Summer 2021 Newsletter

“My job is to get myself out of the way.”
Hugh’s conversation with photographer JoAnn Verburg

The first time I saw JoAnn Verburg’s photos of olive trees—at a gallery in Minnesota—I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so magical I felt as if I could walk right into them and be transported into another reality. It reminded me of an enchanting evening my wife and I spent years ago having dinner in an olive grove in the Chianti region of Italy that was so peaceful and luminescent we had a difficult time tearing ourselves away.

So, when I heard that JoAnn, who has exhibited her work at the Museum of Modern Art and other major museums, had a new show opening this summer at the Pace Gallery in New York, I thought it would be a good time to talk with her about her visionary approach to selfless creativity.

What inspired you to go into photography?

My father. He worked for Ansco, a rival of Kodak at the time. He gave me my first camera when I was six and that led me to start taking snapshots.

When did you decide to become a photographer?

“Become a photographer” is an interesting way of putting it. My father discouraged me. He loved that I was taking pictures, but the idea that I would become a photographer was anathema. As he put it, “You can’t take a photograph, slice it an inch thick, and butter it.” He was a Depression kid, and he was very concerned about not having his three daughters suffer as he had.

As I understand it, you bought your first 5×7 camera when you were a grad student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. What intrigued you about working with large format cameras?

One of the many nice things about the 5×7 is that it has a bellows, an accordion-like thing that allows you to move the front and the back of the camera independently. Historically, photographers [notably Ansel Adams] used that feature to get everything in focus. But I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to encourage people to look at certain things in the frame, but not have everything in focus. I remember, when I first got glasses, I was really upset. I put them on and said to my husband [poet Jim Moore], “I don’t want the world to look like an Ansel Adams photograph.”

The other day when you were giving me a Zoom tour of your new show, I pointed out that the pictures’ lack of clarity can be confusing at times, and you replied, “confusing, but peaceful.”  What did you mean by that?

It’s about gravity. There’s a feeling of dislocation that can be confusing. You’re not certain where you are—literally, where your feet are in relation to the content of the picture. But what you’re doing in your imagination is entering an environment that’s very alive in the present moment. And yet, even though you may feel a little bit out of balance, at the same time, there’s a way in which it can be very comforting, because you’re connecting with an image of nature that feels really vital.

But isn’t photography supposed to be about capturing reality?

Yes and no. First of all, when I use the word “reality” I usually say “so-called reality,” unless I have to behave myself. When you first look at these pictures, there’s the beauty of the color and the idea that you’re in an olive grove. Then, there’s an unhinged feeling that the gravity is off and your sense of what’s “real” is being disrupted. But, if you stick with it, then this environment you’ve entered will bring you back to yourself, in a way that allows you to let go of your expectations in favor of fully experiencing the moment.

The fact that it’s disturbing shifts your perception…

Exactly. Years ago, I worked on the Rephotographic Survey Project. The idea was to put a picture of mountains in Colorado made in 1873 next to a picture of the same subject taken in 1977 from the same vantage point. It was a before-and-after strategy. That made me sensitive to the fact that no one photograph is “the truth.” All you have to do is put another photo next to it and it’s not the single only truth anymore. Putting images next to each other opens up a sense of space and time for the viewer who brings his or her own sense of what reality is.

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What drew you to photographing olive trees?

This body of work was catalyzed by an earthquake [in Spoleto, Italy, where JoAnn and Jim live part-time]. I felt the tremors and had a lot of uncertainty about whether I was going to live or not. So, I went outdoors and ended up in an olive grove. Which was also scary, but being dislodged like that and then feeling that I could stand up with my feet on the ground and be safe led me to engage with nature in a balanced way, beyond any expectation I’d ever had about what balance meant.

What was your creative process like when you tried to capture that feeling on film?

