Carrying on from the new habit of not bothering to take any photographs, I have been reading in the garden. It has been causing a gentle rewiring of my brain. It all kicked off with a little book I didn’t like.
With rave Amazon reviews, a director of films I love, when I found out David Lynch was an artist I immediately got “Catching the Big Fish” A book on David Lynch’s creative process. I feel no reviewer had read “Art and Fear” or the two books from Brooks Jenson I read last weekend. Constantly referring to a special meditation technique, yet never actually explaining the process; It turned out with further research “Transcendental Meditation” is a special technique that is incredibly natural and easy yet requires one-to-one training over some time, for money, otherwise, it just won’t work. I struggled to find much more information except people claiming it’s just simple mantra meditation requiring no training.
I’m forever sceptical of meditation. People who claim its benefits are also selling books on it. No lifestyle guru is going to say their morning routine is to get up, wash their hair, get dressed and go to work. It will, of course, be a cold shower at 5 am, smoothies, a morning run, meditation and affirmations followed by journaling the plan of the day ahead and reading the Art of War.
I had already been religiously making Morning Notes, a daily exercise from the book “The Artists Way” by Julia Cameron. This simply, is to write out 3 pages of notes about whatever concerns and plans you have for the day. It is to get stuff out of your head and discover your artistic motivations. This task all started to go to crap when I replaced my A5 notepad with an A5+ notepad, which made the time to write out 3 pages even more tiring.
Swapping morning notes for meditation, I somehow discovered something profound. The internet is the killer of all my artistic motivation. How meditation even led to this realisation I'm unsure. I’ve learnt to be bored, I've learnt to recognise my thinking and be aware of my distractions. In this new state of mind, I've learnt to be inspired by nature again.
Now I’m living the monastic life, my reading has skyrocketed. I am also making huge progress on keeping the house clean with the exception of the toilet.
Much of my newer work is inspired by the English countryside, its history, myths and unique weirdness, hearing the word “Albion” ignites my love for creativity and the English landscape. This book did not immerse me in the rabbit holes of English culture like “A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields” did. Whilst the latter is far too long and over-stylized in its language, the former is too short and more of a mainstream primer to this genre.
The book feels like a very nice and short broken poem about the unique mystery of old England. It features many great artists to take inspiration from. It reminds me to read more on this subject.
I’ve had this book for some time and been too scared to read it. I am unsure why, sometimes I will flip through a book and think “damn that works so good I don’t feel like I’m ready to read it.” In some ways I’m glad I didn’t as I wasn’t ready to read it.
After reading “Art and Fear” and “Letting Go of the Camera”, this book seems to prove everything they said about the working of an artist. One of my favourite paintings “Cristina’s world” has now taken on a different meaning. The painting was part of a long-running series where the artist documented the complex relationship he shared at the Olson’s House and Keuner’s Farm and their inhabitants.
“Cristina’s world” wasn’t an image from imagination or even meant to have any stand-alone deepness, it was one of many images made over years from life. Wyeth was forever sketching and painting the interactions of the environment and people. He lived as a kind of strange long-term guest, their home his studio.
What was inspiring is that he felt to see; he needed to draw and paint. It was this which showed the true nature of things, the emotion, something that cannot be captured by camera alone. There is an overriding sense of him going deeper into the lives and places to discover something previously unseen. Sketches upon sketches, constant reworking and abandoning old ideas when they didn’t work out. Wyeth was a man obsessed with deep observation of the quiet emotion of people and place. The book truly inspired me, I feel “Cristina’s World” is not even the best image inside.
Taking The Crown for the worst book I’ve read this year, I thought this could have been a gem. I was hoping for some long-forgotten insights from the earliest portrait photographers. Instead, this book was the over-flowery prose and bitching’s of an upper-class studio owner. Ladies! Thou ought to come to the studio early and not go galivanting around shopping during the best light of the day. Arriving at the studio past 3pm just won’t do and will require more seconds for the exposure
