Seeing is a creative process.
Meaningful art – in any medium – is mind changing, challenging the prejudices of conventional thought. In this role, art lives between the known and the unknown, communicating what it discovers in this ambiguous territory.
“The winds of grace are blowing all the time. All you have to do is put up your sail”.
On breaking through the enslavement of the judgmental mind, we wander freely, we welcome and embrace the unknown, the chaos , the mystery. We move beyond the prejudice of the habitual understanding to spontaneous understanding. In this attitude of receptivity, we discover that we are open to the renewing energy of beauty in all that is.
-Duane Preble
Leap into the boundless and make it your home!
– Chuang-Tzu
Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encotnering your subject matter with you whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.
– Freeman Patterson
Chuang-Tzu describes specific characteristics of sagehood… They can be classified according to the following related concepts:
- freedom from the sense of self
- receptivity
- wu-wei (non-forceful action)
- spontaneity
- nonattachment
- acceptance
- resourcefulness
- te (virtue/power)
- free and easy wondering
By not limiting awareness to a unique ense fo self, the Taoist sage is able to embrace fully – indeed, be an integral part of – the whole process of nature happening. The sense of self is forgotten, lost in a greater universal perspective – the Tao.
My pictures are never pre-visualised or planned. I feel sstrongly that pictures must come from contact with things at the time and place of taking. At such times I rely on intuitive, perceptual responses to guide me, using reason only after the final print is made to accept or reject the results of my work.
– Wynn Bullock
I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is nt documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drawning yoursef, dissolving yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff – being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for i; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose yourself. Then it happens.
– Henri Catier-Bresson
Great Understanding is a state of mind empty of received ideas and beliefs. It is not a blank, nihilistic state in which nothing exists, but one of openness and receptivity, a state wherein past knowledge neither taints nor constricts the perception of the present moment in all its fullness.
The greater the range of emotions that you permit yourself to feel and show, the greater your receptivity to what you see before your viewfinder.
– Kathryn Marx
In both the Chuang-Tzu and in photography, receptivity implies release from the bonds of past knowledge, opening a gateway to full immersion in the immediate moment.
I am not looking for anything, I’m just looking – trying to have as full an experience as possible. The point is to have a full experience – the photograph is just a bonus.
– Michael Smith
Superiors must adop inaction and make the world work for them; inferiors must adopt action and work for the world.
– Chuang-Tzu