Inspiration

[Struan Gray]

Where do people get their inspiration from?

For me, photography is a too tidy, too closed world, with a tendency to pat itself on the back for having already got things completely right. I rarely feel refreshed and invigorated from looking at other people's photographs. Paintings on the other hand always fascinate and have always done so. Likewise many many pieces of glass, pottery and textiles.

I am not having a go at photographers. Well, not much. I would be interested to hear about where other camera owners draw their inspiration. Am I so very odd to find mine in other artforms?



A tribute

[medform-norm]

Struan,
I never knew it was supposed to be odd to draw inspiration from whatever you chose. Looking at photographs by collegues does not inspire me, it may give a hint, suggest and idea. I see it more as comparing notes. Looking at work you dislike is a very important part of that.
The only thing I would find odd is that you only find inspiration in other art forms and not anywhere else. I would find that limiting.
BTW I liked your Jackson Pollock

[Struan Gray]

I find visual inspiration everywhere. Sometimes I feel I have reached that exalted level of sensitivity where diverse taste is functionally equivalent to no taste. But I was trying to be brief; and relevant to the forum at hand: the aesthetic thrill of the proof of Green's Theorem is not something many of my photographer friends have ever "got".

[GPS]

Pity the tribute is out of focus - would be a good ad for the need of eye glasses.

[Struan Gray]

That's not blur. That's gesture

[Ron Marshall]

I works for me out of focus, and would be dull and lifeless and flat and pedestrian if it had been in focus. As is, it draws me into the image and elicits a sense of wonder. But one persons tribute is anothers trash.

[Walt Calahan]

Struan

For me your image is a tribute to Jackson Pollock!

Using selected focus so that only part of the scene is sharp, combined with all the intersections, and seeing repeating tonal and color range, for me, is definitely a photograph from the abstract expressionist school.

I don't know "Green's Theorem," but well done.

In the past, I've tried to use cubism, i.e. Nude Descending Staircase, in my photography by using timed strobe firings with camera movement. The first image on my "People" page of my web site is an example (http://www.walterpcalahan.com).

Keep up the tributes!

[Robert McClure]

Struan,

A wonderful photograph which works for me. Out of focus? There was a time when a cinematographer would NEVER allow lens flare to show up in his final edited work. It is now part of the grammar. Your photograph fairly hypnotized me. Then again, that's just me. Wow!

Thanks!

[Struan Gray]

Ron, Walter, Robert. Thanks.

I wasn't really fishing for compliments. No really. Really. Well, perhaps a bit :-)

I have always been drawn to images that have a strong sense of line. Classical drawing, cartoons, sketches and even cross-hatched engravings, have all fed a fascination with how to create volume with essentially one-dimensional means. When I found myself getting more and more abstract in my photography I was naturally drawn to the abstract expressionists. My favourite is Mark Tobey, something of an outsider to the mainstream movement, but a painter and print maker with a tremendous subtlety of expression and a contemplative spirituality that makes the New York crowd seem very loud and raucous.

That said, Pollock is another favourite, and it was a delight to find this patch of hawthorn, blackthorn and bramble seedlings conforming to his highly individual sense of structure and form. I don't often copy my inspirations so blatently, but in this case there was no choice.

Walter, I liked the Duchamp reference - and the rest of your site. Photography has always had a somewhat supine relationship with painting, but I like to think that it is possible to be inspired without resorting to fawning plagiarism.

Anyone else care to share their muses?

[GPS]

Ron, Walter - that's not blur, that's gesture.