Creating the Image
“it’s okay, it’s okay. make mistakes, make mistakes.”
Lyrics from Angie McMahon’s song Letting Go stuck in my head. Starting from that place, I just wanted to explore and create without attachment to any story or end goal. Putting pieces together, trying them out and then trying other ones. This is how I imagine catching a rhythm might feel in creating music. Picking up on a thread from one image and matching that rhythm with a thread from another image. Rhythm and rhyme.
While reflecting on the finished image, I was reminded of a recent article I read: Our Search For Beauty Is What Makes Us Human by Nicholas Humphrey. Specifically, the reference to poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his perspective on beauty. Hopkins conceptualizes beauty in terms of visual rhyme. He cited paintings and everyday elements in nature as examples of visual rhyme, things that share a similarity but differ in their details. What’s driving our delight is rhyme, the comparisons we make between things, and the ways in which they resemble but differ from each other.
Visual Rhyme… the same idea three ways
Three different visual rhymes I found: visual elements that were similar enough to draw connections but different in detail.
Exploring Meaning
With no story in mind to start from, and no immediate emotional pull, I started listing what I noticed. I started naming possibilities:
Doors and windows. Entering towards the light. Can’t see light through the window (maybe you have to experience it for yourself, it’s not clear from looking on the outside what it is like inside).
Steps. One step at a time. Step up.
Contrast. High contrast, dramatic and intense. The light matches in direction, though the source is unclear – light coming from inside and from somewhere outside the building.
Cloud. Raining. It’s misleading. The cloud looks like it belongs in a sunny day. Texture makes it look like it’s raining. But it’s the color of sky blue. Maybe it is not as it seems. It is the ingredients of a sunny day reorganized such that it is not immediately recognized, only after closer exploration. It’s actually not sad.
Expression. Unclear.
Wall. Protection. Short wall – coming down or building up?
Wooden block. A barrier to ease of climb.
Conceptual Rhyme
In trying to put a name to this one, the steps stood out most, and I thought ‘one step at a time’ as a title. But then the words ‘high steppin’ popped into my mind, in Avett Brothers song form.
So I started digging into that song, wondering if there might be some conceptual rhyme between the song and the image – some comparisons that could be drawn. And I learned in reading a Rolling Stone article about this song that it was originally written as a straight-ahead country song before the band began deconstructing it and experimenting. To their surprise, the more they moved away from that traditional sound, the weightier the theme sounded to him.
“I’ve always loved a contrast, if it’s colors or if it’s themes, if it’s sound. Something that is sort of fatal, or critical, or just massively stressful contrasted with … more of a playful sound.”
Contrast. That’s my take-away from this little rabbit hole. Visual contrast in the image rhymed with contrast in the song through both sound and subject matter. The ability to hold both serious content and exuberant playfulness – I find that so delightful.
