www.cherylmachatdorskind.com
New Ideas Fascinate Me
© 2012 Cheryl Machat Dorskind
Looking for a new motif for your photography? Well, Thomas Struth might have an answer. Struth bypassed photographer’s block finding his muse for over forty years in a broad range of subjects including urban environments, families, technology, and (today’s topic) museums. Struth doesn’t look at his breadth of subjects as personal reinvention, but rather fascination with new ideas,
“It has less to do with reinventing myself then with how I simply change as a person and how will new things come into my life, New things fascinate me and I’m interested in new problems.
~Thomas Struth~
(http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/spaces/content/video-struth.cfm
Finding new new ideas requires an open heart and mind and curiosity. Struth wrote about the museum experience:
“The question is? What are people doing there. Why are they there? The answer is museums provide a protected space where people can reflect on history and on the perspective of history provided by other people before them.”
Museums create a protected space to unleash your imagination. In museums I loose myself and time. Willa Sibert Cather writes in “Song of the Lark” (free download on the Kindle),
“It was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the old miseries and old sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide staircase to the pictures. There she liked best the ones that told stories… In that same room, there was a picture— Oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her… She liked even the name of it, ‘The Song of the Lark’… She told herself that that picture was ‘right’… the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.”
Art will refuel a photographer and expand her repertoire. Use a camera for sketching. Capture history-making-images. Photograph (If the museum permits) a Mary Cassatt or Rembrandt for light, color, and composition.
So here’s to another happy Friday. I hope you find your muse,
Cheryl
