Category: Art and the Creative Process

Over the years, I’ve come across so many Ansel Adams wannabes, Wynn Bullock wannabes, Michael Kenna wannabes and many others who’d prefer to be someone other than who they are. I’ve been drawn to the conclusion that imitation is the sincerest form of mindlessness.
I’ve managed to escape that. Though I admire the work of many artists in many media, I have neither icons nor mentors. My first art teacher was an idiot, and this did me sterling service. I was left on my own to pursue work as I wished, and as I could invent. And invent I did, drawing often from a long classical education, from a passion for literature and music, history and philosophy, as well as unorthodoxy, bloodymindedness, and a capacity to find joy in small phenomena that often escape the notice of others. As digital media have thinned the walls among art forms, so has my education blossomed.
From time to time I’ve been asked “How did you do that?” That’s actually an inquiry that tends to yield much less useful information than “Why did you do that?” The former is entirely mechanistic and limited, while the latter is considerably more thoughtful, more probing, more metaphysical, more likely to result in independent effort, and always much better teaching than requiring students to use carbon paper.
However, on this one occasion, I’d like to indulge those who ask the first question. Below, I include an image made from my love of the season, and below that, the recipe for achieving it. Its title is Autumn Colors.
Take ten French colored pencils, a can of Gillette aerosol shaving cream, and a single autumn leaf. Mix the ingredients carefully until you find the right flavor, testing frequently. Using a trustworthy camera, add a pinch of powdered Photoshop, and a heaped tablespoon of imagination. Store for several nights in the occipital lobe, and when it has risen sufficiently, place in a warm monitor. Results may vary.
Pulitzer-Prizewinning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, in her book In Other Words, writes of the great difficulty, as a mature adult, in acquiring a new language, in her case, Italian. She describes the years of study, the discipline, practice, receptiveness, imagination and devotion, and then adds an essential ingredient: “I renounce expertise to challenge myself. I trade certainty for uncertainty.” That’s the price and the intrinsic reward for learning a new language, or a new voice in an art medium, and continuing to refine the process, and, in the refining, changing direction, seeking refreshment.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with seeing the world through the eyes of others. After all, a lot of teaching and learning happens that way. But there is much to be said for also seeing the world through one’s own eyes.
What’s the point of standing upon the shoulders of giants if your only vision is downward? 
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries  

I see a great number of images. I make a few myself, and I subscribe to remarkable journals put out by the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, LensWork, others devoted to the image, and those made by many artists, some of whom I know. I see works exhibited in museums, galleries and websites all over the world. The work is stunning. The variety is as great as the huge population in pursuit of this calling, and the ingenuity of many of the images is almost beyond belief. I can’t think of a finer way of getting my daily inspiration, not to plagiarize, but to aspire. It is impossible to be a writer without being a reader. It’s just as impossible to be an artist without voraciously consuming art. 
I have something in common with Georg Friedrich Handel and Wynn Bullock, probably many hundreds, perhaps thousands of others. Handel, born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, was consumed with music. His father, Georg Sr., banned musical instruments from the house and insisted that his son study a respectable profession, law. Wynn Bullock’s mother was the first female Superior Court judge in California. Wynn was pressed to attend law school, but abandoned his books on his classroom desk and fled to art school.
My elementary school art teacher gave each student a lump of clay, and ordered us to copy a small horse sculpture on a shelf in the back of the room. I suppose even then at the age of 10 or so, I had acquired a nonconformist, surrealist gene. My horse had shorter front legs so he wouldn’t have to bend as far for his food, something I’ve always thought important; and longer rear legs so he could propel himself with great speed. Shading into marsupial. Mr. Strever was so annoyed with my unnatural equine re-creation that he smashed it with his fist and said “You’ll never understand anything about art.” I’ve since learned to disagree.
My father, like Herr Handel’s attitude to his son, was horrified by my interest in art, cut off access to supplies, and insisted I attend law school. It was a sympathetic Dean, a family acquaintance, who got me off the hook. I compromised by becoming an academic political scientist. The social status suited my father, though emphatically not my political analyses. It was years after my father’s death that I felt the freedom to pursue this career of art and writing, strongly supported by my brilliant wife’s encouragement. I was far along in my forties when it all began in earnest. Needing to learn quickly, I decided to teach. I can’t imagine another way of accelerating the process. So I reached for some native chutzpah, and talked my way into lecturing in arts organizations and colleges. I have loved every moment, and almost certainly learned more than my students, to whom I remain grateful.
Inspiration comes from many sources, experience, learning, relationships, and for me, perhaps above all, music, the Empress of all the arts. Each day I conduct some of the world’s great orchestras. This morning I led the Bavarian State Radio Orchestra in a particularly beautiful rendition (if I may say so) of Mozart’s Requiem from my podium, the saddle of my stationary exercise bike.
Many people have expressed their views of what constitutes a creative life. Most recently, Brooks Jensen, Editor/Publisher of LensWork, recorded a podcast on this subject. It is worth the listening: 

