Journaling the Lazytea Way

Mood: Centered
Listening to: Keep it Simple - Keb Mo
Reading: The Tao of Photography

The more I learn about something the more information I absorb when I see it. I took a class in calligraphy once many years ago. I thought I would be learning how to write fancy letters. Instead, I learned about paper, ink, pen nibs, serifs, and the form of the basic lettering styles. I can no longer look at anything printed without noting if the font was serif or sans serif. The flourishes of the celtic letters are old friends. I also learned a lot about my inner nature. How hard it was for me to write something large though the same thing on a smaller scale was not so difficult. I learned I could trace and trace thousands of times but when left on my own to reproduce the stroke I failed miserably. I learned to breathe, concentrate, work from the heart. All served me well down the road. I guess the most important thing I learned was that we don't always know what we will be learning or doing though we seemingly have free choice to choose.

Deviants seem to have mastered transforming reality with a poetic conception quite well. They see beyond what meets the eye. I learn from every deviation I visit. I like to look at the deviations in various contexts - as a part of my favorites, as a part of a gallery personal or club, as a part of what deviations were new from all on my watch list, as a part of their own gallery, or as a part of some collection produced by a search. The art itself is the same but the context shifts like light on a cloudy day. Filters can by mine or the artists. The focus can be altered. In speaking of plant photography Tom Ang bring up similar ideas:

"It is easy to be blind to the commonplace, to what you see everyday. Rather like the air we need for our physical well-being, we rely on plant life for our continuing mental balance and health - but we notice it only when it is missing. We think about our furniture only when somebody has moved it without our permission.

It takes, then, a certain poetic concentration to transcend the normally inconsequential, to lift the invisible, the ignored, into the realm of the observed. It is only through an act of focused imagination that meaning is revealed. In fact, there is probably a photograph in the next shrub you pass. An image can be extracted from any blade of grass you step on.

The gap between a picture and plant life is bridged by your imagination and artistic force. "

Tom Ang - Tao of Photography

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"...You do not have to go outside to see Heaven.
The more you travel, the less you know."
- Tao Te Ching
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