Listen up. What I am about to impart to you is one of the most important lessons I learned in college.
Of course, me being stubborn and slow on the take, it took several years after I graduated for those important lessons to sink in and for me to to realize how phenomenally smart my Professors are.
The lesson of the day begins with: Trees. Well, and an e mail from Mom.
First the trees in question.
Entering Lake Harris
When my site first went live on the internet, I, of course, had friends and family looking at it. My Mother e mailed me telling me she enjoyed the site and that some photographs she liked while others did nothing for her. She also was nice enough to inform me that I had cut off part of one of the trees in my Entering Lake Harris photograph.
Like any aspiring artist looking for helpful constructive criticism with a sincere desire to improve, I grew defensive and angry and tuned her out.
Why angry and defensive? Because, it was her idea I cut off that bit of tree. Well, not directly, but she wanted me to finish college sooo badly because it was sooo important to have that BFA (along with the huge GSL that went with it) and that is where I learned to do it.
Let’s go back to my sophomore year and a younger Morgan.
Our Color and Design class had been given the assignment of going to the library to look up several famous artists and observe their efforts. I believe they were all paintings.
At the tender age of 20, I knew everything. I knew those colorful basic shapes and squiggles painted by artists whose work sells for millions in fine art galleries was the demented scheme of a bunch of hacks. It was all modern art. It looked to my knowledgeable young mind like a kindergartener’s finger painting that belonged hanging by a magnet on some proud mother’s refrigerator. Not something worthy of praise hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I halfheartedly leafed through the rest of the assignment and left the library for more important pursuits like drinking beer, chasing girls, and bemoaning the fact that I was a genius under pressure with very important feelings and that nobody understood me.
Next day in class, the art teacher asked me something along the lines of, “Did you understand why I had you look at those paintings?”
I said, “Not really.” She asked me to explain so I gave an example. My apologies if I do not recreate this scene exactly. It was many years ago and I may be messing up some details.
Anyway, I explained that I did not think the art she had us study was any good.
“For example,” I said opening my notebook and illustrating with a pencil, “one artist just painted a couple of circles on the canvas like this.”
Let me just interrupt my own story by saying, at this point, I felt like I was done. I had illustrated that I had done the homework assignment and actually given it some thought. She really ought to have moved on to the next student and let me sip my coffee and nurse my hangover in peace.
Instead, she said, “I believe I know the painting you’re referring to. It is very famous and actually looks more like this.
I shrugged. Hadn’t she gotten bored with pestering me yet?
“See?” She said. “The way you just drew it is ugly space. There’s dead empty space all around the circles that does not tie in to the objects at all. The way the artist did it is beautiful space. By cropping the circles the artist has drawn you in to the visual dialogue between the two focal points and there is no static dead space surrounding the circles in the frame.”
Uh, yeah, sure.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.” She said shaking her head and leaving my table.
She was right. I did not.
Years later, I do understand. I’ve seen it a million times. It is the photograph the co-worker shows you taken on a cell phone of what (s)he saw last weekend. It is all over Flickr. It is the boring static photographs a friend shows you of their ocean cruise with subjects ‘bullseye’d’ in the center of the frame. It is not art. It is not photography. It is a snapshot.
Oh yeah. Want the most important lesson I learned about art with my hoity toity BFA from my elite school? Here it is:
Whether visual art is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder and a matter of opinion. Whether or not an effort is art at all is defined by indisputable laws of composition.
That being said, I did not need to shoot the photograph the way I did. I could have shot just one tree centered and alone on the rippling waters of Lake Harris creating a feeling of isolation. I could have pulled back my focus and, yes, included all the branches of all three trees without including the shore on the right at all creating a more serene look.
I remembered my laws of composition. Cropped the image on the left and included the shore on the right ‘flowing’ off the frame to create a rhythym with the repetition of pattern created by the three trees to suck the viewer in and make their eye move from left to right to, hopefully, want to study the photograph more closely.
The bird perched on the third tree to the right symbolizes the eternal struggle between good and evil. Kidding!
Anyway, Mom did not like it. Maybe you love it. Maybe you hate it. Maybe you couldn’t care less and this is way to long a blog entry on a black and white photograph of three trees.
This leads me to something I learned from many years of attempting to create art in one form or another:
Making art “right” can be learned. Making “good” art?
That’s something else.