Two years ago, an internationally renowned constitutional lawyer, whom I first encountered when she was the infant daughter of one of my own professors, was at my home for dinner. We had decades to catch up on. During our conversation, she said, “You would have made a fine lawyer.” 
I wish she hadn’t said that!
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

It is simply a dining-room chair of pleasing design. Over the years it has acquired distinction because of the remarkable glutei maximi that it has cradled.

Guests have included college presidents, scholars from Berkeley, The California College of the Arts, Stanford, Yale, Oxford, Tuebingen, my alma mater the University of Cape Town, and other institutions; authors, artists, a Shakespeare scholar, lawyers, an astrophysicist, theologians, mathematicians, editors, a museum director, musicians, psychologists, physicians, a Justice devoted to human rights law, and my “brother,” playwright Rick Foster, one of the most deeply cultured and educated people I’ve ever known. They have been guests here not because of their titles, but because they have contributed so warmly and generously to discussions over food and wine. Rick’s response to my last column was so enlightening that I invited him to be my guest columnist, to occupy, as it were, the Distinguished Chair.
Raphael Shevelev
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In The Art of Subversion, his October 2013 column, Raphael argues forcefully and persuasively that to judge any work of art by its adherence to a set of rules is to commit a fundamentally anti-artistic act. An act destructive to the very perception of art. Yet it also points to the need for a broader discussion of rule-making and rule-breaking as essential human activities
The birth and death of any set of rules is a complex topic. Rules pre-date civilization. The Bible and the Homeric Epics, not to mention Greek Tragedy, are filled with fraught dramatizations of the failures of the existing rules of conflict resolution – struggles that are still paramount in the twenty-first Century.
Within the arts there is also evidence of rules – and rule-breaking – going far back in time. Look at the rules that one can infer from the extreme stability of ancient Egyptian art for over a millennium, and at the astonishing, delightful, and short-lived changes during and just after the reign of Akhenaten. 
In recent centuries when basic values are hotly contested within and between societies, and the progress of science and technology pose so many new and interesting challenges, artists are continually faced with fresh problems to solve. But that’s what artists are: problem solvers. Their task is to integrate the raw data of our environment into stories, sounds, gestures, and images that carry deep meaning.

Being social animals, we form a loose, or not so loose, consensus as to how a problem is to be solved in our group. If you wanted to paint a successful landscape in Europe in 1450, you had to employ the rules of mathematical perspective. The consensus begins as description but then hardens into a prescription, i.e. a rule. Other solutions to the problem are “ruled” out. Eventually our more inquiring minds either get bored with repeating the same old solutions, or external changes provoke artists to investigate totally new problems, problems that cannot be solved by using the old methods. Things generate their opposite: rules give birth to the practice of their own breaking. In this light, the rules play a useful role in change. Their rigidity challenges us to go beyond them. They clarify just what it is that needs to be done differently in order to be fresh and apposite. Conservatives are left behind feeling superior and insecure. A new consensus is formed, which will provoke new rules that produce exciting results, for a while.
This is basically old stuff. But lately I’ve been thinking about the meta-problem—how is it that our species finds, or rejects, meanings in particular images, gestures, musical sounds, or groups of words? I recently saw a documentary called Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. It brilliantly explores the way that films of the early years of the last century had a symbiotic relationship with the painters who developed cubism. They were actually reflecting the way that a whole civilization was coming to see the world differently – at the neurological level – because of stop-action and moving pictures.
Neurological science is now challenging our fundamental assumptions about how we perceive, judge, describe, and remember our world. There are powerful rules embedded in these assumptions. Courts of law rule that eyewitness accounts are to be taken most seriously in determining the guilt or innocence of the accused. But there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that eyewitness accounts are extremely unreliable and have punished many of the innocent and freed many of the guilty. When we say, “Speak, Memory!” and memory speaks, how are we to judge the truth of its sincere utterances? Memory has been influenced by the stories that we have found meaningful, the values and superstitions we have received, the images we have found beautiful or disgusting, the definition of heroism that we have embraced, and all of these have been conveyed by the art we have been given or sought out.
Which is to say that our conception of the human condition – and our reaction to art – is still shot through with old assumptions about perception and memory, assumptions that are now known to be false. That, then, is the deepest calling of art, to explore the human condition. It requires us to re-imagine the world in ways that will bring us into closer accord with “things as they are.” In order to do this re-imagining, we should make explicit all the rules tacitly embedded in our assumptions and decide which ones we need to break, and how to break them. Then we will be ready to play Wallace Stevens’s “Blue Guitar.” If that reference is obscure, I will end this note with the first section of his long and wonderful poem The Man With the Blue Guitar, which is an exploration of what Picasso was doing to our ways of seeing just before his Cubist period:

