- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Complexity
Friday, December 08, 2023
Disorder to Order
- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
Patterns of Connection
Wednesday, December 06, 2023
It’s a Visual World
Leonora Carrington (asked if there had been other artists in the family): My mother used to paint biscuit tins for jumble sales. That’s the only art that went on in my household.
Interviewer: I wonder where it came from?
Leonora Carrington: I have no idea.
Interviewer: No other artists in our family? None at all?
Leonora Carrington: Why are you fixed on the idea of heredity? It’s not hereditary … comes from somewhere else, not from genes. You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make a kind of intellectual mini-logic. You never understand by that road.
Interviewer: What do you think you do understand by then?
Leonora Carrington: By your own feelings about things …if you see a painting that you like… canvas is an empty space.
Interviewer: If I got one of your pictures down from upstairs and said to you what were you thinking when you painted this…?
Leonora Carrington: No. It’s a visual world, you want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not… the visual world, it’s totally different. Remember what I’ve just said now, don’t try and turn it into a …kind of intellectual game. It’s not… It’s a visual world, which is different. The visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk –that’s one concept– to this bed and around it without running into it. I’m moving in space. Or I can have a concept of it and then I can see it as an object in space…”
- Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Don't try to intellectualize art
Sunday, November 12, 2023
The Color Nearest the Light
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Theory of Colours
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Leaves, Color, Wholeness
"When we understand what order is, I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is ... Learning to see … wholeness … not muddled or contaminated by words and concepts, is extremely difficult, but it is possible to learn …When we see wholeness as it is, we recognize that [its] seeming parts … are merely arbitrary fragments which our minds have been directed to, because we happen to have words for them. If we open our eyes wide, and look at the scene without cognitive prejudice, we see something quite different ... geometric wholeness is not merely beautiful in itself as an accompaniment to the beautiful color. It is essential, necessary, for the release of light. Color, far from being an incidental attribute of things, is fundamental to the living structure of wholeness. Inner light is not merely a phenomenon, but the character of wholeness when it ‘melts.’"
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
Wednesday, November 08, 2023
The Direction of Time
- Hans Reichenbach (1891 - 1953)
The Direction of Time
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Capturing Surrealities - #2
"Far away there in the sunshine
are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can
look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and try
to follow where they lead."
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Capturing Surrealities - #1
Monday, October 23, 2023
Expanding Our Vision
- Eric Kandel (1929 - )
The Age of Insight
Saturday, June 10, 2023
Sparks of Ephemeral Unrealities
Waves shatter against stoic stone,
It's not a mirror of the world as is,
But a mirror of the world
as it can be imagined to be.
aleph of unending possibilities.
asking, "Who dreams the dreamer?"
Behold, we are all, the other, in this
world as it can be imagined to be."
- ChatGPT (30 Nov 2022 - )
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence
Prompt = "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have stitched together a triptych of long exposure images taken at sunset at Point Lobos, California. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes the mystery this triptych is meant to evoke in a viewers mind's eye. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."
Friday, May 26, 2023
Mysterious Worlds
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov
Sunday, March 05, 2023
The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit
- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe
Thursday, February 16, 2023
What's a Photographer to Do Without a 'Real' Camera?
- Chase Jarvis (1971 - )
As I wrote about in my last blog post, my wife and I recently visited our youngest son in college. Since the trip was only for a few days (cross-country, no less: we live in northern Virginia, but our son's college is in California), and our ostensible purpose was to attend "Parent's Day," I reasoned - foolishly, as it turns out - that there would be zero time for "real photography" (meaning: photography with what I call my "real" camera). Note that I intend no disrespect either to my iPhone (which I always have with me) or to anyone who's "real camera" is an iPhone. The iPhone is a great photographic tool and is more than capable of capturing wonderful images! I use this phraseology only to convey a truth of my own reality: if I am without the camera(s) that I am usually armed with when I go on my photo safaris I somehow feel less than whole - disarmed, as it were - photographically speaking (which in hindsight of course is, again, rather foolish). Which is not to say that my "eye" is not constantly searching for something to photograph (even as the brain behind the eye laments not having my "real camera").
The (abstract) triptych above is an assembly of a few miscellaneous "shots" I took with my iPhone while waiting to board one of our planes. A few other "quick grabs" I managed to take during the trip included: (1) a shot of the ceiling at an American Airlines' Admirals Club (the "upside down" view of which I much prefer over the "straight" version) ...
(2) a shot of a chandelier at LAX ...
(3) a series of "fire abstracts" (captured while waiting for our dinner to arrive at a restaurant close to our son's college) ...
Saturday, February 04, 2023
Worlds Within Worlds
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
The Original Mystery
...
Thus the world, whenever it appears as a physical universe*, must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Deep Time
Monday, December 19, 2022
Bewilderments of the Eyes
would be literally nothing but
the shadows of the images.
...
- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Republic, "The Allegory of the Cave"
Friday, December 16, 2022
Illimitable Universe
- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919)
The Riddle of the Universe
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Admiring Light's Beauty
Close your eyes, and then look again:
what you saw is no longer there;
and what you will see later is not yet. "
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
Sunday, November 06, 2022
Signatura Regrum
all reasoning is also intuition,
all observation is also invention.