The above work is by Vassily Kandinsky. I’ll get back to that presently.
This week’s Lens Artists Challenge is Creativity, courtesy of Leya. It’s a “look back” at Challenge #42 (I wasn’t here for that.) I’ll touch on several dimensions of creativity important to me. Creativity is the ability to think about a task or a problem in a new or different way, or the ability to use the imagination to generate new ideas. I think that view applies to most of my examples.
I taught mathematics for forty years, high school and college math. I was regarded as an especially creative teacher. I loved it. It was a very meaningful and treasured part of my life. I found doing mathematics to be a very creative experience. I did research and studied what I felt at the time to be particularly creative and important subjects (dynamical systems, general systems theory, automata).
In the classroom, I tried to help my students grow intellectually as well as personally – in confidence and perspective, in maturity and meaningful relations – and just square roots and quadratic equations. Teaching young people the pleasures of calculus was an experience I’ll never forget.
I don’t paint or draw or sculpt. For me, aside from mathematics, creativity means photography and modern art. The achievement I’m proudest of was publishing Visions of Nature several years ago. It was a large size 73-page coffee table book with over 50 photographs on heavyweight semi-gloss art paper. Unfortunately, the book is now out of print, but you can see the book and page through all of the images online.
This project resulted from my discovery of amazingly creative work by the Russian writer and critic, Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky wrote, in 1917, that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’”, the process he characterized as “defamiliarization,” or ostranenie in the Russian, in order to generate fresh ways of seeing.
I found this a startlingly original insight, and so I created a series of photographic images that intentionally abstracted or distorted scenes of nature in the interest of inspiring different ways to perceive the colors, shapes, and patterns of nature.
Here is a small gallery of some images from this collection, Visions of Nature.
There are more in my website at Visions of Nature and many more in the book.
Continuing in the photography theme, another, for me, highly creative person was Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Stieglitz founded the Camera Club of New York in 1896. This led to the magazine, Camera Notes, in 1897. In 1902, Camera Notes turned into Camera Work, published from 1902 to 1917, which is still considered one of the seminal works in photography. Through Camera Work and his other work, Stieglitz presided over the rise of the Photo Secessionist movement, which sought to establish a distinctively American school of photography. Steiglitz and the Photo Secessionists did more to establish photography as a serious art form than anyone else. Steiglitz also founded what became known as the naturalist school of photography. Stieglitz believed that photography was an art form in which the photography applied all the tools of the camera and the darkroom to produce the photographer’s vision. (An early forerunner of today’s school of digital manipulation of the photographic image!) Stieglitz was also married to Georgia Okkeefe, another artist high in my pantheon of the most creative people.
And,
Now for that Kandinsky…
I have long had a passion for modern art. Vassily Kandinsky, 1886-1944, is one of my favorites and, in my view, one of the most creative of modern artists. Kandinsky is generally viewed as the founder of abstract art in Western painting. Kandinsky compared painting to composing music in the manner for which he would become noted, writing “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmony, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”. (In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911.)
In the painting above, Yellow Red Blue, Kandinsky was following the color theory of the German poet Goethe, according to which yellow and blue, which he has placed here in powerful opposition to each other, are the strongest pair of opposites. Between them he has put red to cool the conflict. The bright warmth of red made him think of fanfares.
And, so, thanks to Leya for this great Challenge! Next week it is holiday time, so the Lens Artists Challenge continues on July 12, when our guest host will be Stupidity Hole, aka SH.
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