 
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
 
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
 
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon a blue guitar.”
 
And they said then, “But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
 
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
Rick Foster
 
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

A few months ago I was invited to give an address to a local photographic arts group. I titled my talk “The Urge to Create,” in the course of which I had emphatically dismissed the idea of “rules” in the creation of art. At the end of the meeting, a gentleman asked one of the very good questions that were posed that evening: “If there are no rules, then how do we maintain standards?” As a fuller discussion of this could easily have absorbed another several hours, I thought it best to postpone, and then promptly forgot about this interesting problem. Recently, thinking about other matters that I plan to write about, that question came to mind again, and so I thought I’d explore it further and publicly offer a brief reply.
Rules and standards are not synonymous. “Standards” refers to the quality of rendition or realization with which artists seek to convey their thoughts. These necessarily differ from artist to artist, and medium to medium, yet offer a basis of comparison to a learned, sophisticated and empathetic audience. 

“Rules” are of a different nature, because they so clearly imply that there is the presence of some form of ruler, perhaps of an aesthetic legislature. This is certainly the most completely dysfunctional aspect of the creative process, because creating by rule leads only to a kind of metaphysical, intellectual uniformity, which is a polite term for utterly “safe,” and therefore utterly boring. It is the antithesis of creativity.
One of the best examples of this is the rigidity with which the Salon (Académie des Beaux-Arts) of the mid-nineteenth century chose those paintings that “deserved” exhibition. In 1863, Napoleon III, responding to a huge furor, established the Salon des Refusés, which showed many of the works that had been refused entry by the official Salon. This was repeated in 1874, 1875 and 1876, by which time the official Salon came to be regarded as rigid and rule-bound, and the modern art of France, including the once officially dismissed “Impressionists,” began to achieve the wonder it deserves so well. How many of the painters of the Académie can one remember, even the very prominent and successful Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, painter of Napoleon, as opposed to the names of Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Dutch-born van Gogh, and others?
Comparing (rather viciously) the formal Salon with the adjacently exhibited Salon des Refusés, Emile Zola, in his 1886 novel L’oeuvre, wrote:
“There was nothing to recall the lively riot of their salon, with its fresh colors and its exaggerated rendering of bright sunlight. It was one long succession of gold frames filled with shadow, black, ungraceful shapes, jaundiced-looking nudes in gloomy half-lights, all the paraphernalia of Classical Antiquity, historical subjects, genre paintings, everyone soaked in the train-oil of convention. Every picture oozed unfailing mediocrity…”

I’ve selected four works, two paintings and two photographs, to illustrate my point: Sir Anthony van Dyck’s 1614 The Apostle Simon; Eugène Atget’s 1921 photograph Rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville; Salvador Dali’s 1931 The Persistence of Memory; and my own recent digital photograph, Cobalt Explorer.
So let’s see. Where are the “rules”? Van Dyck’s portrait intrigues precisely because the subject’s back is partially turned toward us. The colors are muted, as is the shape of his face, and this requires time, engagement and intelligence from the viewer. No catchlights in the eyes! Indeed, only one eye in profile. Yet the standards by which the work can be judged are superb. Simon looks his part. More than that, he acts his part. Only the heartless could deny him.
Atget gave us wonderful images of “vieux Paris,” before demolition and modern reconstruction occurred. They are documents of a city that has now changed so much, and we owe to Berenice Abbott the fact that they were preserved after his death. Here is a street, the “street of the City Hall,” made shortly after dawn, without humans, but conveying a deep sense of time and place. Where are the “rules?” Look more deeply into his photographs, and the standards become so much more obvious. Thank goodness he paid no attention to imposed “rules.”

