The Ephemeral Persistence of Beauty
Why and how you must keep creating
Why and how do we create in times of struggle?
I’m embarrassed to admit how long ago I started this post. It’s been months, but it feels like years. Since I began this, the world has been shifting around us so rapidly that it seems as though years have blown by in the wind. So much of the world we’ve known has changed, and for many of us that change is infuriating and frightening. In the face of all this, I want to share with you something that is very personal and challenging to talk about as a creator.
It is this… in moments like this I can find it challenging to create.
The foundations of American democracy are shaking, perhaps more violently than ever before, and it makes me furious. All of you who know me or follow me on social media know this well. The other thing that it does to me is to make me question my work when I don’t see it applying directly to the problems I see in the world.
I know that this isn’t a logical reaction. There is very little that I can do beyond what other concerned people are doing. I protest. I try to share information. But through it all, I still feel like another dancing body, spinning against a background of Rome in flames.
But here is what I know. Despite my internal struggles, I know within that we still need art, and perhaps we need it now more than ever. In the midst of uncertainty, the role of artists remains the same – to observe injustice, imagine the future, question the accepted, irritate the powerful, and beautify what we can. Art is the game outside the game, and we play it with whatever hand we are dealt.
So we create. With everything that is happening in the world, we still create. We paint or write or cook or build, or maybe we just imagine new worlds in our heads. We create and hope that our gift to the world, however small, brings some joy or respite or awareness into someone’s life - even if that someone is just ourselves.
I create, because to me creating is like breathing. If I hold it in too long, my body feels its loss. I know this isn’t just me, this is how it is for many people.
One person who I’ve always admired for his unceasing creativity is Bruce Barnbaum, one of my favorite B&W photographers and a good friend. The image above is one of my favorites – a razor thin slice of reality so abstract and beautiful that it takes effort to understand and in those moments it releases us from the weight of the present.
I met Bruce a couple decades ago, when I was photographing roadless lands across the United States. I was looking for a few other landscape photographers who could contribute to the project, and after a bit of research, I came across one of Bruce’s photographs of a fallen Sequoia in the Sierra Nevadas, and I knew right away that I wanted to meet him.
Bruce is a large-format B&W photographer. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, it means he uses the old-school style bellows camera that you’ve probably only seen in pictures of Ansel Adams. It also means that more than half of his work is in the darkroom, painting images onto silver halide sheets with the light that shines through his 4 by 5 inch negatives.
Bruce is one of those photographers who has an uncanny ability to find the ephemeral beauty in a thousand different moments of time – brief slices of reality that are frozen onto a paper-thin sheet of celluloid and then painted with meaning in the darkroom.
It is the ephemeral permanence of beauty.
Bruce’s work speaks volumes about his deep love of nature and his undying fascination for the subtle beauties that arise in the most unlikely places – if we only know how to see them. And if we don’t know how to see that flash of grace, Bruce shows it to us or teaches us how to find it.
I’m not going to write a long biography about Bruce - you can find that elsewhere. The reason I wanted to share him with you, is because I have long loved Bruce’s deep and endless creativity. The world of contemporary art tends to get hyper-focused on the idea of creativity as the very new – things that we’ve never seen before, things that are shocking. This view of creativity is fine and often wonderful, but it can also be shallow and fleeting. If you spend a week with Bruce in his studio nestled in the temperate rainforest in the foothills of the Cascades, you will come to understand a different sort of creativity as you watch Bruce find endless new ways to look at everything.
Our lives are filled with storms – emotional, physical, fiscal. We all have different sets of tools that we use to ground ourselves during those storms – friends, family, exercise, meditation… but for me, and clearly for Bruce, the act of creation is one of the most powerful tools.
Life has always been an uncertain gambit. We come into the world with a hand of cards that we don’t fully understand and are asked to play a game with constantly shifting rules, but the role of artists remains the same.
Art is the game outside the game.
Bruce offers regular workshops around the world in insanely beautiful places. I’ve never been on one of his workshops, but I’ve spent so much time with him at his house in the mountains that I can imagine how deeply fulfilling and fun those workshops must be. Bruce is filled with stories and creative insight, and as a bonus he is hilarious. You can see more of his work and find his workshops on his website: www.brucebarnbaum.com
Thank you Nelson. I am a budding creative 🔆
Thanks. I needed that.