Tag Archives: visual imagery

Inspirational, My Eye!

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Yes, my eyes are my inspiration. Lots of the stuff that’s put out there in the world as ‘inspirational’ doesn’t work that way for me, so to that I just say, ‘Inspirational my eye!’ but when it comes to gathering up visual data for idea generation, that’s what tends to get my engine revved up more truly. So I’m really enjoying my holiday rambles in search of same.Blog.12-30-2012.1

Yesterday R (my beloved spousal-person) and I and his parents were collected midday by R’s cousin and his wife and we all went into Gruene (Texas) for lunch and a short stroll together. Lunch was grand, the company was lovely, and the day was pleasant all through. But of course what I found the most enriching on the little walk was enjoying the numerous attractions of an old town designed to be pedestrian-friendly, tourist-enticing (there were oodles of the latter) and full of details not found in our own more northerly town.Blog.12-30-2012.2

So I took pictures as a mnemonic device to help me retain some of what we’d seen and to give me images from which to (literally) draw or make digital paintings. I also get out the camera whenever I simply want to be more observant, because it’s remarkable how having that little device in my hand makes me notice all sorts of things I wouldn’t otherwise see. This, naturally, is something of a potential irritation to R since it means that I get into my ‘interval training’ mode, as I call it, wherein on our walks he continues at a steady pace and I stop over and over again to take photos of little sweet-nothings, then dash to catch up with him, at least until I see the next item of interest. Mostly he’s quite tolerant of this method, but it’s been known to irk him (understandably) when the stop-and-start means he’s talking to me and doesn’t know I’m twenty–or fifty–feet behind him. I can still hear him, or I wouldn’t stop cold, but it’s not quite the same, I know. <Sheepish grin.> He does still manage to love me enough to keep going out for walks with me, even knowing I’ll do such a pesky thing every time.Blog.12-30-2012.3And that makes the walks all the more pleasurable, you can be sure. And it makes me all the more happy to take any good opportunity to go hunting for more input for my visual files whenever I can. Click! Snap! Smile, everybody!Blog.12-30-2012.4

The Large and the Small of It

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The depths of Space carry miraculous sparks of inspiration at a seeming infinity of levels.digital collage

A couple of years ago my husband was conducting a concert of choral works all, in one way or another, exploring the idea of Space, and he asked me to provide projected images that would act as a visual companion to the music. Since the centerpiece of the concert was to be a selection of movements from Estonian composer/astronomer Urmas Sisask’s ‘Gloria Patri‘–wonderfully meditative, somewhat minimalistic yet still quite melodic music which was to be accompanied by photographs taken through the Hubble telescope, I was given a clear starting point for the collection of visual images. The good people of NASA willingly agreed to let us use any Hubble images we liked, without any constraints and at no charge, so my task was to find the images I thought best suited the music at all points, edit them (some extensively, some less so) in order to fit the format of the projections, and collate all of it into a pre-arranged program that I could manually ‘play’ as the concert was performed. Looking for, and then through, hundreds of Hubble images was a bit of a project in itself; reformatting and resizing, digitally ‘cleaning’ and grouping and ordering them proved to be a little more weighty. But it was a pleasurable and energizing project all the same, staring at the stars and constellations in all of their miraculously varied glory. ‘Gloria Patri’ indeed!digital collageGoing forward to work out images for the rest of the pieces on the docket for this program, I was moved by both the enormity of the Hubble’s scope and our own galaxy’s tininess within the vastness of space to think that it would be wonderful to explore those strange dissonances and harmonies that occur in the known world, microscopic to massive, blurred by our limited vision and knowledge and delicately detailed by our constant finding of new facts and ideas in all of it. So for the other pieces in the concert’s repertoire, I sought out images that would complement each other yet emphasize the astounding range of contrasts in our spatial existence, from the granular to the grand. Pollen and planets might in fact have more in common than we can imagine, if we stretch our thinking just a little. Snowflakes and stars might be merely opposite ends of a spectrum that transcends dimensions, scale and vision.digital collageI was reminded throughout this process not only of my minuteness in the great spectacle of existence, but also of how fantastically treasure-filled that existence is, from the level of the subatomic to things and thoughts so massive that the Hubble telescope and all of its exponentially larger generations of offspring may never quite be able to encompass the enormity of it all. If I ever think I’m running out of ideas, I only need to remember this one exercise in humility and happiness, and I should be able to break out of my stasis as a flood of newly sparked inspirations stream like comets out of me.