Look carefully at Salvador Dali’s work. Are there really “rules” to guide us on the depiction of time and memory? Is there a “rule” that clocks can’t be flexibly draped over branches and other objects? Does this conform to creative standards? Does it free the mind of the viewer from expectation, and instead induce surprise and wonder?
What about Cobalt Explorer? Aren’t there “rules” about not having part of a blue human foot intruding into the field from the bottom right corner? I’m sure there must be. But, is there a narrative? Can one imagine a story? I hope so. So much of art demands audience intelligence. If it is so true of literature, music and architecture, then why not of paintings and photographs? “The magic synthesis” is what Arthur Koestler called the relationship between artist and viewer.

While surrealism brought us a refreshing and liberating renewal of the senses, a way of subverting reality and “thinking sideways,” in order to be fair, I have to quote art critic Robert Hughes in his The Shock Of The New, where he writes, with as much restraint as Zola:
“Consequently, a good deal of Surrealism, and of the art it inspired, was not only a solemn parody of revolutionary threats: it had, as a structure, much in common with the Catholic religion…It had dogmas and rituals, catechisms, saints, baptisms, excommunications…and a singularly demanding and touchy Pope: Andre Breton…He inspired, as one of his disciples put it, a doglike devotion…He was immune to most of the deadly sins except pride and lust…and believed that art had not only the power but also the duty to change life.”
Nevertheless, in the half-century since Breton’s death, Surrealism and many other forms of modern art continue to encourage liberation from constraints, from imposed logic, rules and expectation, and therefore have a great deal in common with wit and humor.

Recently, a photographer friend, Mary De Shaw, sent me one of her images that had been subjected to what I regard as very silly notions of compositional “rules.” She was told by a competition judge to remove the heads in the upper left, much of the ocean on the right of the image, and center on the two boys splashing in the surf.
However, isn’t there a powerful parallel narrative of how the ocean can offer experiences of immense energy and immense lassitude? Both are present here in intriguing ways. This image also offers a metaphor for the oceans between which the United States is located. It’s almost as though the artist had been looking across the country from the turbulence of the Atlantic out beyond California, to the calm of the Pacific (hence its name). When I looked at this picture I was reminded of two books published 50 years apart: James Mitchener’s Hawaii, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic. 
Of course, those trained to “judge” by the standards of much photographic instruction and many photographic associations would very likely have missed these ideas altogether, and enforced the mind-numbing “rules” of the composition police. My readers know that my least favorite word is “orthodox.” Creation and innovation require a conspiracy against rules. But keep in mind that there are also no rules for committing unorthodoxy. Imposing rules on art eviscerates art.
As I write this, an exhibition titled “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938” has just opened to an appreciative audience at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. René Magritte is the artist of the unsmokable pipes, rain falling upward, hats in the sky, and a forest occupying the middle place on a layered vertical scale beneath an ocean beach and above houses, Panorama Populaire (1926). As for his own compositional bent, he might have said, “Ceci n’est pas une règle.”
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NOTE: I am grateful to the Open Content Program of the Getty Museum for the downloads of the van Dyck and Atget images, and to Mary De Shaw for hers. 
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© Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

Aloneness, solitude, is frequently a choice, even a necessity. Loneliness, however, implies a yearning for connection. Both are conditions familiar to artists, and sometimes flow into each other. The literature, including poetry, on aloneness and loneliness, is more than ample. Some of it is encouraging, some empathetic, some contradictory, some reconciliatory and some so distressing as to itself cause the depression from which it may well have arisen.
Art is almost never done by committee. It often takes what painter, filmmaker, director, author Rebecca Miller – and many others – call the dark and lonely grind. At the same time we also know that artistic innovation does not happen in is own bubble, but comes from all of life’s formations: family, education, acculturation and experiences, especially social contact. It’s the expressive product of the sum of the good and the painful.
 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Talents are best nurtured in solitude. Character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.” Writing specifically from a woman’s point of view, Barbara de Angelis said, “Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.” Aldous Huxley, aware of the conflict between solitude and fellowship claimed “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline to regions of solitude.” These are mirrors of words written or spoken by Thoreau and Einstein.
 
