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| 4.30.12 Rondout in Blue and Gold • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • ©Margaret Helthaler |
The air was cool but the sun was bright this morning as I walked my regular route along the Rondout Reservoir. This image was captured with my iPhone 4 using the Hipstamtic app. Some additional adjustments were made in Photoshop.We cannot avoid intimating our individual responses in creative works…
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| 4.29.12 Gray Birch on Peekamoose Road • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
…keep the process moving…experienced creators need to gain this same fundamental understanding that is somehow lost and obscured through practice.
- Shawn McNiff, Trust the Process
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| 4.28.12 Hawthorn Blossoms • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over… A piece of art is the surface expression of a live lived within productive patterns.
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| 4.27.12 Sundown Barn • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
…the past as something that is not really over but is an exciting feature of the present.
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| 4.26.12 Tree by Rondout • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
…the fundamental human desire for giving shape to experience, for expressiveness, for creating form and structure out of the confusion that constitutes both our inner and outer worlds.
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| 4.25.12 Rondout Reservoir • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
The basic principle that links our places and states is simple: a good or bad environment promotes good or bad memories, which inspire a good or bad mood, which inclines us toward good or bad behavior… On some level, states and places are internal and external versions of each other.
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| 4.24.12 Big Hollow Barn • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
Family connections and memory draw us into the photographed spaces rather than leaving us gawking at the window. We “read into” those spaces with vocabularies based in our own lives.
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| 4.23.12 Old Apple Tree • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.
Creation thrives on inspiration and affirmation rather than direction.Another busy day that left little time for a walk. Our CAG art group met in the home of one of our members and she was kind enough to allow me to capture this enchanting view from the picture window in her living room. This image was taken with my iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app.
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| 4.21.12 Grahamsville Reformed Church • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
Religious shrines throughout the world attest to the fact that when a person experiences extraordinary perceptual change…along with a sudden revelation, he and even his society may consider the place where these things occurred special.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.
The same evidence that has been showing us how much of their ordinary environments people respond to is also leading us to the idea that people have within them various brain-body mechanisms that react to different aspects of their surroundings.
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| 4.18.12 Sky Top Trail at Mohonk • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
Deep down, we know our devotion to reality is just a marriage of convenience, and we leave it to the seers, the shamans, the ascetics, the religious teachers, the artists among us to reach a higher state of awareness, from which they transcend our rigorous but routinely analyzing senses and become closer to the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious, the world of dreams, the source of myth.
I understand the spiritual as a way of living the ordinary while sensing the extraordinary.
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| 4.16.12 Reflections on Rondout • 8x8 • limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
Certainly many Buddhist monks…who spend a lot of time in the mountains believe there’s a big relationship between environment and spirituality. [quoting Hackett]Beginning of a warm day - I took a solo walk along my familiar route by the Rondout Reservoir. This image was captured with my iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app with the John S lens and Pistil film.
Ultimately a marriage takes place between the visual need and a subject that will answer the need and at the same time satisfy the artist’s other concerns and feelings.
… always carrying within you the seed crystal for your next destination.
There is a time for making and time for contemplative looking.We arrived at the Marist College campus in Poughkeepsie, NY bright and early this morning so my son could participate in an admissions tour. While the campus is beautiful - with sweeping vistas of the Hudson River - I couldn't overlook the pleasing arrangement of these Adirondack chairs in the morning sunlight... This image was captured with my iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic app.
The idea that “nature is a place where we are not” has ruled for centuries…
“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.” (quoting Jean Lescure)
So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death.
“We assimilate a little this way, and a little that way. Life is only mutation.”
I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.- Psalms 121: 1-2
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| 4.7.12 Big Hollow Barn • 4x4 or 8x8 limited edition of 30 • © Margaret Helthaler |
Through one system of perception we see ourselves as observers of an environment composted of separated objects, but at the same time, through another system of perception, equally active, we look for ways in which we are connected or are part of our surroundings.
There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
There are a plethora of symptoms to suggest that we are living in a cultural moment that could be described as split between mind and body.
He comes to realize that the cosmos molds mankind, that it can transform a man of the hills into a man of islands and rivers, and that the house remodels man.
Once beauty employed the language of the traditional arts, but now it doesn’t. It employs, instead, the language of photography. Makeup nowadays enhances not by covering, but by making the original more like it was than it ever was when left alone. Photography, made in an instant, developed in the dark, in a pool of poison, as a simultaneity, is like the beautiful in this property of always being all there at once. Unlike paintings, which are made bit by bit, over time, in the light, but also out of poisonous materials.
Few of us seem conscious of how water shapes not only the way we live but the way we see. The oceans and rushing streams and creeks of the East and South, the vast lakes of the northern Midwest, the hide-and-seek rivers of the high Western desert – each defines an ecological psyche.
…beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live.
