LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: Art as Experience
Romancing the Stone (and the Sun and the River and. . . .)
. . . Zen classics say that the world after satori is, in some ways, just the same as the world before satori — and yet, everything’s different. My connection to the Devon Bridge is positive and intimate, but people, including artists, aren’t taught to recognize that relationship, or what to call it. It goes beyond common education and beyond the terms and habits of photographic society.
Visionary “Correspondences”
. . . That is what opens up, in immersive fashion, in mystical experience: a sense that one is experiencing not some kind of glorious hyper-illusion, but rather the universe as it really is, when the doors of our perception are opened. And it’s that manner of vision that the greatest artists to try to evoke or manifest by their art, in works such as “Pepper No. 30” or Wynn Bullock’s “galactic” “Tidepool, Point Lobos” or Olivier Messiaen’s Lightning over the Beyond or Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it’s central to what I pursue in my own art, in photos like “The Window Is at Your Feet,” “Ritual,” “Grass of the Midnight Sea,” “The Tree of Unsleeping Surveillance,” “Uprooted,” the “Marion” images, most of the works throughout my portfolios.
The Word “Spirit” Means Wind or Breath, as in Respiration, or Inspiration
Intellect by itself (not that it ever really is a function by itself) is not the only way, and not the best way, that we navigate reality, that we determine what is valuable or decide what action is best. Within what I’ve called the higher function, there is a capacity to sense non-conceptual, experienced resemblances, affinities, correspondences, a capacity like what we call intuition, but more than intuition. I’ve already written a bit about this in earlier posts (in July through October of 2011 – you’ll find a timeline in the column to the right of this post). But now I don’t want to try to discuss it, but rather to give you a related line of illustrations from my life.
It Isn’t Intellect That Sees through the Matrix That Intellect Builds
The faculty that we call intellect is good for figuring out how to transport water uphill from the river to our hut. It can do astonishing things. It’s pretty useless, however, in disclosing the satisfactions of tasting that water, swimming in it, watching its ever-changing motions and reflections, hearing it as rain on a roof or waves on a beach. . . .
A Surprise Communion across Continents, Classes, Centuries, and Cultures
. . .In dejection from all the awful and discouraging news about reactionary political victories, rampant viral sub-variants, catastrophic droughts, and increasing violence (as well as, for me, unhappy views about my own self), I found myself doing something that I’ve done on occasion over the years, especially under stress: I was hand-writing, long past midnight, a list of my favorite artists and mystical writers. That exercise can calm and comfort me. not just as an obsessive-compulsive ritual, but as a reminder of real treasures that I’ve been given, for inspiration and illumination.
“The Friend Who May Not Seem a Friend” – The Cat and the Fire, Post 1 of 3
To understand why I show you this carved cat in flames, you need to know that my childhood was plagued by sweat-through-the-night terrors, terrors that could take hold even in daytime. . .
The Cage of the “Surreal” – Post 1 of 2
In my last post, I made some remarks about the falsity of calling certain artworks “surrealistic.” I want to pursue that further here. Am I saying that we should never use the words “surreal” or “surrealistic”? No, but. . . .
A New “Marion” and a New Clue
As the title of this post promises, here is the photograph that just last week joined my ongoing, award-winning “Marion under the Moon” series. Its title is “Dream of the Playground Melting into Night.” Several friends of mine, seeing it for the first time, have ha wildly differing emotional reactions to it . . . One male friend said that the image provides “mysteries upon mysteries”. . . .
Marion Magic
All of the people who know me pretty well know that I adore my wife, Marion. It’s a central fact of my person and my life. You yourself may, just possibly, have gathered this from my earlier post, “The Heroines’ Unpinned Hair” (posted February 13, 2013) https://lruss.com/2013/02/15/the-heroines-unpinned-hair/ . If you didn’t guess it before, you’ll likely guess now that she’s the model in all the images in my “Marion under the Moon” series, which began with the photograph (above) of that name. . . .
Keith Carter and the Cloud of Mercy – Part 3 of 3
It’ll be tempting for me at times to get lost in exposition or explanation, but I want to stick as much as possible to what’s central to this series of posts: an experience that I had some years ago on August 28 in Israel that suddenly came to mind as I was looking at Keith Carter’s Fifty Years and thinking about his use of shallow focus.