length, because I've written an essay on the subject you can access: "On Street Photography," In my spare time I started walking the streets with a Leica. Some of my pictures from the sixties are true street photography.
I did a lot of shooting trips around Southern Colorado on weekends. We also made trips to Sun City, Arizona, where my folks lived. During those years I was able to capture some of the remnants of the West's adolescence before they disappeared. Those photographs are what I call "wabi sabi" (Google it). Many of the pictures are on my web at Western Ruins of the Sixties, but I put some of them together with a preface and a poem in a little book: Voices on the Prairie.
In 1972 we moved to 20 Grand Avenue in Manitou Springs. 20 Grand is a large house with five bedrooms and not much of a basement. I was out of business as far as black and white photography was concerned. There was no way to set up a darkroom in that house.
A year after we moved to Manitou I went back to Thailand. I took my Leica M4 with me but I was too busy as commander of the 621st to spend much time shooting pictures. When I got home, all my photographic gear was still sitting in a dank, unfinished basement room, so I sold it all and stopped shooting pictures.
Then, in 1992 we sold 20 Grand and moved to 45 W. Boulder, a condo at Park Place in Colorado Springs. Eight years later the first really usable digital camera came out: the Casio QV-3000EX. Digital was a whole new world. You needed software for your computer but you didn't need a darkroom. Since we lived downtown I started walking the streets again with the Casio.
Equipment and software got better and better, and somewhere around 2005 I started putting prints in local galleries. I sold a few, but the effort mostly was an ego trip. Then, in 2007 I went to work shooting for the Colorado Springs Downtown Partnership's new web site — for free. At that time I had my office at 29 E. Bijou, where I was doing my printing and matting. Mark Kemper, a friend down the hall was a professional photographer, and I didn't want to cut into his business so I was pretty careful what I took on. But Downtown Partnership couldn't afford to hire a pro, and the connection allowed me the kind of access around town I'd have had as a newspaper reporter.
I've had a lot of fun with my cameras, but the serious work has been street photography and wabi sabi.
As I pointed out in my essays, good street photography needs to contain a story. But to be really good it also needs to have enough ambiguity to tweak your imagination. I've shot many pictures that satisfy both requirements. Here are a few of my favorites: "Luncheon Over," "381," "The Circle," and "The Midnight Guitarist" in black and white. "Shine," "Bad Day at Black Rock," and "Moretti" in color,
In 2006 I made two shooting trips through the less populated parts of Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and West Texas. I ended up with a lot of wabi sabi that I put together in a pair of comb-bound books that I titled "For the Wind Passeth Over it." Somebody in the family has those books. There are many wabi sabi pictures in the "In Passing" collection on my web.
I have two photo webs. One is the Photo Gallery at russ-lewis.com, which includes a wide range of pictures. The other is Fine Art Snaps which was a failed marketing test, and is more selective than its counterpart. A wide collection of my photographs is on those two sites, but I have boxes of negatives I haven't scanned. At the moment my Lightroom catalog shows a total of 23,737 digital photograph files. Many of these are family pictures, and many are what I call "tourist pictures," but there are a few that can be described properly as art.
I'm attracted to many kinds of photography. Sometimes I do landscape. Sometimes I do still life. In Florida I frequently shoot wildlife. I enjoy doing portraits, formal and informal. I had a ball in downtown Colorado Springs making promotional shots for the Downtown Partnership. Wabi sabi is one of my passions, but to me street photography is photography's apex. As I said in "On Street Photography":
An historical novelist guesses at the past on the best evidence he can find, but a photograph isn't a guess; it's an artifact from the past that has captured time. And so, a street photograph that has captured not only the visages of its subjects, but the story that surrounds their actions can be a more convincing reminder of how things were than any novel or any straight, posed documentary photograph.
I often try to produce art with my cameras. I rarely succeed, but I find my few successes deeply satisfying.
————————————————
Outside the realm of art, in the early sixties I wrote for the Foundation For Economic Education (FEE), and for a couple other conservative publications under the pen name, "Lewis Stearns." I went searching on the web for some of this stuff. I found a couple articles in FEE's archives, but because of copyright restrictions only one was recoverable. If you're interested, you can see it here.
