Category Archives: Thoughts on Creativity

Ansel Adams

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ansel

A letter Ansel Adams, an icon of landscape photography,
sent to his friend Cedric Wright on June 10, 1937

Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today.
I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone;
the resonance of all spiritual and physical things….

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give.
It is not charity, which is the giving of things.
It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self.
It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.
It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel

Annie Dillard

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“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? 
Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? 
Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? 
What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? 
Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? 
We still and always want waking. 
We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesman and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”  

—————- ANNIE DILLARD
The Writing Life 
Why are we looking at Art, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Can the artist isololate and vivify all in experience that most engages our eyes, our intellects and our hearts?
Can the artist renew our hope in visual form? 
Why are we looking if not in the hope that the artist will magnify and enliven our sight, will inspire us with vision, courage, and the possibility of remembrance and meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds and hearts the deepest mysteries re-seen, so that we may feel again their majesty and power?
What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? 
Why does death catch us so by surprise, and why love?
We still and always want waking.
We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesman and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”  

—————- ANNIE DILLARD (altered to be directed towards artists and viewers by J.R. )