Amy Turn Sharp, Poet

and sometimes we would dance in the stone street
sometimes I would put my head on his shoulder
and wonder what sadness there was in the world
when the sun could be so warm
when the island flowers could smell so summer strong
when people could dance with such grace
when my heart had a thousand chances left

Amy Turn Sharp, extract from #82 her series, a poem a day for a year.

I love this woman's poetry.  There have been so many treasures so far. I'm looking forward to spending a year reading her.

 

Maya Angelou, Life

“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure....Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative, and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”

Maya Angelou

Piazza Banchi, Genova

I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason to paint but that.
Andrew Wyeth.

Exploring the depth of my love for a place seems like an inspiring reason to take photographs too.  There is more passion, more depth and emotion, when you turn your camera on something you love.

Piazza Banchi, the place where I buy my pink flowers when in Genova.  Taken one winter's night, January, 2012.

(Note: this was taken after the sun had gone down.  I spun my Canon EOS 5D MkII's ISO up to someplace around 6000 (thank you to Canon for this option) then handheld the camera to see what I might get without a flash or a tripod.)

Art and Fear

"Artists come together with the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities. Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it's not art. Your job is to draw a line from your art to your life that is straight and clear."

- David Bayles & Ted Orland (Art and Fear)

found over on The Drawing Board.

Holy Light, Genova

We are lonesome animals.
We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome.
One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel
‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.’
You’re not as alone as you thought.
— John Steinbeck

Quote sourced from the blog of the truly gifted photographer, Steve McCurry.

Yesterday, as we worked through our day, Hanna, Francesca and I found time to pop into my favourite church here in Genova ... located in Piazza Maddalena.

I was giving Hanna a little information about photography and explained ... there are all the rules but then you can break them and, sometimes, that’s where the magic happens.

This is one of those shots, for me anyway.  I was handholding my camera in an incredibly dark church, kind of falling in love with the light and voila, the light let me have a little of its beautiful self.

Cees Nooteboom, photography

Photography is a more intense way of “looking”. No photographer simply travels. He cannot allow himself the luxury of just looking around. He does not see landscapes; he sees photographs, images of reality as it might appear in a photograph.
Cees Nooteboom in 1982 in the Holland Herald, KLM’s in-flight magazine.

Uncertainty, Innovation, and the Alchemy of Fear, by Jonathan Fields

The ability to live in the question long enough for genius to emerge is a touchstone of creative success. In fact, a 2008 study published in the Journal of Creative Behavior revealed tolerance for ambiguity to be “significantly and positively related” to creativity.

I had to smile.  I believe I might just have that tolerance for ambiguity.  It’s been so much of my life ... the uncertainty of what’s next and how to go forward.  It might even be said that doing things like moving alone to Istanbul, in 2003, had a degree of seeking out that uncertainty-washed place.  Mostly it’s without realising it.  It seems to be me. 

Jonathan Fields has written an interesting article you might enjoy if you’re working as a creative person: There may, in fact, be a very thin slice of creators who arrive on the planet more able to go to and even seek out that uncertainty-washed place that destroys so many others. But, for a far greater number of high-level creators, across all fields, the ability to be okay and even invite uncertainty in the name of creating bigger, better, cooler things is trained. Sometimes with great intention, other times without even realizing it.

The house is a metaphor for the self ...

The house is a metaphor for the self, of course, but it is also totally real.  And a foreign house exaggerates all the associations houses carry.
Frances Mayes, extracted from Under the Tuscan Sun.

I love the words I find written in Frances Mayes book, Under the Tuscan Sun.  I’ve been carrying this book with me, wherever I move, since before moving to Te Anau, New Zealand, and that was way back before 1999.

The book is so veryvery different to the movie.  My idea is that the book is for writers and dreamers, while the movie is a straight out chick flick ... humble opionion, of course.

David, Ralph and Vincent

Ridicule is a terrible whitherer of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Found over on David du Chemin’s blog ... brilliant post.  He is writing wise words from his hospital bed in these days.  He pulled me in when I read, ‘I don’t know a single artist that doesn’t wrestle with cycles of self-doubt, second-guesses ...”

He, in turn, linked over to Vincent Versace

I loved so much of his article too ... a slice: Every image you create is an expression of the artistic inspiration that moves you. You express your creative voice by developing the ability to show what moves you without screaming for the attention of others. It means getting out of your own way and, in the moments when your creative spirit is moved, trusting that what comes from those moments will be good. Your goal should be to trust what you feel and constantly strive toward personal excellence and elegant performance. When your effectiveness becomes effortless, your images will move the viewer solely by the power that caused you to be moved.

Pearl S. Buck, Creative Minds

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…

They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.
Pearl S. Buck

Colin Monteath, Photographer, Writer, Explorer

Chance encounters change lives. Close friends, passing aquaintances and even characters who emerge from old books often leave footprints across my heart. By opening mysterious doors, the influence of others has inadvertently altered the direction of my life.
Colin Monteath,  from Under A Sheltering Sky

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Lecture, 2006

Some extracts: A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.

The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

...I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.

But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.

Sir Richard Burton, a quote

After a long and toilsome march, weary of the way, [the wanderer] drops into the nearest place of rest to become the most domestic of men ...

But soon the passive fit has passed away; again a paroxysm of ennui coming on by slow degrees, Viator loses appetite, he walks about his room all night, he yawns at conversations, and a book acts upon him as a narcotic.

The man wants to wander, and he must do so, or he shall die.
Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 1855