NATURALLY OCCURING ART: THE WELLSPRING OF CREATIVITY FOR US ALL...



Blood Breakast: Stumbled On Art,
Photographed by Ross Bachelder At
Panera Breads in Dover, NH on 6 10 11

 I'm increasingly fascinated with what is often the utterly random nature of creativity. Things that we as artists labor for countless hours to conceive and then make beautiful -- landscapes, portraits, still lifes, abstracts, assemblages -- can be discovered at any moment and at any place in the real world after having been created by chance with what can only be described as astounding aleatory virtuosity.


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.






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

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: 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.