I went for a swim. I’d wake up early and do laps for a half-hour or so in an Olympic-size pool. The first length of the pool I’d be frustrated about some comment that I’d made or someone else had made or some little thing that was itching at me. By the second or third length of the pool, I’d start looking at things floating on the water, and then I’d let go of that and just focus on the light at the bottom of the pool. By the end of the half-hour, all the things that were annoying in my life just went away. Then I’d take a shower, get in my car with my camera, drive to an olive grove outside of town, and just look at the light—and the sky, trees, earth—and allow myself to have no expectations. I had to let go of my natural instinct to be competent, to get to a deeper place and be fully present.

That sounds like a meditative process, putting you in a state of what’s often called “beginner’s mind.”

Yes, if it goes well. I think my work is related to meditation, but I don’t use that word. What I do involves completely clearing out the mind. And when I’m in that zone, I can never tell how long I’ve been there. When I’m with the olive trees, I can’t tell you where I go.

I was listening recently to an interview with singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy in the New York Times (see below), who says that “disappearing” is the most sustaining part of what he does.  Do you resonate with that?

Totally. My job is: number one, to show up; number two, to have whatever equipment I need; and number three, to get myself out of the way.

You talk about your pictures as being a portrait of the viewer. How so?

The olive trees as olive trees per se have never been a real interest of mine, but they’ve allowed for so many things to come into the images.  Working in olive groves allows me to let go of the distinction between myself as an individual human being and the world in which this body of mine lives. I have the privilege of standing in a natural place and letting go of my ego, to the point where I feel completely integrated with everything: the trees, the moment, the sky, history, the future. All those distinctions dissolve and disappear.

You’re connecting with the oneness of life…

Yes. We compartmentalize everything in order to control it. What I’m talking about is finding a way to work where I let go of control.

So, where does the viewer come in?

The viewer looking at the picture is seeing a bit of me—my attitudes, my philosophy, my way of looking at the world—and yet the viewer is alone at the same time. So, the photograph becomes an invitation for him or her to imagine who I am without hitting them over the head with my ego. It’s a reciprocal act. Something in the photograph expresses something about me through the subject matter, the vantage point, the time of day, and the viewer brings the life, the breath, the moment into the experience of viewing the picture. That’s parallel to a relationship with another person, me in this case. But—and this is really thrilling to me—it’s also true of the viewer’s experience of the subject matter: the olive trees, nature. The viewer brings a unique appreciation of nature to the experience that nobody else has in quite the same way. Because we’re all individuals, we’re all unique, we’re all alone. And that’s a fantastic thing.

For more information and additional photos from JoAnn’s show at the Pace Gallery, go here.

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Model Poet

Jim Moore, is a widely published poet, whose work appears regularly in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and other publications. He’s also the leading model in JoAnn’s photographs, where he’s often portrayed as an avid newspaper reader with a proclivity for wandering aimlessly around olive groves.

The Word Ladder

In his book, How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy, a singer/songwriter for the band Wilco, describes several free-writing exercises he uses to spark creativity. One of them involves building what he calls a “word ladder.”

The first step is to create a list of ten verbs associated with some kind of profession (being a physician, for example), and another list of ten nouns that are in your immediate field of vision.

Here are the lists Tweedy came up with:

Examine          Cushion
Thump             Guitar
Prescribe         Wall
Listen               Turntable
Write                Sunlight
Scan                 Window
Touch              Carpet
Wait                 Drum
Charge             Microphone
Heal                 Lightbulb

The next step is to draw lines connecting nouns and verbs that don’t normally work together. Tweedy says he likes to do this exercise not only to generate lyrics, but also “to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities.”

This is a quick poem Tweedy created from the lists above:

The drum is waiting,
by the window listening
where the sunlight writes
on the cushions
prescribed
thump the microphone
the guitar is healing
how the turntable is touched
charging the wall
while one lightbulb examines
and scans the carpet

Not Shakespeare, exactly, but there are some good images to work with here, especially the phrase “sunlight writes,” which Tweedy says “alludes to an idea that the natural world might have intentions, might be trying to tell us something.”

