In college, my art professor once defined art as organized chaos. I’ve thought about that definition for years. I think about it when I look at the river landscapes around me or the light shining on my son’s hair when we are getting a post-school snowball: how would I organize these colors and shapes on a flat surface?
Right now, the world itself feels chaotic. I am terrified of nuclear war, Neo-Nazi rallies, hurricanes that destroy lives and homes. I’ve seen and admired other artists engage with the absolutely terrifying parts of the world in a way I don’t yet feel equipped to.
Art has been my escape from chaos– my retreat, not away from the world but more deeply into it’s more harmonious elements– the shapes, lines, and colors of nature when it doesn’t seem at war with itself. My art is the blue heron before it violently devours an unassuming fish or before it itself gets bloodied and consumed by an alligator.
I realize this is all a bit much, but nature isn’t always peaceful. I forget that a lot. I’m not suggesting we disengage from the world’s terrors (what a privilege it is for those of us who even have that option). This post isn’t an answer so much as a question: how do I make art in a chaotic and painful world?
There are times when it feels laughable to devote emotional energy to painting a heron. There are other times when it feels like a meditation, like praying– maybe if I can make sense of this space, this potential beauty, I might make sense of the bigger spaces I find so terrifying.
Your thoughts are always welcome.
Thanks for encapsulating what I’ve been feeling since white supremacists marched on Charlottesville. I like to think I’m aware of my white privilege, but I don’t question it nearly enough. I’m only just beginning to do that with photography, and right now I only have very basic questions. I certainly haven’t taken many photos that have anything to do with social justice, as I am very much drawn to minimalism and photography at its simplest: what do these shapes say? What are these birds doing perched close together on the beach?
Lately I’ve been asking myself, what do I think “beautiful” means? Am I only considering beauty from a white male’s perspective? Probably, and how then can I move beyond that? Do I need to consider the history of the spaces I photograph? And how can I confront those histories with just a not-very-good camera, a few not-very-good-lenses, and usually only natural lighting? And as I look back at my work, it’s the photos that have some sort of haunting element to them that I prefer over the others. But again, what in particular is haunting me?
Thank you so much for sharing. I love the questions your photography is causing you to ask. I think what I like best about my also “non-social justice” work is that the act of creating it reminds me of my own agency– if I make a line or shape that wasn’t there before, I am not powerless. While my images don’t literally depict or engage directly with the world’s ills I find most troubling, I like to believe that my ritual of creating helps me to be a person who can and does engage with those ills. If nothing else, when we photograph or paint we are looking closely at something. We discover things we hadn’t noticed without the camera or without the paint or even without the intent to photograph or paint. I think this is a skill worth cultivating.