So here I am, at this very moment of writing, having to guard my solitude against the swell of gregariousness which has characterized so much of my life. When working on my images, the distinction used to be even more pronounced than now, for I once labored sealed in the gloomy loneliness of a chemical darkroom. Now that I work digitally in a room filled with light, music and the distant sound-connections of a city, the need for solitude seems just as vital. 
 
Then, when the work is done, the expanding umbilical connection with humanity becomes as important as the solitude of creation. Now is the time to show the work, to open it, to expose it and oneself to the “stormy billows,” and try to achieve the character that Goethe wrote about. As we need the private, so also do we need the public.

I’ve tried to characterize my condition with an image of a tiny clump of foliage exposed in space, subject to the winds and weather of my own mind, but retaining a slender connection to the society of which I am a part and from which I draw nourishment. It is titled Autobiography. I am a single artist, creating alone, but needing peers with whom to exchange ideas, and a chorus with whom to sing my picture-songs.
 
All my adult life, I’ve enjoyed attending galleries or concerts partly to overhear the opinions of others. Once in a while, when my own art is exhibited in a public place, I conspire to visit the gallery anonymously and do the same. I don’t believe that artists are the final arbiters of their own art. We all have limited vision, limited comprehension, and so the expressed thoughts of others are a great source of learning. Sometimes they are also a great source of surprise. There are delightful occasions when I learn how much smarter I am than I’d thought. Yes, of course I must have known that my photographs have a clearly direct connection with the mythology of the Mahabharata!
 
Twenty years ago, when I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, I had been under some pressure to get my portfolio to their Bath headquarters in time for the judging. As my darkroom was being renovated, I used one in a friend’s home. I ran out of the gelatin silver print paper I’d chosen, so my host offered me her own. As a result, about a third of the work was printed on paper with a different texture than the rest. A kind friend recorded jurors’ comments and sent me the tape. One of them remarked about the unusual brilliance of choosing different paper textures to emphasize the peculiarities of specific images. It was a much more satisfying explanation than I could have invented. I took that as an institutional confirmation of my unconscious genius. (hic ridete)

The invention of the compact disk and its ability to be electronically encoded made it possible for my friend and neighbor, clarinetist Bill Larson, to found a company in 1986 called To Make Music. It had much the same purpose as Music Minus One, a successful enterprise founded in 1950, very shortly after the invention of the 33 rpm vinyl LP. This new technology extended the playing time on each side from about five minutes to over twenty minutes. The CD extends this period for far longer, so it is possible for a private soloist to perform quite large works with recorded accompaniment without unwanted technical interruption. Bill has long since retired, but if he desires an appreciative human audience, all he has to do is assemble his hot clarinet, poke it out the window and play his heart out. This is a very music-friendly neighborhood.
 
So where do we graphic artists go for our Art Minus One, for our vital connection between solitude and society? We know that in order to create we require solitude, but we also require society and our peers in order to have a life filled with the psychic benefits of being social animals. These conditions are complementary. Remove either and the other is damaged. 
 
In his book Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience (1990), psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes: 
“To fill time with activities that require concentration, that increase skills, that lead to a development of the self, is not the same as killing time by watching television…A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.”

We are the sole, singular creators of our art. To pursue our ambitions we depend on the belief that what we create has a necessary role in the aggregation of what we call civilization. 
 
There are, of course, the usual avenues for enlivening that slender branch between our creativity and the source and target of our life in society. These include formal and informal exhibition and publication. Here too we have our wonderful new technologies to make this possible. Like our fellow performing artists, we now have websites and the internet. Our images are seen and responded to in distant places. We are part of the symphony and antiphony of the world.
 
Just two weeks before I wrote this, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands opened the long-awaited renewed and glorious Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There is a photograph of her standing before Rembrandt’s Night Watch in the Hall of Honor. Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker of April 22, 2013, writes that, as he viewed the painting, “I had a moment of fancying the almost hundred-and-eighty-five-square-foot canvas as a raft for the self-respect of Western civilization. One of us did that!”
 
A healthy creative life requires us to be both soloists and members of the chorus.
 