The third step is to make the poem more songlike, by selecting some phrases from the first poem and adding a touch or two from somewhere else (in this case, a line from the Wilco song, “I’m Always in Love”).

the drum is waiting by the windowsill
where the sunlight writes its will on the rug
my guitar is healed
by the amp plug charging the wall
and that’s not all
I’m always in love

Tweedy’s final creation isn’t quite there yet, but, he says, ‘it’s definitely enough to jump-start my brain in a way where language and words have my full attention again. Which is the right mindset to be in when you’re creating lyrics.”

For more of Tweedy’s insights on stress-free creativity, check out his interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein here

Creative Solitude

Ask any artist where creativity comes from and, more than likely, solitude will be at or near the top of the list. “Painters and writers need solitude to forge and refine their vision of their work,” writes Stephen Batchelor in his new book, The Art of Solitude. “They pass long stretches of time alone with their work, anonymous, ignored, haunted by the prospect of ridicule or failure. Solitude is a necessary condition for developing their imagination and their craft.” But, he adds, it’s not enough to chain yourself to your easel or writing desk.  You have to “free yourself from the phantoms and inner critics who pursue you wherever you go.”

Composer John Cage put it this way. “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

Painter Agnes Martin was a master at this kind of disappearing act. As she famously put it, “I paint with my back to the world.” A relatively unknown painter working in New York and New Mexico, she had a vision in her early 50s of painting a grid of fine vertical lines and pale horizontal bands to reflect the innocence of trees. That painting, entitled simply The Tree, launched her on a mystical, solitary journey to create a collection of deceptively simple geometrical paintings of pure abstract emotions, such as perfection, benevolence, happiness and love. It also led her strip everything out of her life that got in the way of her art, which meant living alone for nearly a decade on an isolated mesa without electricity or telephone. Martin wasn’t interested in representing the feelings that inspired her; she wanted to reveal them by becoming a selfless channel for inspiration. For her, Batchelor writes, “ideas, calculations, and ambitions obscure the ‘sublime, absolute perfection’ that is present each moment. And the very worst thing you can think of when you’re working is yourself.” In contemporary society, Martin argued, solitude is usually considered an aberration. “We have been strenuously conditioned against solitude,” she said. “To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition.” To fend off this negative bias against solitude, she advised artists to develop an intimate relationship with their work, alone and undistracted. That way, she concluded, you can “discover your direction and truth about yourself.”

Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat   (National Gallery of Art)

Another artist who understood the power of solitude was Johannes Vermeer. The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran called him the “master of intimacy and confidential silences,” who “softens the impact of solitude in an atmosphere of familiar interiors.” Vermeer “captures from inside what it’s like to be human,” adds Batchelor. “[The women he painted] are briefly at rest in a world of bourgeois comfort and domestic routines. They are alone but do not appear lonely.”

Once a friend of writer Aldous Huxley asked him to describe what he saw when he experimented with the psychedelic drug mescaline, and he answered, “the nearest approach to this would be Vermeer.” In Huxley’s view, Vermeer captured the “sublime givenness of ordinary objects” better than any other artist. Or as Batchelor puts it, he “succeeded in arresting life in its pivotal moments while losing nothing of its vitality and generosity. The simplest things—a nail in a wall, metal studs on a chair, a plain white curtain in shadow, a trickle of water down an alley—appear suffused with unworldly intensity and significance.”

Huxley viewed Vermeer as essentially as “a painter of still life.” Which meant that in order to capture the divine nature of people, he had to paint them as objects “in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless” That was very much unlike his contemporary, Rembrandt, whose all-inclusive art, writes Batchelor, “portrayed humanity in all its conceited, ambiguous tragedy.”

So, given this, what’s the best choice for the creative person: a life of solitude or a life of engagement? Neither, says Batchelor. In the end, he contends, it’s better to embrace both and find a healthy balance between them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

This video is a conversation between Stephen Batchelor and novelist Ruth Ozeki on creativity and spirituality moderated by Tricycle magazine’s editor-in-chief James Shaheen.