Discovery Through Novelty

       
I previously referred to Picasso’s remark “I don’t seek, I find.” Our readiness to notice anomalies in our field of vision and our lives enhances our experience of the ordinary. We begin to think about things differently when we see them differently. We are surprised as children to see how monstrous and odd a face can appear when it is lit from underneath as opposed to our standard experience of seeing faces lit from above. As a child you may have walked from room to room looking down at a mirror and tried to navigate a world that was upside down. The world seemed fresh and full of surprise because of its paradoxical familiarity/unfamiliarity. Similarly, we are unaware that our own face is not presented to us as actual size when we look in a mirror, but at 12 inches of distance it appears as about half the size of our actual face. To get an actual size reflection we would have to press our face against the mirror. As an artist, a poet, a filmmaker, or a scientist, we all try to see the world as if for the first time, to observe and present a condition that has always been present, but, so far ignored. In this spirit of visual adventure and novelty I present the photos above: the garden shot seen through the bottom of a glass ashtray, an Italian village seen in my daughter Sybil’s sunglasses, Butterfly weed shot through a magnifying glass, my self portrait shot in silver ice bucket, and the photo that reveals both sides of a window, its interior and its exterior reflections. Observe the location coincidence of the eye of the bust and the sliver of open window.