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Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

Creating is difficult and demanding work. Ask any creator. We know it requires a synthesis of imagination and high technical skill, but we frequently forget that the act of creating is also allied to humor and play. Play is thought of as a childish pursuit, not appropriate for adults in an increasingly technological and empirical world. There’s a story about a man who explains to his little daughter that his job is to teach adults to draw. “You mean they forget?” she asks. Yes, they do. So, before we go further into the meanings of creativity, I’d like to invite you to come play with me. Sometimes it is challenging, but as often it is great fun.
I’ve been a close observer of my grandson, who has just reached his early teens. Over the years I’ve been enthralled with his rich and deep imagination, and his ability to invent fantastic “special machines” meant to accomplish all manner of tasks. David is a 21st century child, aware of much of the technology with which we live. And while I have delighted in his endless imagination, which, incidentally, has helped to stimulate my own, I could also feel his frustration at not having the executive skills to realize his fantasies.
So this is the tipping point, where, as they grow up, children are rewarded for empiricism and “the right answers” and increasingly encouraged to avoid fantasy and risk. It’s the real world. Even in California, as close as we are to the innovations of Silicon Valley, in public education there seems to be an inverse proportion in emphasis between imagination and executive abilities. We need to have both. And we have to recognize that frustration is a gift, admittedly well disguised, an obstacle which rewards those who overcome.

When I have taught courses at arts institutions on the creative process using the medium of photography, the last thing I could possibly have thought of was to begin – or even end – with discussions of cameras and lenses. I would enter the classroom and ask my students for a description of their equipment, and hear “Canon,” “Nikon,” Olympus” and other manufacturers. It was a trick question. What I really wanted them to be aware of was their own natural equipment, their senses, their brains, their anatomy, their acculturation and education. That’s the real photographic equipment. That’s the real equipment of the painter and the author, not the brush or the pen. It’s why I called the course The Eye’s Mind.
I have little interest in the mechanics, and great interest in perception and understanding the narrative of pictorial language. Were I to teach a class on cooking, would I really begin with the anatomy and function of stoves and pans, rather than with nutrition and taste? That’s what manuals are for. Let us not be boring.
For my students, their first assignment was to bring to class one or two pictures found in magazines, books, catalogues, even family albums that fascinated them, and discuss them. Getting them enthusiastic about images was the engine that drove their enthusiastic acquisition of technical ability so they could author their own. 
My friend, photographer Lady Ines Roberts, once told me that her engineer husband, Sir Gilbert, a delightfully smart, kind and generous-spirited man, invited her into his office and drew diagrams on the whiteboard of the focal length and acceptance angles of lenses, “thereby retarding my progress for two years.” At exhibitions of my own work, it’s always a man, never a woman, who approaches me with a compliment “I love your work,” and immediately follows with “What kind of camera do you use?” In a jocular moment, Brooks Jensen, the editor/publisher of LensWork reminded me that “When you buy a camera, you’re a photographer, and when you buy a violin, you own a violin.”  Mechanical instruments, however necessary, should not be confused with artistic expression.
Creation requires the willingness to be thought of as foolish, often wrong, and to value the words of our critics. It takes considerable courage. Think of it as a kind of exploration, where the process and the ends are uncertain. There are no maps. Innovation requires the defeat of habit. We are an explorative species, but we also seek the comforts of revealed truths and established taxonomies. When I was new to photography, I kept hearing about the compositional “rule of thirds,” in which a rectangular field is subdivided into nine segments, with the idea that any element of significance should be placed on one of the four internal intersections to make the greatest visual impact. My mental compass rebelled at the thought of this prepackaging. It was happily supported not only by looking closely at many images and reading the stories behind them, but by Leonardo’s words in his Treatise on Painting: “Those who create by rule, create nothing but confusion.”
What really counts is the intellectual bridge between artist and audience, what Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation called “the magic synthesis.” That synthesis depends on the ability of the artist to hold and guide the attention of the audience, often with the interruption of logical flow. That’s the connection to humor and play. Is it possible to experience the work of inventive comedians, surrealists, cartoonists, playwrights and architects without knowing that our senses are being tweaked and therefore intrigued?
For those who wish to explore the subject of creativity more fully, there are fine books by Robert Grudin (The Grace of Great Things), psychologists Rollo May (The Courage to Create), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Creativity), and that delightful read by photographers David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear. You may also be interested in my own essay for the Royal Photographic Society and LensWork, Creation: A Journey to the Reflecting Pool.
Innovation breeds innovation. Let us play.
(Click on the embedded image to see the story)
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Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

