CAPTURE | CREATE | COPY
During my travels in Vietnam, I felt inspired to undertake a small project with potentially large consequences. I'm going to materialize my musings in a visually pleasing, digestible format. In other words, I'm creating another book--as I've been scheming on finding ways to birth another product into the inventory of my creative portfolio. It involves art and imaging: taking photos, having them made into paintings, and then printing them in a book to adorn my meditations--one for each article. This approach has numerous benefits, as it panders to my desire to constantly create and showcase meaningful stuff with commercial potential.
By amalgamating my most meaningful thoughts on paper, accompanied by a heavy investment in visual treasures, I am convinced that I will find the motivation to complete this project, having turned the whole production process into my creative playground as I love travel, photography, print, and philosophy.
The concept is deep: I'm juxtaposing artists' interpretation of a real life images next to my interpretations of real life issues. Both works reflect and wrestle with the interplay between light and darkness, the quality of which depends on the author and artists' ability to parse the source material--or fill the frame--in such a way that will resonate with readers.
And as lazy as I've been of recent in my writings. I couldn't muster the intellectual energy to produce any coherent written work with respectable dimensions, so I had to look for another approach--which I found by marrying the arts.
There is much to be said about the interconnection between the material and immaterial, and how one is a reflection of the other. Ergo, everything is related. It emerged from the "uni-verse", the starting point of His-story (Gen 1:3), which is why coupling a pan-hemisphered interaction with reality has real rewards.
That said, I began to reflect on how remarkable life is when viewed in the right frame, and a decent lens. This is ever so true for photography and yet equally if not more so for our worldviews. I believe that how we frame an image, a scene, or a real-life scenario determines how we can appreciate it. Fundamentally speaking--there's art in everything.
That leads me to the title of this article: FILLING THE FRAME: ART VERSUS IMAGE. As I'm writing this, I'm reflecting on the decision I made to request my painter to interpret my photo on a smaller canvas. As we will be reproducing several reflections of reality via mechanized processes, we should not lose sight of the goal which is the art, not the image.
And that is to appreciate the genius of the human mind; its ability not only to capture and copy images, but to create and reflect on them as well, through the romantic filter of artistic license. And life itself concerns the complex idea of image.
I want to readers to peer into the chasm between what's imagined and what what's imaged. The brush strokes that create the image are more important than the image itself. Parsing is paramount.
Therefore, I found an inspiring way to weave my works within the calming confines of a devotional, allowing me to take my time in processing my thoughts as they come--every minute, hour, and day of the week.
And granted that I'm not under any pressure to exhaust my thought kernels beyond my inspirational capacity, I feel assured that the end result will be visually, intellectually, and spiritually pleasing. Amen.