 |
| Blood Breakast: Stumbled On Art, Photographed by Ross Bachelder At Panera Breads in Dover, NH on 6 10 11 |
Here are three remarkable examples of this artist-free genre -- what we might call "Found Beauty" or "Serendipitous Findings" or "Stumbled On Art."
Setting out purposefully to discover such naturally occuring masterworks can be a superb visual training tool for practicing artists. One can think of it as a playful and yet constructive search for the Instant Sublime that's all around us -- moments and snippets of inexplicable beauty that some would call inscrutable and others would call the Hand of God.
Blood Breakfast: This image (upper right), taken just this morning at Panera Breads in Dover, New Hampshire, is actually of the remants of the toast I had -- with tea and the New York Times -- garnished, quite unexpectedly, by rivulets of blood from a hard-to-heal cut I incurred while working as a picture framer.
And really, are these ubiquitous elegances, waiting unpretentiously to be discovered, not the very wellspring from which artists derive the often spectacular results of their own passionate search for all things beautiful? They're full of mystery, of color, texture, volume and geometry, these discoveries, and within their magical propertiess are lessons for artists of any kind, anywhere, to learn.
 |
Aerial Splat: Art from On High, Conceived and Executed by a Winged Proponent of Outside Art. -- Photo by Ross Bachelder, Portsmouth, NH 2010. Madison Ave-Stract: I snapped this picture (lower right) while walking against traffic in a pedestrian-choked intersection on Madison Avenue in New York City in the summer of 2009. I'd come into town to see the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tim Burton exhibit at MoMA. What excited me was the thought that some construction worker, going about his task of marking a patch of pavement for repair, quite un- wittingly created a work of art -- indeed, Street Art -- That with proper framing could easily have been featured in a SoHo exhibit, then lauded by the Press as a marvelously fresh artwork by an emerging darling of the Gallery Set. Acknowledging the random nature of beauty -- and recognizing its function as the visual artists' primary source of inspiration -- is a supreme act of humility -- a recognition that we're neither omnicient nor omni- potent as humans. On the contrary, we're woven intricately into the fabric of all living things and utterly dependent on them for our creativity. For that reason alone, we must take care of this little Orb we call home and preserve it, as little tampered with as possible, for furture generations. -- Ross Bachelder 6 10 11 |
Aerial Splat: A powerful, even majestic instant abstract (at left), created by another of the earth's naturally gifted artists, the common pigeon. The more experimental artists are always looking for fresh approaches and unconventional media, a process that can require hours of theorizing and experimen-tation. But the pigeon -- perhaps an unheralded pioneer in the genre of performance art -- just makes his beauty naturally, with one finely crafted drop of poop -- in this case on a plank of the Middle Bridge in Portsmouth -- and compositional gifts we as humans can only struggle to acquire.
 |
Madison Ave-Stract: Street-wise Graffiti, Created by construction workers and photographed by Ross Bachelder in the Summer of 2009. |