That’s a good question to ask of a surgeon before an operation. It’s usually also a good question to ask of a financial counselor, an electrician, or the pilot of a chartered aircraft. But there are occasions when the question is the last or only resort of a potential employer who has little or no idea of what they’d like to see accomplished. It vacuums all the creative imagination out of the room and replaces it with the certain monotony of an assembly line.
I’m very fortunate to fill my working life with projects of my own choosing, and not dependent upon the whims of clients. Occasionally I take on commissions, but only when they promise some real challenge, where I can sharpen my skills as an artist and perhaps use some of the processes it adduces to add to my creative portfolios. I love the look on a client’s face, which says “How exciting. I didn’t think of that!”
I have a secret fantasy life. It has revolved around music, great Western classical music, and I’ve lived in that Walter Mitty state since my boyhood. As a child, I could sing all the parts of at least half a dozen grand operas entirely from memory, and as a teenager used a baton, given me by Maestro Dimitri Mitropoulos, to conduct air symphonies daily. Having lost that baton many years ago, I’ve replaced it with a lacquered Japanese chopstick to lead orchestras from Chicago to Berlin, often on the same day, and with barely any rehearsal. Once, at a schools concert by the Symphony Orchestra in my native Cape Town, the conductor, Edward Dunn, summoned me onstage to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Italian Caprice, which, he said, I knew as well as he did. While it took an effort to keep my knocking knees from drowning out the tympani, I also learned the true meaning of benign megalomania. Later, when I became a student, then a professor, of international relations, it was not a great leap for me to believe that the world’s greatest peacemakers are Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
I have continued to this day my envy, not of Presidents and Prime Ministers, but of great orchestral conductors. As other parts of my body age, my hearing seems to have become more acute, as well as far more educated. I once surprised a conductor friend by telling him that the only distinction between his conducting and mine was half a second. He anticipated the orchestra by a quarter second, and I followed the orchestra by the other quarter.

As an artist and writer, one of my “mentors” remains 19th century scholar Walter Horatio Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. He wrote: “All art aspires to the condition of music.”
A few months ago, I was approached by the leader of a classical music ensemble, and asked to photograph the individual musicians as well as the group as a whole in performance. The previous photographs that had been done of them reminded me of the music club in a college yearbook, and the group, lined up from left to right, formally dressed, holding their instruments at rest, reminded me of pictures I’ve seen on the society or events page of a local newspaper. Except for the nature of the instruments, they could as well have been unusually well dressed photographers holding cameras, or the graduating class of a medical school, holding their stethoscopes. What seemed so deeply missing was a sense of relationship, of complementarity, of harmony, of the small, significant signals that pass among musicians in full flight. The poetry – indeed, the musicality – was missing. But, before I could say anything, the leader asked me the question that is endlessly repeated by the most pedestrian of human resources bureaucrats: “Have you done this before?” That truly caught me by surprise, as it is so clearly the wrong question. I’m quite used to variations of “What can you do for us?” or “What ideas can we pursue together?” That would give me the opportunity to consider creative options, and compose scenarios, activities whose challenge I relish.
Well, as I said, I’m pretty independent, and have no interest in mug shots. If you’re looking for imaginative work, asking unimaginative questions isn’t likely to get the result you’d prefer. So, although I’ve fantasized about photographing the Berlin Philharmonic in rehearsal, I’ve never done that. However, as its conductor and I have a mutual friend, that could, perhaps, be arranged.
When I wrote back to the leader of the ensemble, I said no. But I added that, although I had never photographed burned out buildings before, “Vulcan’s Craft,” my portfolio on the aftermath of the catastrophic 1991 East Bay Fire earned me an exhibition in the Mills College Art Museum and a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain; and although I had never photographed death camps before, my book Liberating the Ghosts (LensWork Publishing) won awards from the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, as well as exhibitions on both coasts. It was a cover story in the Photographic Journal of the RPS.
If Boeing wants product pictures of their magnificent aircraft, they should find an industrial photographer who’ll give them fine results. But, if they want someone to help them create intimate visions of the romance of flight, and its importance in our daily lives, I’d be willing to think it out with them. My number is in the directory.
My nostalgia is for the future. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Resolve to be always beginning – to be a beginner.” With that recommendation in mind, I love the challenge of trying to render with my eyes the magnificence that enters my ears. The struggle to aspire to the condition of music continues.
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Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.